The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism by Friedrich Hayek defines "the fatal conceit" as man's mistaken belief that he "is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes." (p. 27) Thus, man seeks to order the affairs of other men to attain certain goals--prosperity, equality, community, dignity, etc. Paradoxically, the more rooted these social engineering schemes become in a society, the further these societies find themselves from the stated aims of the social engineers.

Those suffering from the fatal conceit, Hayek informs, disproportionately people the ranks of the intelligentsia. "The higher we climb up the ladder of intelligence, the more we talk with intellectuals, the more likely we are to encounter socialist convictions. Rationalists tend to be intelligent and intellectual; and intelligent intellectuals tend to be socialists." But why? The Fatal Conceit provides a partial explanation: "One's initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be socialists diminishes when one realises that, of course, intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence." (p. 53)

In Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas, I offer some thoughts on this subject. Intellectuals cling to ideas that fail in practice because the worship of the idea--the ideology--blinds them to reality. Ideology thus serves as a de facto religion for the people who view themselves as too smart for traditional religion. Because the aims of the ideologist are so lofty, the means to acheive them become so vile ("So what if some Ukranians starve," the Communist intellectual might say, "when we're on the road to creating Heaven on Earth?"). Everything from poor results to murder are thus excused. But it is arrogance rather than intelligence (though the arrogance often stems from the inflated ego of the superintellect) that misguides smart people to believe that they can order the affairs of millions of people or devise a theory that explains all of human history.

Do you agree with Hayek's assertion that intelligent people disproportionately fall for socialism and other social engineering schemes? Do you agree with Hayek that smart people reject the unordered development of institutions in favor of the rational construction of them because of their faith in reason? I've offered a few ideas above on why smart people are enamored with social engineering. What are yours?

Why are smart people are enamored with social engineering? My explanation: Intellectuals tend to think that all the problems in life have rational answers--like in math. They also tend to think that experimenting with the social order is the best way to learn how to improve things--like in the scientific method. Math and science are great, but leftist intellectuals falsely apply this faith in simple answers to morality and politics.

E.g., What is with the cult to Albert Einstein? It's like some people think the man's brain was so good at math and science that it spoke infallibly about politics.

Part of it is that they honestly don't believe most people are smart enough to act in their own self-interest. This is why they favor laws and regulations that, as the cliche goes, protect us from ourselves. If you take that idea to its logical endpoint, the result is tyranny.

I suppose that depends on how you define intelligence. I will allow that highly educated people tend to be disproportionately socialist in their views. But intelligence comes in many forms and the ability to excel in academia is only one of them. Highly educated people have another common trait, and that is the tendency to over value their own brand of intelligence at the expense of all others - that is, to the extent that they even recognize other brands. And when you set yourself above all others, it doesn't take long before you begin toying with ideas on how those others might be put to best use. This fits in nicely with Socialism as an ideology.

So, I would agree with Hayek's conclusion in every respect save one. I would subsitute the phrase highly educated for the word intelligent. Academics have always mistakenly equated the two. Hayek himself was apparently not immune to this fallacy.

Intelligent people do not disproportinally fall for socialism, however the Intellgentsia do.

It is quite easy to find many-an-intelligent Conservative, but you are unlikely to find them as Professors at a college. Conservatives tend towards the practicle, and as such intelligent conservatives tend towards the private sector, statecraft, et cetera. Places where real differences can be made.

The socialist intelligentsia, on the other hand, are anything but practicle. They shun the real world, preferring a world of ideas, where they cannot be trumped by reality. Hence their attraction to fields such as academia, and journalism, where they can seek to bend the popular perception of reality to their wishes.

Can we change the world around us? Yes, to an extent. However the far left socialists seek to change the very core of human nature. And that is not happening anytime soon.

"Do you agree with Hayek that smart people reject the unordered development of institutions in favor of the rational construction of them because of their faith in reason?"

I do agree, but I doubt that it's as sinister as Hayek makes out. Ignorance is not a virtue even in politics. And unordered development has as often (indeed, more so) resulted in tyranny as in liberty.

"Rational construction" per se is merely the ordering of the community according to rational principles. Aristotle's political writings (as well as numerous other political investigations from antiquity through the Scholastics) can be interpreted along these lines (e.g., 'virtue' is the human end according to reason, and the community should therefore be ordered toward virtue). Aristotle is hardly a socialist.

Socialism and its favor among the elite is a historical accident. That socialism is associated with the rational ordering of society is a 20-th century phenomenon. That it's bad economics born of bad philosophy does not mean that it's is the necessary result of economics or philosophy (i.e., of academic pursuits of truth).

It's interesting that both you and Hayek invoke Aristotle. While you rely on Aristotle to butress your point, Hayek attacked him in The Fatal Conceit on those very grounds.

Brad: I don't think Aristotle's "ordering the community toward virtue" (which A. supports, of course, as do I) means rational construction of society. Isn't there something in between Hayek's "unordered development" and the constructivist's "rational construction" of institutions?

My hunch: there is a difference between ordering the community toward an end--which is the point of political organizations--and constructing or remaking it. Hayek isn't an irrationalist (and I think he and you misunderstand A. here).

Hayek does have something between "unordered development" and "rational construction." He calls it "evolution" but admits it has a Lamarckian element (he must postulate something non-Darwinian, since there is no way there have been enough "random variations" in societies to have produced this system in the timeframe he gives.) I was quite disappointed in this ana-lysis. His answers are often insightful but his "backstory" leaves a lot to be desired.

The reasons given above about why people with "academic intelligence" fall for rationalistic follies are right. Let me postulate one more. The "Enlightenment" thinkers wanted to discredit religion as a foundation of the order in which they found themselves. Since they had a high opinion of themselves, they had a high opinion of that order but, due in part to the wars of the previous centuries which had been blamed on religion, they had a low opinion of religion. To discover a rational foundation for their order has been the goal ever since. That they always fail does not seem to dim their enthusiasm.

Hayek wants to have it both ways. He wants to be both dismissive of religion and dismissive of reason and so he concocts some (not fully specified) kind of evolution of morals. This move allows him to see many of the follies of the enlightenment rationalists. But it doesn't allow him to construct a decent mechanism for explaining the development of Western order.

Here is what a good explanation would be able to explain: why is it that the West turned against slavery? Was it not a rational development of the postulates of Christianity? If so, then it was not due to reason alone nor was it due to an unguided "evolution." Without understanding the grounds of their postulates the rationalists are doomed to be silly. But evolution alone without a guiding intelligence either Divine or human (or as I believe both) is totally inadequate as well.

The problem here is that both sides hold conceits. The intellectuals conceit is that they actually have a clue what the long term consequences are of fiddling with society. Usually they miss about half of the stuff they should have considered. However, the conceit of the right is that they already know the optimal conditions and any idea than contradicts it is wrong or worse immoral. They also tend to believe in some sort of imaginary 'more perfect' state that everything existed in, and continually point out how it was better 'back then'. They will insist this, even if you point out a hundred things that improved or even that 'they' would be dead from something, which was treated by the very stuff they are complaining about.

This is a common theme for some. Doesn't matter if we can find and cure problems that would have killed them 50 years ago or that for the most part the kids are having almost no problem with technological progress, which isn't caused by adults trying to force a path on them, instead of letting them find their own, but 'progress' for some is 'too fast' and 'out of control'. Odd.. I seem to remember similar comments from books written when the first horseless carraiges where built. I suspect it was also screamed when major sailing ships where built, when the Romans got the idea to built roads and even when the first person in the Messopotamian got the idea to attack wheels to a box, so he didn't have to make 50 trips carrying his produce to the market. Heck, the Chinese where so horrified by the race of progress they sank the entire fleet of hundreds of ships they had, burned every document they could find about what the fleet had seen or discovered and tried to make it look like the Emporer responsible never existed. There is plenty of arrogance to go around, but progress, social or otherwise, doesn't happen by arrogantly insisting you already have every answer. It requires experimentation.

The real problem is that the experimentors often know less about other people than they need to, so when trying to reshape a society, they run up against a) different opinions, b) sabotage, c) ignorance, d) unexpected problems, etc. You want socialistic views to prevail? Start small and hope your great, great, grand children can make it real. Anyone trying to force it to happen in a single generation will either be proven a fool or have to get extraordinarilly lucky. The error is assuming such changes are going to happen without resistance and/or that the means is even available to achieve them. Socialism would damn near require something on the scale of Star Trek replicator technology. You have to equalize resources, opertunity, etc. *first*, not take unequal amounts of those things and try to shoehorn them into an artifical mess that requires more people to keep it working than benefit from it.

An evolutionary model is insufficient because it can only be descriptive. Politics, however, must be normative.

I fail to see a categorical difference in the Soviet and American political 'experiments', for example, concerning rational construction. The difference is solely one of content, i.e., in what was judged rational. Even to the extent that the Founders appealed to experience, it was a deliberate appeal.

Those who disparage 'rational construction', it seems to me, conflate rational construction per se with a particular rational construction, say Marxism.

Brad: the soviets' experiment started with destroying what had preceded them then trying to make every aspect of the social and economic and religious life conform to what they thought it should be. The American "experiment" didn't even come close to this. This is more than a difference of "content." It is the difference between building on tradition and trying to be God, creating a new world.

What the hell does slavery have to do with evolution DocMcG? See, this is the problem with creationists and ID people. They bring in irrelevant nonsense into a subject that has nothing to do with it. In many respects, we as humans derailed our own general evolution and that of domesticated species since the first time we replanted something we ate in a place it didn't originally grow. Slavery fell apart because we are able to percieve the injustice of it, not because some new gene showed up in more than 50% of the population, which told us, "This is wrong!". It has 'nothing' to do with the theory of evolution you complain about. For that matter, evolution itself is 100% nuetral about 'if' anything guides it in some general sense. A lot of people that accept it think that guiding forces, aliens or Gods unnecessarilly complicate things, without saying a damn thing about 'how' it works. Quite a few Christians even consider supporting ID as dangerous and stupid, since instead of placing God 'outside' the universe and leaving him there, IDists are trying to turn God into the 'incredible shrinking God', who as the mechanisms of evolution become more and more understood, has less and less to actually do. lol

And don't pull the BS about ID not being creationism. It has two traits in common - a) it provides no science and b) even if aliens did it, something would have had to guide their development too, which leaves you with God. But its worst error is the false concepts of a) design and b) irreducibility. The first is false, because genetics shows 'no' sign of intellegent design, even if people insist that the final product 'looks' designed and the second has been disproven by simulation as not only possible to produce through random chance, but shows just as convoluted, inefficient and flawed 'design' as real genes do. Given that both of the fundimental priciples of ID have been proven false and ID proponents spend all their time arguing the same debunked and discredited 'flaws' in evolution, instead of actually presenting both a) a real theory and b) a means to test it and thus provide proof for their idea, it can't be considered anything by creationism in a mask or a pointless complaint about how 'everyone' that believes in evolution hates people that think someone guided the process. Too bad that's pure high grade BS and they are attacking the theory based on the views of a (minority) of its supporters.

DocMcG: I think Hayek's right that cultural practices evolve in a Lamarkian way (=inheritance of acquired characteristics). Are you rejecting that? Or, are you just saying that Hayek leaves too little room for goal-directed action? I.e., perhaps, that his mechanism of cultural evolution is too mindless to be accurate for humans?

Further, Agreed about Hayek's view of religion. But I don't quite get your objection to it (apart from the obvious, that you think some religion is true).

There is nothing sacred about tradition (small 't'). Many traditions are unjust. Concerning unjust traditions, no just man should be a 'conservative'.

Any new ordering replaces a previous order. The scale on which a reordering is undertaken is hardly a principled objection to rational construction. Do you, e.g., object to the radical reordering of the Japanese regime (circa 1946) because it was discontinuous with tradition?

Brad retorts: "The scale on which a reordering is undertaken is hardly a principled objection to rational construction."

Wrong, since the principle on which we base the objection is the finitude of the human mind and the inherent limitations of human control over a practical infinity of facts. As far as I understand Hayek, this is his basis. That's why he advocates "peice-meal" reformations.

I am not completely rejecting a Lamarkian adapted evolution of moral traditions. I simply point out that evolution without some Lamarkian adaptation is too mindless to have produced the results we observe in the timeframe it has occurred and is not descriptive of the facts we know in moral development, such as the facts of the anti-slavery movement. A Lamarkian adaptation must have some other mechanism to describe why some behaviors (acquired characteristics) are transmitted to the next generation and others are not. My objection to Hayek is that I haven't seen such an explanation.

If Hayek had postulated some other reliable mechanism of moral development, I would have less of a quarrel with him. My problem is that there was an accepted theory of such development prior to the Enlightenment--that human beings were slow learners but could, over time and using reason, tease out the true implications of Revelation. This theory was rejected by the Enlightenment and by Hayek because of its religious content. They have failed to replace it with any adequate description of moral development. It is not scientific to so replace a good theory with a poorer one (unless your definition of science includes an anti-religious element.)

DocMcG: I still don't see what Revelation has to do with this. We are talking about how practices evolve, whether or not some people think they are divinely sanctioned.

But I think you're right that Hayek is too thin on the mechanism that would cause some practices to last and others not. He indicates practices (1) spread via imitation (this is the Lamrakian element, and it requires some mindfulness), and that (2) the practices that help a community survive/compete in the long run are the ones that last in the long run (this is the Darwinian element, it requires no mindfulness). So, it seems to me, (1) provides the replication, and (2) provides the selection. Your problem is that (2) doesn't explain the selection well enough? Because thoughts about right and wrong are sometimes involved in the selection of practices as well? If so, I'd agree. But I still don't see your pre-Enlightenment point.

Kagehi,

DocMcG was/is discussing Hayek's theory of human moral "evolution" not biological theories of evolution (or only tangentially). So rants about creationism and ID (the most reasonable explanation going for biological history) are way off topic. I think you misread what he was discussing above.

DocMcG,

I think I follow you. Do you have in mind Jaki and other's argument that the Christian understanding of the world as rational and the *possibility* of human's achieving knowledge of the world via reason (since both the reasonableness of the world and our own exercise of reason are grounded, as it were, by divine Providence) is what spurred the west to develop empirical science and technology, etc.?

Is that what you mean by "teas[ing]out the true implications of Revelation"? That Revelation is partly the natural order of man and the world open to rational understanding, but a reason informed and properly open to the metaphysical?

Or am I completely missing the point and you are pushing for a bit more of a Hegelian understanding of the development of human knowledge.

Intellectuals are searching for consistency of ideas. Many are bound to notice the direct contradiction between capitalism and the morality of altruism. By embracing socialism, they do achieve consistency, even if that makes them wrong on both counts.

Most conservatives can ignore the contradiction between their economics and their morality, but only through a militant contempt for intellectual consistency.

Very interesting Wyatt. In fact, Hayek sees the inconsistency, and opposes the "morality of altruism" as self-defeating. So your criticism won't stick to him there. But then he adds that the free market system, which shuns altruism in our particular economic actions, ends up being the most altruistic system in its effects. Most conservative defenders of the market believe this--viz., the market is in the big picture the most altruistic system. So even though your phrase is rhetorically nice ("most conservatives" have a "militant contempt for intellectual consistency"), it's just not true, at least on this issue.

What are you, a Randian? I'm sorry, an objectivist? What do they think of Hayek?

Brian,

Sorry, I’ve been away from the internet for a few days. Yes, you put it well. I would say that first principles cannot be ascertained by reason; that the true fatal conceit is thinking that we can reason to first principles. Hayek makes a poor attempt at a substitute conceit by saying we must accept the first principles that evolution gives us (at least as far as economics is concerned--note he refuses to extend his logic to "family" issues which means he is not as committed to his logic as would first appear).

We must get first principles from somewhere. I have labeled that somewhere "Revelation." How much such Revelation is a product of historical accident, historical forces (like Hayek's "evolution"), human intelligence, or Divine intervention is an intriguing religious debate but one we can avoid if our focus is the society, since as Tocqueville pointed out it matters greatly to a man whether his religion is true, but a society will not go to heaven or hell.

Short,

My pre-Enlightenment point is captured a bit by Hayek on page 49 where he quotes Locke. Locke there uses "reason" much more broadly that the "constructivists." He uses the term in a way that allows it to embrace the post-hoc affirmation of "Revelation" that confirms the usefulness of the moral culture we have inherited rather than as a tool that has the possibility of undermining that moral culture.

OK Doc: I don't have the book in front of me, but thought the "reason" that Locke refers to has nothing necessarily to do with revelation, but is simply an appeal to "rational insight", which is the faculty in us of recognizing necessary and essential truth. If something is "self-evidently true" we would know it by insight, for example, not by a process of reasoning. (It is largely abandoned by moderns who claim to get rid of essences, forms, universals, whatever. Some moderns get rid of form and rational insight in epistemology without getting rid of them in morality.) Unlike procedural reasoning, insight is supposed to be passive like vision. So in the preenlightenment tradition the first principle of practical reason is: "Do good," or "The goal of all action is the good." A corollary would be, "Avoid evil."

Tell me if I'm wrong: ultimately your argument boils down to (P1) reasoning (procedural reasoning, from premise to conslusion) can't get us first principles, (P2) there is no such thing as rational insight into first principles, so (C) the two options are (a) to accept first principles irrationally from faith, or (b) say that there are no first principles.

Short,

I think there is something like your "rational insight" but it is not as strong as you paint it. It involves the ability to disconfirm an irrational first principle by recognizing internal contradictions or by recognizing it's contradiction with the "moral sense" (those rules "written on our hearts"). My point above was that this process does not generate first principles it can only reject them.
I am sorry that you and other posters took the word "revelation" to mean "something supported by faith alone" when I meant it to mean "those uncontraindicated moral hypotheses we have inherited from the past." That we cannot arrive at such principles solely through reason does not mean we can't "develop" moral theories; that is tease out the rational implications of them and apply them to new circumstances.

"Socialism would damn near require something on the scale of Star Trek replicator technology. You have to equalize resources, opertunity, etc. *first*, not take unequal amounts of those things and try to shoehorn them into an artifical mess that requires more people to keep it working than benefit from it."

The problem with that theory is that it assumes equal human capability, drive and motivation. Even if everyone started with equal resources, some would be more productive and more successful than others. It wouldn't even take one generation for enequalities to manifest and the end result would be the same jealousness for other's successes. Socialism doesn't work because it doesn't reward higher levels of productiveness and/or motivation. You can't motivate people to work harder, study harder, overcome obstacles and apply themselves by giving them the fruits of another's labor. You can, however, motivate those people who are inclined to be more productive to cease their efforts by taking the fruits of their labor and giving it to those less motivated and less capable.

"Most conservatives can ignore the contradiction between their economics and their morality, but only through a militant contempt for intellectual consistency."

That's a ridiculous assertion. It requires an assumption that the accumulation of wealth (capitalism) is immoral.

Conservatives don't disdain the "redistribution of wealth" as long as such redistribution is voluntary..i.e. charitable. Government forced charity through taxation and involuntary redistribution of wealth is not charitable. What is "moral" about being forced to donate to charity?

There is no "intellectual consistency" on insisting that government sponsored theft is immoral. There is also no "intellectual consistency" in ignoring the demonstrable fact that self-described conservatives are much more involved in actual charitable activities and charitable giving than self-described liberals. Forcing others give their wealth for charitable purposes is not moral, voluntarily giving of your own wealth for charitable purposes is.

The "intellectual consistency" comes from the belief that voluntary charitable contributions is a moral act while government sponsored theft is not.