“Daring as it is to investigate the unknown, even more so
it is to question the known.” – Kaspar
It is my opinion that we must treat the West today as a
crime scene. The scene of the crime are the floors of legislative bodies and
the victims are the citizens whom the ruling elite seek to return to serfdom.
Our leaders are portraying the greatest improvement of the human condition as
the rape of the planet and the common person as the despoiler. Since for the first
time in human history all our governments have torn the same page out of a
hysterical dystopian playbook and are using it to forcibly confiscate our
freedoms and our wealth.
One of the purposes of the scientific method of inquiry is to provide a means by which we can analyze the smelly, little orthodoxies which contend for our soul. Given the fact that the principal motive of the political class is not to improve society despite all their assurances of promoting social progress - since any real progress is almost invariably a mere by-product of very few of their actions – but rather to increase their own hold on power, why do the ruled who are far greater in number, accept this state of tyranny? Machiavelli identified several contrivances employed by the ruling elite to increase their power including coercion, trickery, subterfuge, the collusion of crony capitalism amounting to fascism, and the self-serving reallocation of capital expropriated by excessive taxation and fiduciary easing. But none of these contrivances alone could affect cementing their rule nor would it permit them to sink their talons into every cloying aspect of society without the existence of an overarching fallacious narrative. Today this has resulted in the elite promoting quasi-religious radical and fanatical ideologies to advance their revolutionary agenda. Note the hysteria around climate change, COVID policies, and the smelly, petty-bourgeois orthodoxy of the DIE religion of diversity, inclusiveness, and equity.
As evolutionary psychologist Dr. Gad Saad asserts, “At the root of the DIE religion is the unflappable and irrational belief that societies must exhibit equality of outcomes on every possible human endeavor. When this cancerous objective is not met, it is presumed that the sole possible explanation is institutionalized bigotry. Of course, people with functioning brains recognize that most complex phenomena are multifactorial in their causes. In other words, a disparity in outcomes is likely caused by a large number of factors of which institutionalized bigotry might be absent from such a list. For the readers interested in the pernicious effects of the DIE religion and its attack on the meritocratic ethos, please read The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.”
And so we see how the elite have created an ideological
orthodoxy which cannot be questioned. In order to legitimize themselves the
governing class invariably rely on proliferating ideas favourable to their
objectives to convince the masses of the necessity of their rule, or as David
Hume wrote: “It is therefore on opinion that government is founded; and this
maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to
the most free and most popular.” - David Hume, Essays Moral, Political,
Literary. And this is how an ideologically possessed power mad political class
have used their revolutionary ideology so that it would become mainstream
orthodoxy in order to cement their control over us! And their orthodoxy smells
like shit!
Coordination Problem
'the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for
our souls'
By Peter Boettke
· University
Professor of Economics and Philosophy, George Mason University
· Director
of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and
Economics, Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Dr. Boettke writes, “The quote above comes from George
Orwell's essay on Charles Dickens.
Orwell describes a true liberal as a bold intellect that is equally
hated by all those 'smelly' orthodoxies of their day. A person of free intelligence who writes
openly and without fear and is generously angry with the prevailing falsehoods
of the day.
One of the gems from the James Buchanan archives is a 1982
paper of his that picks up on this Orwell theme and applies it to the
experiences he and his colleagues had to face in pursuing the public choice
research program in economics and political science. The essay is titled "The Dishwater of
Orthodoxies" and he claims that the orthodoxies he faced in methodology of
the social sciences, the method of analysis in the social and policy sciences,
and implications of that analysis for political economy and social philosophy
while not "smelly" was nevertheless dangerous. The reason why the orthodoxies he and his
colleagues faced didn't smell is because they weren't alive enough to stink,
the orthodoxies Buchanan faced were "dull, dead, drab, dirty." But as Buchanan is quick to point out, one
can drown in dishwater nevertheless.
It is the dull, dead, drab and dirty dishwater of social
scientific orthodoxy mid-20th century that had to be resisted, and effectively
drained away so that a new science of association among free and responsible
individuals could be developed. Those
who held as sacrosanct the efficacy of majoritian democracy or the necessary
efficiency of modern bureaucracy had to be disabused of such notions. This requires disruptive intellectuals. Those who are comfortable in their academic
life don't want to permit the methodological re-evaluation required. They resist change and seek to cast out the
heretic. But as Buchanan points out,
when the only recourse left is dismissive name-calling, that means the heretic
has won because the opposition is out of genuine argument.
"The genuine innovator-entrepreneur," Buchahan
writes, "who seeks to challenge, to stir up the dishwater of the
orthodoxy, must expect to counter resistance at every stage. At best, he and
his fellow [heretics] can hope to find academic settings that are temporarily
congenial to their efforts, settings that encourage those who dare to be
different."
The context of this essay is the last Liberty Fund
sponsored summer conference in Blacksburg, as Buchanan and his colleagues at
the Center for Study of Public Choice had recently decided to leave VPI and
relocate at GMU. There is a sort of
"edge" to the essay, but an edge that in the context makes perfect
sense, and as with Orwell's description of Dicken's Buchanan is being
generously angry and not at all gratuitously angry, and he is writing openly,
without fear, and embracing his responsibilities as a person of free
intelligence. This is the James Buchanan
I had as a teacher --- Dare to be Different --- was his motto to all of us, but
also he made us believe that our job wasn't either to ignore the dishwater let
alone to merely learn to swim in it, but instead to stir it up, and to unclog
the drain so it could be washed away.
As I read these various pieces from the Buchanan
collection, I am transported back in time to a young man in his early 20s
trying to figure out how to be a professional economist. How amazingly lucky was I that I had James
Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Kenneth Boulding to learn from?! Of course, my other teachers such as Bob
Tollison, Karen Vaughn, Viktor Vanberg, and of course my advisor Don Lavoie
taught me so much. But to have your professor win the Nobel Prize, and then to
have the AEA Distinguished Fellow and the 2nd John Bates Clark Medalist
reinforce the message that your job was to stir up the dishwater of the
orthodoxy and to unclog the drain and wash the dull, dead, drab and dirty water
away. We never wanted to be like
Harvard-MIT crowd because the Harvard-MIT crowd constituted the dishwater of
the orthodoxy.
I am not sure as a teacher I have been able to instill in
my students this same sense of urgency in challenging the prevailing orthodoxy
-- especially in more recent years as opposed to my earlier years at GMU and
with students from the period 1998-2005.
Post-2005, I often wonder if the practical advice about how to exist
within a profession defined by the dishwater has been taken as a lesson in
swimming rather than stirring things up.
If it has, that was a mistake.
Reading Buchanan inspires and reminds me of the sense of purpose he
instilled in us as students. Boulding,
as well, taught us about the sheer joy of learning and the urgency of the
problems we were attempting to tackle.
And Tullock, well Gordon, his great strength was to suggest complete
irreverence for anything established (or not established).”
I hope my students --- past, present, and future --- are
generously angry and willing to stir up the dishwater of the orthodoxy, and
unclog the drain and wash the dull, dead, drab and dirty away and substitute in
fresh thinking in methodology, methods of analysis, and bold implications for
political economy and social philosophy.
There are plenty of "smelly little orthodoxies which are now
contending for our souls" that must be challenged anew by mainline
economic thinkers.”, end quote
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