The Vital Need to See Mankind as Following Myths, NOT conspiracies.
Imagine you had a time machine and went back in time about 300 years to Salem, Massachusetts during the famed Salem witch trials where 19 women were hanged for witchcraft, and told people that the world could function much better if there was no slavery, that women should have the same freedoms as men, that homosexuality should be tolerated and seen as natural, and that six million years ago we had a common ancestor with chimpanzees. People would see you as some devilish monstrosity spreading heretical-sinful ideas and quickly “conspire” to kill you. Even if you succeeded in persuading a few people, the rate at which your ideas could spread would likely be no match for the rate at which existing fallacies, myths and the “incentive and ideological structure” of slave owners, religious leaders and the “experts” of their day would lead to your death. Would this mean that the people of the time were bad-malicious-”evil”? Or members of some “vast conspiracy” of “bad guys” or “special interests”? Of course not. The people would be fellow homo sapiens acting based on the prevailing myths and incentive structures of the times. Even if you didn’t get killed, as the superior ideas spread they may end up doing far more harm than good. Perhaps their spread may lead to ultimately unsuccessful slave revolts, or a civil war that ends up making society more susceptible to conquest by an external power like the French or Spanish at the time. Thus the spread of superior ideas or truths can end up doing far, far more harm than good. Knowing the risks, would you attempt to spread the ideas? Would it be “immoral” for you not to try? How would you attempt to spread them? Had you succeeded, needless suffering and the cultural-intellectual changes that led to more freedom for any individual to live his or her life according to their plans instead of those of another (master, husband, church, government) could have happened much faster. The American Civil War and who knows how many other calamities and suffering could have been avoided. Something along these lines applies to this book and the dilemmas its authors face. Spreading Spencer-Menger-Mises-Hayek-friends’ ideas is similar to the above example, however, instead of attempting to explain today’s mainstream superior ideas to tribalistic myth-following slightly smarter apes in the past, we take and apply ideas that are currently ahead of our time and attempt to spread them among today’s dangerous slightly smarter apes who are as lost in mythology and dangerous as they were 300 years ago. If by our modern standards pretty much everything about how people saw the world 300 years ago could be rightly understood as mythology, why should we not be open to the idea that we are likewise immersed in mythology?
It should be easy to realize that all human beings are such slightly smarter apes who grow up absorbing a continuously evolving culture-language-”identity”-ideas-myths which then leads them to act in ways that lead to disorder via conflict-war, or order via peace and prosperity. As Mises tells us:
”It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales.”
When a lion takes over a pride and kills the cubs so that the females will once again be ready to mate, we don’t say that the lion is “evil”, we rightly understand the complex evolutionary factors leading to such actions. It is likewise important to look at our socioeconomic disasters using an evolutionary lens that is free of “blame” and full of sympathy and understanding. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Churchill, Roosevelt, Fauci, etc. were not “evil”, which is itself a mythical linguistic construct inherited from more religious times, they were fellow homo sapiens adored by their respective masses who absorbed horrendous ideas or myths propagated by scholars arising from the complexity of the economy as in the case of Socialism (Hitler-Lenin-Mao-Roosevelt-etc.), and the biochemical order as in the case of CovidMania and resulting coercive lockdowns and damaging vaccinations and more (Fauci). As Hayek tells us:
”It is necessary to realize that the sources of many of the most harmful agents in this world are often not evil men but high-minded idealists, and that in particular the foundations of totalitarian barbarism have been laid by honourable and well-meaning scholars who never recognized the offspring they produced.” (Hayek F. A., 1973, p. 70)
”Most people are still unwilling to face the most alarming lesson of modern history: that the greatest crimes of our time have been committed by governments that had the enthusiastic support of millions of people who were guided by moral impulses. It is simply not true that Hitler or Mussolini, Lenin or Stalin, appealed only to the worst instincts of their people: they also appealed to some of the feelings which also dominate contemporary democracies.” (Hayek F. A., 1976, p. 134)
The great war historian and senior editor of antiwar.com, Scott Horton, shared an Instagram quote that read:
”To get one to commit the greatest atrocities, you do not need to convince evil men to do evil. You need to convince good men to believe they are doing good. The best men I have ever met have done the worst things I have ever seen.” — US Marine.
Mises again:
”Neither as judges allotting praise and blame nor as avengers seeking out the guilty should we face the past. We seek truth, not guilt; we want to know how things came about to understand them, not to issue condemnations.”
The centuries of slavery, religious slaughters, persecution of minorities, Jew-Gentile misunderstandings and emerging disasters like WWII, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its numerous ramifications, and all man-made calamities were obviously the result, not of mythical “evil” or “madness”, but of the ideas and myths held by the slightly smarter apes at the time and the mistaken need to coerce each other, and as long as the masses remain lost in erroneous mythology, democracy obviously does little good. Hayek:
”Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.”
It is obvious that we should focus on the ideas instead of vilifying people and assuming sinister motives or madness as the source of our problems, yet the fact that this goes largely unnoticed as we constantly segregate ourselves along political-tribal lines is further evidence that we are such dangerous slightly smarter apes, and just as important, how little a role “reason” plays in creating and sustaining civilization. Focusing on the actions of individual men is irrelevant compared to the evolutionary processes that create the ideas, incentive structures and circumstances under which he acts. Without the above men’s evolutionary insights, as Spencer tells us:
”It is as though a child, seeing for the first time a tree from which a gardener is here cutting off a branch and there pruning away smaller parts, should regard the gardener, the only visible agent, as the creator of the whole structure: knowing nothing about the agency of sun and rain, air and soil. Undeveloped intelligences cannot recognize the results of slow, silent, invisible causes.”
Was the Catholic Priesthood which oppressed most Europeans for centuries the result of some conspiracy by various popes? Was Socialism-Communism also a nefarious conspiracy by Socialists? Of course not, these social growths were the understandable result of the myths held at the times.
