To: David, Platt, Wim and Rick
DMB
You should read the book. Apparently, its about philosophers who became
disenchanted with the moral uncertainty of liberalism and intellectual
principles. Instead they embraced tyranny and old-fashioned moral
certainties. You really shoud.
PLATT
As Pirsig points out, intellectuals (defined as high IQ types) are ill-
equipped to run society.
DMB
There you go again. SOM is ill-equipped to run society, not the intellect
per se. How many times do I have to?.... Oh, nevermind.
ROG adds
My favorite book on the defense of liberalism (used in the philosophical
sense, not the political) and the admonition of totalitarianism is F A
Hayek's *The Road to Serfdom.* Hayek too noticed that intellectuals and
scientists were often the vanguard to totalitarianism. Below are two of my
favorite passages from the book:
"The movement for planning owes its present strength largely to the fact
that, while planning is in the main still an ambition, it unites all the
single-minded idealists... "
and he adds:
"The effect of people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without
agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit
themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go:
with the results that they may all have to make a journey which most of them
do not want at all."
Totalitarianism requires the suppression of individual goals, values and
competing ideas and replaces it with vague, lowest-common-denominator
collective goals. Once the collectivist/totalitarian path is taken,
individual thought and values become dangerous to the collective plan, and
must be controlled. The net result is that intellectuals, in pursuit of their
ideals, are often the first to embrace a master plan that not only never
actually addresses their own particular ideals, but that actually leads to
the elimination of their ability to even establish future ideals.
I believe there is a place for intellectuals (certainly Hayek is himself
one), but I would caution that intellectual freedom can only occur in a world
where ideas are allowed to compete and cooperate in freedom. Furthermore, any
so-called intellectual that still believes in central coordination of
complex, dynamic systems should read up on the current science of complexity.
Master planners are as intellectual today as flat-earthers and creationists.
Rog
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