ROG:
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.
DMB
I'm familiar with Hayek. I guess you could call The Road to Serfdom a
defense of liberalism in some special sense of the word, but he's actually a
darling of the right. He's big among anti-communist cold warriors. He didn't
have the tools to see political struggles as Pirsig does. The blunders that
are bound to occur when operating on mistaken assumptions (SOM) infect all
political ideologies. But Hayek doesn't understand that, nor could he. And
on a more basic level, he makes a mistake that is common on the right; he
confuses the real ideals and aims of socialism with Stalin's totalitarian
nightmare. No doubt, this is what Hayek is thinking of when he writes...
"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."
DMB
Yea, yea. In spite of all that's been said and written about the rights of
the people, social and ecomonic justice, Socialism just means Stalinism, it
means centrally planned economies, collectivized farms and a gulag for the
dissenters. Just look at Canada. The horror. And here's Roger's take....
ROGER
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.
DMB
Right. We're on the same page. Totalitarianism is bad. I'm against it. I'm
against suppression and for individual thought. I don't want to be
controlled any more than the next guy. And if I thought liberalism or
socialism endorsed any kind of totalitarianism I'd walk away, but they
don't. Anti-Soviet cold war propaganda is far from genuine political
analysis. I'm not saying he was himself a propagandist, just that they were
the one's who made him popular. The sad fact is that most anti-communists
know very little about the actual theories and ideas behind it all. In no
way is a "master plan" essential to the left. In fact the final aim of
communism is to have no government or plan of any kind. At the same time,
Marx's most influential insight is readily absorbed by capitalism: that
Humanity's progress is best measured by our material and technological
progress. When we say Stone Age, Iron Age or Information Age, we are
describing historical progress in Marxist terms.
ROG:
Master planners are as intellectual today as flat-earthers and creationists.
DMB:
Exactly, that's over, especially with the MOQ in your tool box. No more big
projects. Today's intellectuals can see that. None of them out there selling
Stalinism or anything like that. Fear of such a thing is unrealistic and
even a little irrational.
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