The Opium of the Intellectuals (2005)

&quot;Even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist&quot; - Keynes.<p>That&#x27;s the trouble with looking backward to Marx or Smith for guidance. Both predate the Industrial Revolution reaching full speed. The basic problem of their era was making enough stuff, just as it had been for millenia. Today&#x27;s basic problem is that we don&#x27;t need that many people to make all the stuff. Neither Marx nor Smith addressed that problem. Keynes said it might be a problem for generations after his. Well, we&#x27;re there.<p>We&#x27;ve also conquered scale. One of the assumptions of capitalism is that lots of people working for their own self-interest would outperform a central planning system. It looked that way in the days of the USSR. Big companies had trouble getting out of their own way. General Motors, once the biggest company, had to operate as a bunch of independent companies under one corporate umbrella just to make the thing manageable.<p>That&#x27;s no longer true. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Apple, FedEx, UPS, AT&amp;T, and WalMart are all very centralized. It doesn&#x27;t seem to hurt their performance. They don&#x27;t compete on price - they define markets and platforms, and dictate terms. They&#x27;re able to change rapidly compared to monopolies of the past - each of those companies is quite different than a decade ago. Computers and networks have made this possible - deployment at scale works far better than it did even twenty years ago. Even for companies with physical products.<p>Economics for the 21st century needs to start dealing with these issues, not rehashing the 19th century.

This set of observations has been made repeatedly throughout history, albeit usually in works that sink immediately into obscurity. That&#x27;s a pity because the key insights are very important.<p>The same theme - why do so many intellectuals find themselves supporting dictatorships long after the rest of the world has understood their true nature - has been extensively explored by Sowell in books like Intellectuals &amp; Society, and a Conflict of Visions. He finds similar explanations:<p>* Difficulty in accepting that individuals are inherently limited and corruptible, and that ideas are often worthless when tested in the forge of reality. After all, intellectuals are almost by definition people whose value to society comes from production of ideas and who see themselves as unchained from the normal moral and mental limits most people slave under.<p>* That reason, reflection and debate are limited tactics that can&#x27;t yield that much insight about the world.<p>* That to believe in intellectuals as a concept is almost inherently to disbelieve in the notion of democracy, because if insight and wisdom were really so compressed into a few moralistic bookworms and if most people really had none to share, then voting itself is pointless or even harmful. Instead the best outcomes would be yielded by a dictatorship of intellectuals (which is what communism is, in effect).<p>So you end up with academics, writers, some kinds of politician ... the people who would these days be called the &#x27;elite&#x27; or &#x27;globalists&#x27; ... having a distinctly lukewarm relationship with markets and votes throughout history.<p>Yet because they are fundamentally wrong about human nature, where their ideas are put into practice things inevitably go wrong. The intellectuals who end up in charge don&#x27;t create a utopia. Their 5 year plans turn out to be not that well planned, their price-fixing turns out to create other problems elsewhere, and their profound belief that most people are too stupid or immoral to rule turns into an oppressive dystopia. And so the wheel turns.<p>If you&#x27;re interested in these ideas or philosophies, this video interview with Sowell is a good place to start:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok</a>

&quot;The primary target of Aron’s polemic was fanaticism.&quot;<p>I believe this is as relevant to our current social&#x2F;political divisiveness as it ever has been. I&#x27;d like to read more of what he wrote about that.

Might be a little off topic, but I’d really appreciate it if someone could explain why highly educated people describe themselves as Marxists.<p>I’m quite left-leaning in my views, and I agree with many of the criticisms levelled at capitalism, but I don’t see why people support Marxism.<p>Two main arguments:<p>1. Hasn’t Marxism had its chance? Yes, it wasn’t “real Marxism” in a sense, but why would you think it’d turn out different if tried again? We have to consider the reality of the world we live in.<p>2. How many precedents are there for a complete upheaval of the economic system on that scale that have worked? I’m aware of some of the history, but I can’t think of a change <i>that</i> large which worked.<p>How do modern Marxists answer those concerns? From the outside it looks like they’re ignoring history or the reality of human behaviour.

An excellent book on this subject is &quot;The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence&quot; by Andrew Anthony [1]. From the book:<p><i>All but the most obsessively hard-line anti-communist grew up in post-war Europe accepting that the political witch-hunts conducted by Senator McCarthy and his acolytes in the 1950s were a severe assault on freedom – which indeed they were. Yet if you took McCarthyism at its most demented and placed it against the Soviet model at its most liberal – say, for instance, the Khrushchev era – the repression in the East was incomparably more ruthless and extensive than in the West. Almost no one now, except for the most zealous Stalinist, would dispute this fact. Nonetheless the litany of human rights abuses committed by the Soviet state from Prague to Vladivostok never elicited the same invective of intellectuals or protesters in the West. Two books were kept with two totally different methods of accounting. Why?</i><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;Fallout-guilty-liberal-lost-innocence&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0099507854" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;Fallout-guilty-liberal-lost-innocen...</a>

&quot;The ideals in question prominently featured faith in the power of reason. Aron’s discrimination showed itself in his recognition that reason’s power is always limited.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s the key point. There have been two competing traditions in Western philosophy, going back to the Greeks. They have to do with the various finitudes that humans experience, such as ignorance, death, and suffering.<p>According to one view, these are illusions and not only is human understanding potential infinite, but so are all the other types of finitude that interconnect with it. Perhaps the most famous proponent of this view is Plato.<p>The other view, perhaps first made clear by Aristotle, is that human beings and human existence, while they can be improved in important ways, can never be made perfect because our ability to understand the world and act in it are always limited.<p>In the modern era, Marx thought we could abolish most or all finitudes, and have a utopia. Some liberals also think something like this, but the Anglo-American political tradition is more on the Aristotelian side, as was Aron.

This is a distillation of Roger Kimball’s (and many others’) accusations that Marx was an intellectual’s intellectual. He mentions Raymond Aron publishing the same idea in a 1955 book.<p>I’m not sure anyone would argue with the drier thesis. It’s what <i>isn’t</i> mentioned which guides the dishonesty. Marx’s commitments and adorations were always to the working class, and his proper legacy was won exclusively through the working class. He was a strictly anti-authoritarian democracy absolutist, for the record.<p>The article is a strategic smear for a target who knows literal nothing about the history of Karl Marx, because all the facts <i>will</i> check out true.<p>But is this <i>only</i> a cheap framing of Marx’s work as hype? I get a sense there is an additional mythical context I’m missing out on. Can anybody explain why this is compelling to it’s audience?