We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day I believe in democracy because I distrust the elites. I distrust the elites because I believe that self-deception is widespread, and the elites are particularly skilled at it. Accordingly, I believe that it is important for those in power to have the humility of knowing that they may be voted out of office.
Others believe in democracy because they are hoping to see the triumph of a particular elite. Many liberals want to see sympathetic technocrats manipulating the levers of government, nominally for the greater good. I see government technocrats as inevitably embedded in a political system that inefficiently processes information. The more they attempt, the more damage they are likely to do. Many conservatives want to see government used for “conservative ends.” However, I believe that the more that government tries to correct the flaws of families, the more flawed families will become.
– Arnold Kling
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I don’t remember who said it but “democracy is not there to elect a good government but to get rid of a bad one.”
I am all for democracy as long as what people can actually get from their elected representatives is severely constrained.
Any government capable of surviving more than a few years is based at some level upon manipulation of public opinion. The problem with democracy, especially in an age of mass media, is that this becomes the core competence of government, honed to perfection by the need to fight elections.
An interesting essay, if a bit disjointed. It is far more interesting for the obvious but very profound questions it (deliberately?) falls short of addressing. I think it is certain that the author was aware of at least some of this and intended us to reflect further, but it isn’t clear how far he intended us to go down that path or what he meant us to conclude.
The introductory part goes through the business of why people are either ignorant or biased about politics. ‘Everyone but the author?’ one immediately feels like asking. The idea, apparently, is that people don’t like their beliefs to be challenged, and so either purposely remain incurious (resulting in a mish-mash of inconsistent, random beliefs) or devote a great deal of effort to dismissing opposing beliefs (giving a consistent but lop-sided set of beliefs, ignorant about the opposition’s best arguments).
OK, so we’re apparently all doomed. It’s a rather pessimistic view that ignores all those areas where people do now know the right answer, which don’t impinge on the political consciousness precisely because they are uncontroversial. But never mind that; for the sake of discussion let’s suppose we have effectively dismissed both the proles and the party elites as sources of good guidance.
Now we get to what this was all leading up to. Having eliminated everyone individually from consideration, from where should we get our leadership? It is of course the classic paradox of government: nobody who wants to rule us should in any circumstances be trusted to do so. What with this being part of something called “The Hayek Series”, the answer is predictable: free markets.
No, we don’t want any of those political elite commentators carefully discrediting all alternatives to yield a pre-determined orthodox conclusion. Instead the free market would provide efficient collective processing of information to yield the optimum solution. If only we cognoscenti could adjust the political system to be more like a free market, eh?
He believes in democracy because he distrusts elites who deceive themselves, and they should know that they may be voted out of office. Now how does this follow from the preceding argument? We have been given good reason not to trust the elites, but we also have been shown reasons not to trust the voters, and it isn’t clear why only half the argument now appears. Where does the free market come in? Does the fact that a government may be voted out constitute a free market? And yet, even in democracies it seems to be the political elites that get voted for, and the market has a very low bandwidth with which to convey its conclusion: one or maybe two binary bits every few years. Given how ignorant we are told the masses are, perhaps that is appropriate?
Very odd. The remainder of the essay is a continuation on this theme, of the failings of political elites. But let us go back to the idea that free markets are the answer.
While the essay gives us no direct reasons to believe this is the only alternative to the elites and the masses, or that it is even a viable answer at all, I presume that the reader is assumed to be familiar with Hayek and that this therefore need not be said. But my understanding of Hayek was that the political systems we have already are self-organised free markets. The masses demand and the elites supply, and all the usual failure mechanisms of markets apply: monopolies, and the triumph of advertising over quality, and scams and fraud. The lesson of markets is that there is no perfect utopia, but the market solution is the best that may be practically achieved. And the market often picks solutions that the pundits regard as horribly wrong – illiberal, inefficient, dangerous – I need only mention here the one word: “Microsoft”.
Evidently, the market knows something that all the computer afficionados do not, and one might also ask whether the voters who voted in the likes of Maggie and Tony, or Clinton and Bush, collectively know something the political pundits who hate them do not? Were they just random and inconsistent opinions resulting from the averaging of vast amounts of ignorance? Or has information been processed by the voting market to yield the optimum choice?
The elites, of course, recognise that totally the wrong choice has been made, and the system must be adjusted to correct this for the public’s own good. Their tinkering is generally disasterous, and so we libertarians must adjust the system to prevent this ‘big government’ regulatory messing about for the public’s own good. That’s simply the truth. Free markets do not simply organise themselves; they need our guidance.
A most interesting essay; and particularly the question of whether any or all of this irony was intended.
Reflect on this: about who is Arnold Kling speaking, precisely, when he ends his essay “Our political beliefs are likely to be especially unreliable, regardless of which strategy we use to avoid truth”?
Such thorough going skepticism as evinced by Mr. Kling is unlikely to be particularly congenial to Samizdatistas. After all, if all is vanity, if all our most cherished beliefs are only so due to our pig-headed refusal to let go of them, then where does that leave all those privatisations and gung-ho evocations of Freedom(TM) in the Arab world? Where does that leave the sheer, bloody (quite literally in many cases) radicalism of over-caffeinated Randoids?
Such speculations as indulged in by mr. Kling might lead one to advocate a totalitarain – in the most extreme sense of the word – dictatorship, which would oversee all the day-to-day activities of its people, whilst giving them not even a hint of a political say. Indeed, it might even criminalise the holding of certain opinions unattractive to it, as that would be the only way to ‘persuade’ someone if we assumed that people are as dunderheaded as mr. Kling wants us to believe.
But, who will guard the guards? Will not the functionaries in such a government also possess unbreakable prejudices, which they are even more likely to hold onto once they have the power to suppress all opposition? Will we not find salvation from our obstinance even in a Platonic Republic?
Tradition, chaps, is the one guide, divorced as it is from conscious human reason, which can serve even such fools as us. Tradition consists of those social practices which survived the test of time. One might almost say that past tribulations are a market, and tradition consists of the market winners. ;->
That means no gay marriages, no abortion-on-demand, no adultery-on-demand (no fault divorce), no drug legalisation, no invade the world/invite the world. That must sound horrible for liberty junkie, but market forces must be respected.
Apart from the fact that abortion upon demand has basically been a factor of human life since the beginning (post-natal abortion of defective or unwanted children if the ‘medical technology’ of the society isn’t up to the job of pre-natal abortion.), the ‘nuclear family marriage with a wife you’re actually faithful to’ is a fairly recent conception that the ancient arab and greek societies basically skipped over without any apparent problem, that the ‘tradition’ has been for drugs to be legal rather than illegal etc etc. Odd how lurker mk.3’s ‘traditions’ tend to be neocon ideology rather than a representative selection of the human past lifestyle.
Also,
Is this really true? I was under the impression that the core competence of government was to push heavily its own agenda – the actual business of convincing voters seems to have fallen rather by the wayside, given that only a tiny proportion of the voting public will _ever_ change their party alleigance, regardless of how badly things are going. See all the tory voters who say ‘I’ll still vote tory because they’ll do the right thing once they get into power, they’re just coming up with all this junk to get in…’
Unfortunately, Lascaille, I think it is true. Dave and Tony have never pushed a coherent worldview. So, they’re either imbeciles (which they’re not) or totally mendacious (which they are). And then there are the Mingers who have elevated lack of principle to the status of a principle. I see the stuff they shove through the door here in Manchester and the stuff they shove through my mother’s door in Gateshead and you’d think it came from diametrically opposite parties. In prosperous, white, quasi-rural/suburban/commuter-belt (high-density but cows in the fields – at least until set-aside) West Gateshead the lib-dems play a tune close to classical liberalism/orthodox (Scandi-style) social democracy. In multi-cultural* South Manchester they sound more like a front organisation for RESPECT.
*A lie. An ignoble lie we all have to believe in for the greater good. I, for my sins, live in Levenshulme, which is an Irish/Pakistani ghetto in which the Paddies and the Pakistanis live completely parallel lives which only ever intersect at the curry house or corner shop. Multi-culturalism has totally balkanised Manchester to the extent that just up the A-6 in Longsight they might as well declare themselves an Islamic Republic. I remember making a call from a phone box there a couple of years back which was plastered in flyers for the “Magnificent 19”. They were rather professionally done and I first thought they were promoting a Bollywood film, then I noticed the image of Mohammed Atta. I have done Europe from Mayo to Dubrovnik and the Eastern US from New Jersey to Key West yet I’ve never felt as disconcerted and foreign as I did one afternoon in England’s third city.
Lascalle nails it. The ‘traditional’ vision Lurker offers is a ‘golden age’ neo-Victorian fantasy so beloved of a certain ilk who exist where fascism and conservatism intersect.
“Tradition consists of those social practices which survived the test of time.”
Really? Let’s think about that. What are we calling “the test of time”?
Slavery passed that test for thousands of years.
Let me tell you something: whenever you see the word “tradition” in a discussion like this, your comprehension will be profitably enhanced if you substitute the word, “habit”.
I submit that reason is far better.
Democracy on a scale is fine, I suppose, but when the action of pulling a lever in a school gynasium certifies a 1/3,000,000th (or a 1/180,000,000th, depending on if it State based or nationally based) share in a person who will never know you from Adam to be a 1/537th share in a $2,400,000,000,000 budget and a $46,000,000,000,000 debt, then that doesn’t seem like democracy to me, or what democracy is trying to accomplish.
If the best we get by having a choice between a “democratically” elected Statist behemoth and a dictatorially selected Statist behemoth then we’ve got a major problem. So “scale” is important when discussing democracy. Granted local authorities can be corrupt as well, but the whole notion is to “set aside” bad government, not elect in a new batch of the same.
In the end, the bigger the government, no matter how it is contrived, the more self serving and unresponsive it will be. The anti-federalists knew this, but lost out for the most part.
Yes, but here’s the thing. Western electorates have been asked whether they “want to see sympathetic technocrats manipulating the levers of government, nominally for the greater good” or not and they have said yes. Barry Goldwater explicitly asked the American people whether they wanted the federal government to act as a hyperannuated morality police and they, overwhelimingly, said yes.
So all of us in the west are stuck with an intrusive state contolled by lefties. What are those of us who believe in “conservative ends”, i.e. civilised human beings, supposed to do. We can’t get rid of intrusive government, we’re not allowed to take over intrusive government. What are we to do?
As to reason vs. tradition. 90% of people are completely incapable of doing (that is getting an A in) A2 level algebra that, frankly, is a piece of piss. Given that mathematics is pure reason, I can’t imagine why anyone would think that human reason is any decent guide to how we should actually live our lives.
Yeah, the only thing worse than elite rule is… mob rule.
A thought: elites are, in certain circumstances like UK politics nowadays, monopoly institutions.
In other fields, such as all suppliers to the general public, monopolies are subject to review and, if necessary, regulatory constraint.
Interestingly, political parties are not regulated in this fashion. The major political parties, which actually and ultimately (short of revolution), control decisions on all matters choose not to be so constrained, for example by a voting system such as the Single Transferable Vote (STV).
Worse, the major political parties look to be insulating themselves against perhaps the only remaining protection: doing away with the need to fund themselves, buy considering introducing funding through taxation, and already by using government funding for party-political advertising.
Is there perhaps anything from history that tells us that a self-perpetuating oligarchy (for example a small clique of elites) is anything but bad, and perhaps a signal of impending governmental and economic catastrophe?
Best regards
“As to reason vs. tradition. 90% of people…”
…have been ‘educated’ by government.
Don’t mistake what you’re talking about for the capacity for reason, Gabriel, which hasn’t properly attended in education for generations, now.
Far be it from me to defend the state education system, but while public school alumni are generally marginally better at Mathematics than those from Comprehensives, the difference is not anything like as great as one that would convince me to assent to a legal system derived from scratch, rationally.
In my experience people are pretty good at making decisions that materially effect their own lives and in matters they have extensive experience in. With anything else you’re better off with a random word generator.
Think how many errors even a good mathmetician may make from time to time. Consider how just one small error can be compounded from logical development into a great big whopping mistake. With Mathematics it is fairly easy to see when you have gone wrong, but it is somewhat harder to find out exactly how you did so. With politics there is no analogous set of objective criteria where we can stop and say “there has been an error in reasoning here” and consequently the search for such an error may well be impossible.
Gabriel,
But Mathematics is a phallo-centric system which is used to enslave the young into unthinking obedience to the patriachal capitalist milleau. Math is a running dog for globalisation and even worse it’s insistence on intellectual rigour worked out by generations of dead white European males is utterly stultifying to the minds of the young who should experience the more fulfilling many-valued logic of multi-culturalism and celebrate the “surgical” removal of Aisha (from down the road)’s clitoris with a broken coke bottle as an example of her cultural authenticity.
Except…
I taught myself The Calculus. I had no choice. I blagged my way onto a physics degree course without an A-level in maths but with a solemn promise to teach myself. I taught myself and by the final year of my degree I was taking extra maths modules because I loved the subject with a passion. Math is the most empowering thing I’ve ever learned. I absolutely fail to understand why others fail to see quite how cool it is… What isn’t cool about Maxwell’s equations, Josiah Willard Gibbs’s Grand Canonical Ensemble, Dirichlet criteria, The Disturbing Function, Hilbert’s Hotel, Kurt Goedel’s Cosmological Solutions and the whole gamut of hieroglyphs us in the know cover blackboards with? I am perpetually in awe of the universe because I understand a little bit of it. How sad that so few others have this opportunity.
Given the relative wealth of the UK it isn’t just sad, it’s pathetic. Truly abysmal.
Nick M, you’re obviously way better at Maths than me then. The most advanced stuff I ever did was probably De Moivre’s theorem and some slightly elevated calculus that first year undergraduates get out of the way in the first few weeks. I certainly agree, ghough, that Maths is brilliant and I have long had antadmiration for people who are very proficient in it.
However, what I could never except is that I should defer judgment in ethical and political questions to mathmeticians (Bertrand Russell indeed!!!). However, this is the logical consequence of believing political and ethical questions should be solved solely throught the application of Reason.
P.S. Yes, mathematical education in contemporary Britain is an abject disgrace and, from what I understand, it’s going to get worse.
Political and ethical problems cannot be solved with mathematics (or reason) alone. What maths does is to tell you what the other consequences of a set of beliefs are if you want them to be consistent, or tells you what conditions must apply if the result is to have a certain property. But just as mathematics requires a set of axioms which have to be taken on trust before you can get started, so politics and ethics need to be informed by what it is you want to achieve – what properties are desirable – before mathematics tells you how to do it.
(Or in the case of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, tells you that you can’t do it, by demonstrating that a fair political system is in fact a logical impossibility.)
Pa Annoyed writes:
But fails to identify the missing ingredient.
Might it be killing so many of each other for so long that whatever started the disagreement looks, with hindsight, rather small.
So foresight of later hindsight might help.
And might we not label same as “reason”?
[And somewhere within the last 24 hours, Perry posted something about the danger in being labelled “an idealist”!]
Best regards
“Might it be killing so many of each other for so long that whatever started the disagreement looks, with hindsight, rather small.”
Game theory is rarely that simple. A big problem with intuition is that what you think ought to be the rational goal is frequently not. Strategies that survive are generally the evolutionarily stable ones, not necessarily the ones maximising collective or even individual gain. The Tragedy of the Commons is a good example, and indeed it can be perfectly rational to choose a deliberately irrational strategy.
It works like this. Suppose you are playing a game where the last one to capitulate in each round gains a considerable victory over the other, but until then is very expensive for both players. Now, one approach is to coordinate your moves to capitulate as early as possible, which jointly gives you the maximum collective gain. You either capitulate simultaneously or take it in turns to share the winnings. That sounds like the rational choice, right? But suppose one of the players somehow persuades the other that they are not going to capitulate no matter how long the game goes on, and however heavy the loss. An irrational strategy, I’m sure you’ll agree. Except that the rational partner playing against them now has a choice of an immediate heavy loss, or a long series of losses followed by the same heavy loss. Their “rational” strategy is therefore to capitulate immediately, despite the fact they always lose. So the first guy wins every game instead of just half of them – not so irrational after all!
The second player’s only possible response is to somehow persuade the first player that they are equally irrational, and equally determined not to back down. Only then would the first player’s strategy become actually irrational. But does the first player believe them? If they do, then of course logically they would immediately capitulate, but this is now just the same situation as above reversed. If instead the players can only manage to persuade the other that they will only withstand a certain cost (say the point at which the string of small losses exceeds the gain from winning a round), beyond which they will capitulate and believe their own maximum bearable cost to be higher, then they may try to outbid the other. Again, it is rational to boost one’s own limit a little beyond what is otherwise bearable if it gives you a realistic chance of consistently outbidding the other, but again the game is symmetric and the same applies to both players. And if one has a price and the other is a nutter who will never surrender, the nutter always wins.
Evolutionary psychologists argue that this sort of strategy is behind many sorts of human (and animal) “irrationality”, such as revenge, retaliation, and beserk rages; even at a significant personal cost to the berserker. Because everybody knows that a retaliator will punish misbehaviour beyond the point of rational gain and loss, nobody misbehaves, and the retaliator gets a rational advantage from their irrationality. And given the biologists’ dictum: “evolution is much cleverer than you are”, I’d say that the existence of retaliatory behaviour in humans was strong evidence that the logic is sound.
So your foresight of hindsight does not solve the problem. Yes, I already knew all that. But I’m very obviously a nutcase with no sense of self-preservation and willing to fight for longer than you are, and you know it, which is why you will lose every time.
“I am one of the nails hammered into mankind so the Universe does not fall off! I am surrounded by a glowing aura of power when I speak to the world leaders, who stand in wide-eyed awe of me! And I am in contact with an invisible bloke, who I contact by writing notes and posting them down a magic wishing well and who whispers his messages in my ear at night, who will soon take over the world with my aid in an apocalyptic global nuclear war! Submit or die!”
So tell me, what’s the “rational” choice here? Submit? Or die?
The scorn you pour on the successful traditions of your forebearers is of a piece with some university stoner wondering how a company could have become successful even though he dislikes it. The West rose to agricultural, industrial and finally political supremacy on the back of monogamy, the Protestant work ethic, Christian morality, while the Amerinds, Africans, etc who lacked these habits languished in darkness. China had a High Middle Ages technological base when it traded with Rome round the turn of the millenium. It still had the same base seventeen centuries later, when the European caravles, laden with glass and gunpoweder, sailed in. How did we progress when they didn’t? Almost the same way one company out-competes another one on the basis of its superior work methods, one might say.
Of course, these traditions included practices you find abhorrent with the entirety (I won’t speculate how great that entirety is) of your libertarian souls. Yet the only alternative to accepting this abhorrence as a fault on your part, is to claim that the West’s success came entirely through an accident of history. Or perhaps 2 thousand years of accidents.
But what do I know? After all, I’m just a fascist, which has been defined as palingenetic (palingenesis=rebirth, renewal) ultranationalist populism. You chaps most certainly can’t be accused of that: you want us to continue in the modern decadent state, you’re treasonous and you despise the people.
An interesting analysis from Pa Anmnoyed, obviosly of some merit. However, the game of life in international politics and warmongering is different.
First, each player is a national (or other large) team. Secondly the rules change with time. Thirdly, with time, many (and eventually all) of the players change.
The rules of the endgame fall into one of three sets (with minor differences), posed here as questions.
Set 1: Have you won the game? If not, is it not time to change the rules?
Set 2: Are you sitting comfortably, playing happily (or at least reasonably nicely) with each other?
Set 3: Have you hurt each other enough that you would like to play according to Rule Set 2?
Failure to realise this, as a team, in advance and from the obvious lessons of history, shows a lack of rationality.
In answer to Pa Annoyed’s question:
There are more than two choices. Try some (but not all) of you die along with “The Nail” (or just him, if you can manage it). Try wait for “The Nail” to die. On a personal basis, try emigration: this seems to be quite a common choice, though it does trouble the rest of the world somewhat, as well as weakening your own team.
Best regards
Ah yes, the ol’ Protestant work ethic. That would explain the centuries of Italian cultural dominance, Venetian domination of much of the Mediterranean (also not known for their attachment to monogamy), the French empire, the Spanish empire, the Portuguese empire, the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the Russian empire… and Christian morality did a fine job when it came to the Wars of Religion in Europe. No, Christian morality’s enduring legacy was the rationalist strain of Catholic thought.
I am quite Hayekian when it comes to tradition… much of it is the product of iterative processes that work very well and which came about for very good reasons. Where fascists and conservatives such as Lurker get it wrong is that they want to lock in selected traditions with laws that end the iterative process and change something social (a tradition) into something political (a law).
While the Venetians weren’t in the least bit attracted to Protestantism they did adhere fairly strictly to an ascetic republicanism that was more or less similar in effect, if not in origin. I was in the Nat Gall the other day and it is noticable first how unflash Venetian noblemen were compared to their Milanese and Roman counterparts and how an increasing gaudiness in their depiction (and adherence to Counter Reformation aesthetics) correlates almost perfectly to a decline in their power. It’s also worth remembering the healthy disrespect Venetians had for the Church hierarchy in general and the papacy in particular.
LOL! By systematically pillaging almost an entire conitent Spain managed to just about prop itself up as a major power for 200 years or so. When the illusion was revealed and the Spanish Hapsburg finally succumbed to extinction Spain was shown, for all the gold it stole, to be poor, backwards and pitiful. After becoming a helpless pawn of genuine powers it tore itself apart in civil wars. A triumph for tridentinism indeed!
Whether the plight of Spain was a punishment from above for expelling the chosen people, or simply a logical consequence of expelling the majority of the nation’s bankers, I’ll leave up to you.
Taken to the cleaners by the Dutch.
Seriously, you’re joking right?
War of Spanish succession, Nine Years War, Seven Years war, War of the Austrian Succession. Any sort of pattern emerging here?
Which made Spain look like a luxury delicatessen.
A more instructive example might perhaps be North and South America. What is the one thing that divides the U.S. and Canada from the losers to the south?
That would be what created the inquisition and postponed free market economics for centuries.
Unfortunately a healthy aversion to papistry is no longer an essential condition English patriotism , but then we are in a rather degenrate phase after all. It certainly was the case when being English was something to be proud of.
The US and Canadian explorers brought women with them.
More correctly put, they were interested in putting down roots, actually LIVING here, and building the institutions needed to actually have a viable community. For the most part, the Spanish/Portuguese explorers seemed more interested in digging up a bunch of silver and going home. As a result, relatively little of their particular frontier society was viable over the long term.
That analysis may hold true for Venezuela and Peru, but hardly for Argentina and Brazil. Just like their Protestant counterparts to the north, Iberians were there to settle and to achieve this aim they cleared out the natives. You’ll have to search high and low in Artgentina before you find an Indian – better off going to Dakota. It’s wprth rememberin that a round trip to South America under Phillip II could easily take 15 years. Some people, mostly professional farmers, were there to steal as much as they could and then piss off, but most were there to settle. If they neglected to take their wife, they found one among the natives.
Despite what they might claim, they were not victims of imperialists, they were the imperialists. They were just rubbish at it.
A better riposte to my thesis would be the abundance of natural resources to be found in Latin America.
i.e. as in the Middle East, there was a reduced incentive to innovation in agriculture and industry, because more money could always be made by just getting stuff out of the earth.