The Reason Why The World Is So Messed Up: Ignorance of Carl Menger And His Evolutionary Ideas
I constantly see many bright and relatively well-educated people frantically scratching their heads regarding the socioeconomic chaos of the last 2 years. The tyranny and stupidity of CovidMania with its lockdowns and coerced bullshit vaccinations. The tribalistic Russia-Ukraine war, the usual Israeli/Palestinian hatreds and misunderstandings which radiate naïve good vs. evil thinking and in various ways engulfs the world. Governments creating money to finance all the seemingly idiotic ideas leading rapid world-wide inflation. Many mistakenly believe that some cabal of malicious people are purposely doing all this for some sinister purpose or ideology. Everyone by now has heard of ‘The Great Reset’. Many will blame the World Economic Forum and its leading ideologue Klaus Schwab, or Bill Gates, or the insufferable Justin Trudeau (especially when he speaks in French). But although it is true that these men and today’s politicians and “leading intellectuals” like Yuval Noah Harari are destroying civilization via their economically ignorant global central plans and other nonsense, the real source of our problems is the all pervasive economic ignorance of the masses and intellectuals that goes along with and encourages all the central planning. But we must go one step deeper and identify the source of such ignorance, and it is here where we need Carl Menger. Language, which is obviously a vital mechanism for communication and even thought, is, to borrow the popular phrase from Adam Ferguson, “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”. No caveman millions of years ago “invented” or “designed” it. It arose via an evolutionary process just like the respiratory, circulatory, nervous and other “systems” that help trillions of cells in your body create your complex order-life. Similarly, what Menger’s intellectual descendants of his so-called ‘Austrian School of Economics’ like Ludwig von Mises and 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics F.A. referred to as ‘The Market Process’ and the parts it is composed of like money, finance and banking, interest rates, economic competition, and the governmental-legal-moral structures that sustain it, is the “system” that sustain and expands the socioeconomic order and it too, just like language, evolved without man’s design. We are like cells in a human body having little clue how we have inadvertently become parts of something greater than ourselves because the “system” (the market process) that unites us was NOT the result of our conscious planning or design just like language. This is why we have all this technology yet we remain tribalistic killer slightly smarter apes slaughtering each other via the ignorant creation of massive government structures we ignorantly believe are what are needed to coordinate society.
Notice how all man-made calamities, from religious slaughters, to world wars, to political chaos, are always the result of large groups of homo sapiens somehow coercing each other via government. We have simply not evolved to understand the economic forces that create civilization, the vital need for freedom and privatization, and the immense harm that too much government can do. Supposedly the Dodo bird quickly went extinct because it had not evolved to recognize humans as potential dangers, we similarly just line up for ‘central planning’ and government coordinated self-destruction over and over and over and over.
Referring to man’s general economic ignorance Hayek writes:
“To them the market economy is largely incomprehensible…and its results seem to them irrational and immoral. They often see in it merely an arbitrary structure maintained by some sinister power.”
Who is that ‘sinister power’? Each group of economically ignorant homo sapiens depending on their history and numerous circumstances mistakenly identifies a different boogeyman. Since the recent and rapid evolution of the free-market-Capitalism occurred in Europe, understandably so for much of the third world and non-whites, it is “the white man” and his “exploitative Capitalism” and-or “racism”. There is of course, the “evil corporations”, “the rich-CEOs”, “greed”, “sexism”, “minorities”, “immigrants”, etc. It is as if we are fooled into believing that just because the social order is the result of human action, that our problems are likewise the result of conscious planning or plotting by fellow slightly smarter apes. They are not. They are overwhelmingly the result of economic ignorance and the order-destroying central planning bureaucracies the human dodos create.
Menger-Mises-Hayek’s evolutionary framework which takes into account the vital fact that man is essentially a slightly smarter tribal ape, and explains the proper functioning of the social order and its evolution is what explains how the world works and the real reasons for our chaos. Mises warns us in arguably one of the most important and profound sections of his treatise Human Action titled ‘The Fight Against Error”:
No ideological inconsistency can provide a satisfactory, i.e., working, solution for the problems offered by the facts of the world. The only effect of contradictory ideologies is to conceal the real problems and thus to prevent people from finding in time an appropriate policy for solving them. Inconsistent ideologies may sometimes postpone the emergence of a manifest conflict. But they certainly aggravate the evils which they mask and render a final solution more difficult. They multiply the agonies, they intensify the hatreds, and make peaceful settlement impossible. It is a serious blunder to consider ideological contradictions harmless or even beneficial.
Bottom line, Menger and his ‘Austrian School of Economics’ or bust.
Check out my intro to the above men’s ideas at our Liberty Speaks II event:
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