Chapter 5 Introduction Is Socialism a Mistake?

The idea of ​​socialism was once both sublime and simple...in fact, we might say it is the most ambitious product of the human spirit...so magnificent, so audacious, and rightfully arousing the greatest aspirations.If we want to save the world from barbarism, we must refute socialism, and we cannot dismiss it half-heartedly.

What this book argues is that our civilization, both for its origin and for its maintenance, depends on one thing, its exact expression, an expanding order in human cooperation.A more common but somewhat misleading name for this order is capitalism.In order to understand our civilization, we must understand that this extended order is not the result of human design or intention, but a spontaneous product: it arises out of unintentional adherence to certain traditional, mostly moral practices. Many of these practices are disliked by people, who usually don't understand what it means, and can't justify it, but through a process of evolutionary selection in groups that happen to follow these practices—population and wealth relative increase in - and they spread fairly quickly.Unknowingly, hesitantly, and even painfully adopted by these groups, these practices collectively expand their access to all valuable information that enables them to "work the earth productively and prosper." , people prospered, and their products abounded" ("Old Testament Genesis" 1:28).Presumably this process is the least properly appreciated aspect of human evolution. Socialists see these things differently.Not only did they come to different conclusions, they even had different views on the facts.The fact that socialists get the facts wrong is central to my argument, and will be discussed below.I intend to concede that if the socialist analysis of the workings of the existing economic order and of possible alternatives is factually correct, we would probably have to believe that income distribution is based on certain moral principles and that only This allocation is made possible by empowering a central authority to dictate the use of existing resources, which may be a prerequisite for the elimination of individual ownership of the means of production.Even if collective domination of the means of production could produce at least as much collective good as we do now, how to distribute it justly would still be a serious moral dilemma.Yet we are not in this situation.For there is no known way of telling individuals what direction to direct their individual efforts so as to make the greatest contribution to the total output, except by assigning the product among competitive markets. The gist of my argument is that between those who favor a spontaneously extended human order brought about by a competitive market, and those who demand a central authority to arrange human intercourse arbitrarily on the basis of collective domination of existing resources, on the other, there is a Conflict arises because the latter make factual errors about how knowledge of these resources arises, how it can be created, and how it can be used.As a matter of fact, this conflict must be resolved with scientific research.Such research demonstrates that the knowledge we produce and accumulate is consistent with the moral traditions that arose spontaneously (traditions at odds with the rationalist dogma or norms to which most socialists subscribe) that determine the competitive market order. Wealth is greater than can be acquired or utilized by a central command economy advocated by those who claim to operate strictly according to "rationality".It is therefore impossible for socialism to achieve or carry out its aims and plans; furthermore, they are not even logically tenable. That is why, contrary to what is often held, these questions are not simply questions of interest or value judgments.The question of how certain values ​​or norms came to be accepted by men, and how they acted upon their civilization, is itself of course first and foremost a matter of fact, and is the central question of this book, the answer to which is outlined in the first three chapters .What makes civilization possible is the extended order, and the demands of socialism are not moral conclusions drawn from the traditions that shaped that order.On the contrary, they try to overturn this tradition by means of some rationally designed moral system whose appeal depends on the appeal of its promised results to human instincts.It argues that since people can generate certain systems of rules that coordinate their behavior, they must also be able to design better and more satisfying systems.But if man's survival depends on a specific, rule-governed, proven behavior, he will certainly not choose another behavior just for the immediate benefit.The debate between market order and socialism is nothing less than a matter of life and death.Following the morality of socialism would destroy many of the present human race and impoverish many others. All of this raises an important question that I wish to clarify from the outset of this book.Although I attack rational arbitrariness on the part of the socialists, my argument is not against the proper use of reason.By "the right use of reason," I mean reason that acknowledges its own limitations, that educates itself to face up to the implications of the surprising facts revealed by economics and biology that, without The resulting order in the context of design can go far beyond the plans people consciously pursue.How can a work that argues that socialism is factually and even logically untenable attack reason?Nor do I want to deny that reason can guide the evaluation, criticism, and rejection of traditional institutions and moral principles, if taken in small steps with prudence and humility.Like my earlier work, this book is against the age-old rational norms that guide socialism, norms that I believe embody a naive and uncritical doctrine of rationality, a kind of rationality that I call For the archaic and anti-scientific methodology of "Constructivist Rationalism" (1973). So I don't want to deny that reason has the capacity to improve norms and institutions, let alone think that it is impossible to reform our entire moral system, which is now generally understood to be oriented towards "social justice".But we can only do this by examining the parts of a moral system.If this morality falsely believes that it can do something that it cannot do according to its principles and norms, such as functioning as generating and organizing knowledge, then this impossibility itself is a decisive factor for the moral system. reasonable criticism.It is important to restrain this outcome, since, in the end, it is the point of view that the whole debate is a value judgment rather than a matter of fact, which prevents professional researchers of market order from emphasizing with sufficient force that socialism cannot do what it promises. things. Nor does my argument suggest that I do not share certain widely held values ​​with socialists; I will demonstrate below that I do not believe at all that the widely accepted concept of "social justice" expresses a possible state of affairs, I don't even believe it's a meaningful concept.Nor do I believe that we can make ethical decisions simply by focusing on the greatest foreseeable satisfaction, as some advocates of a hedonistic ethic claim. The starting point of my work may well be expressed by Hume's insight that "moral principles ... are not the result of our reason" (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739/1886: II: 235).This insight will be pivotal in this book, because it forms the fundamental question it seeks to answer about how and how our morality arose and what that means for our economic and political lives. what. The idea that capitalism has a superior ability to exploit dispersed knowledge so that we can only maintain capitalism raises the question of how we got to this irreplaceable economic order - given what I believe is a strong instinct The question is all the more important that rational and rationalist impulses can subvert the morality and institutions that capitalism requires. The answer to this question in the first three chapters rests on the ancient view, well known in economics, that our values ​​and institutions are not merely determined by past causes, but are structures or patterns that involuntarily carry on themselves. part of the organizational process.This view is true not only in economics but also in a broad field known today as the biological sciences.This insight is but the first member of a growing family of theories that account for complex structures by looking at certain processes that transcend our ability to obey all of our respective environments, and whose concrete manifestations of those environments play a decisive role.When I first started working, I felt that I was almost alone in the study of this highly complex evolutionary form of self-sustaining order.But during this time, the study of such problems—which have been called variously called spontaneous generation, cybernetics, endogenous equilibrium, spontaneous order, self-organization, synergy, systems theory, and so on—became There are so many that I can only have a detailed understanding of a few of them.Therefore, this book can only be said to contribute modestly to a growing trend.This trend has apparently led to the gradual development of an evolutionary (though certainly not simply Social Darwinian) ethics, comparable to and helpful to the already advanced evolutionary epistemology, but they There are clear differences between. While this book thus raises some thorny scientific and philosophical questions, its main task remains to demonstrate that one of the most influential political movements of our time, socialism, is clearly based on some false premises, While it may be born of some good intentions and led by some of the brightest representatives of our time, it threatens the standard of living, and even the lives themselves, of a large proportion of our existing population.Chapters 4 through 6 examine this question, in which I evaluate and refute the socialist challenge to my account of the development and maintenance of our civilization in the first three chapters.In Chapter 7 I turn to our language, hoping to show how it has been damaged by the influence of socialism, and how careful we must not be lured into socialist ways of thinking by this language. .In Chapter 8 I discuss an objection raised not only by socialists but by others that the population explosion weakens my argument.Finally, in Chapter 9, I make brief comments on the role religion has played in the development of our moral traditions. Since the theory of evolution plays a central role in this book, I should point out that recent years have played a major role in leading to a better understanding of the growth and function of knowledge (Popper, 1934/1959) and of various complex spontaneous orders ( One of the encouraging advances in Hayek, 1964, 1973, 1976, 1979) was the development of an epistemology of evolution (Campbell, 1977, 1987; Radnitsky and Bartley, 1987), which is a A theory of knowledge that understands reason and its products as an evolutionary process.I also touch on related issues in this book that, while extremely important, remain largely underappreciated. I argue that we should not only have an evolutionary epistemology, but also an evolutionary interpretation of the moral tradition, whose characteristics should be different from existing theories.Of course, the traditional rules of human interaction, like language, law, markets, and currencies, are areas where evolutionary ideas sprout.Ethics is the last stronghold. Human beings must now put down their airs and admit that it also originated from evolution.This theory of moral evolution is clearly emerging, and its basic idea is that our morality is neither an instinctive nor a rational creation, but a peculiar tradition—as the title of the first chapter suggests, it is "Between Instinct and Reason" - a tradition of immense importance that enables us to adapt ourselves to problems and circumstances beyond our own rational capacities.Our moral traditions, like so many other aspects of our culture, are not a product of our reason, but have developed concurrently with our reason.Some people may find this statement strange or confusing, but these moral traditions do go beyond the limits of reason.