Written in 1988, THE FATAL CONCEIT is a summary of the economic and political arguments made in the life of its author, F. A. Hayek. I am reading an early printing, the University of Chicago Press published this as THE COLLECTED WORKS OF F. A. HAYEK, VOLUME 1. The attempt was not petty because the scope is so vast, dropping back to magical powers which preceded economics in Appendix G for "a remarkable little study by Sir James Frazer (1909) -- PSYCHE'S TASK" (p. 157) on "Superstition and the Preservation of Tradition" to emphasize "the effect of tabooing a thing." (p. 157). This book is torn from its roots mainly by the times in which it was written, in which it is merely an example of rhetoric as an intellectual discipline that has disappeared as politics has slid to a level that assumes a micro-order no bigger than a box or a flat screen in at least one room of each house in those areas which consider themselves part of the civilized world.
This book is a spirited defense of capitalism as an extended economic order. Hayek is utterly convinced that a close look at history shows that a strong government is more likely to stifle than to promote the efforts of those who could produce productive economic activity by following the rules which economics ought to provide for those with great wealth. The main argument, for me, of THE FATAL CONCEIT is about morality, which is primarily avoided by modern people functioning mainly as spectators concerned with the behavior of human beings who have previously inhabited a world in which people had contact with each other. Attempting to apply the lessons of this book is sure to be ironic in a comic society, in which those who are highest in the public eye merit the lowest form of treatment. For example, the comedy channel on television is ready to ridicule any individual who has no way to escape from whatever comic role our entertainment values have assigned to people in positions of interest, while the audience is supposed to be too complacent to think that they can do anything about what they see. The comedians who ape stupidity are filling in for furiously planning activists of the world, who are blatantly called intellectuals in this book, as in:
"Intellectuals may of course claim to have invented new and better `social' morals that will accomplish just this, but these `new' rules represent a recidivism to the morals of the primitive micro-order, and can hardly maintain the life and health of the billions supported by the macro-order." (p. 75).
Hayek was living in Freiburg im Breisgau in April 1988 when he penned the Preface on page 5, stating "There were to be no footnotes" and he was right until page 24, where the editor furnished information to support the text: "Not only is the idea of evolution older in the humanities and social sciences than in the natural sciences, I would even be prepared to argue that Darwin got the basic ideas of evolution from economics." For Hayek, analogous laws, mechanisms, modalities and "cultural development rests on such inheritance -- characteristics in the form of rules guiding the mutual relations among individuals" (p. 25) that make sense, in the context of group selection compared to biological evolution. "Despite such differences, all evolution, cultural as well as biological, is a process of continuous adaptation to unforeseen events, to contingent circumstances which could not have been forecast. This is another reason why evolutionary theory can never put us in the position of rationally predicting and controlling future evolution." (p. 25).
Having established that the small group environments of hundreds of thousands of years ago established instinctual loyalties that are more ontogenetic than phylogenetic in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 starts with a section on "Freedom and the Extended Order" (p. 29) which starts history with "So far as we know, the Mediterranean region was the first to see the acceptance of a person's right to dispose over a recognized private domain, thus allowing individuals to develop a dense network of commercial relationships among different communities." (p. 29). Hayek gave us no reason to suppose that he was thinking of drastic climate change when he wrote in Chapter 3, "Indeed, it will perhaps not be long before even Antarctica will enable miners to earn an ample living. To an observer from space, this covering of the earth's surface, with the increasingly changing appearance that it wrought, might seem like an organic growth. But it was no such thing: it was accomplished by individuals following not instinctual demands but traditional customs and rules." (p. 43).
Billions of people imply a lot more survival problems than anyone can think for, as President Woodrow Wilson discovered, or maybe died trying, sometime after the Great War, and Hayek is only going to provide support for anyone who is primarily interested in economic activity. On a philosophical level, the most interesting thing about THE FATAL CONCEIT might be the charge of immorality on a theoretical level concerning Keynes, an intellectual opponent of Hayek, who is identified as "self-proclaimed `immoralists' such as Keynes" (p. 67) due to "his general belief in a management of the market order, on the ground that `in the long run we are all dead' (i.e., it does not matter what long-range damage we do; it is the present moment alone, the short run -- consisting of public opinion, demands, votes, and all the stuff and bribes of demagoguery -- which counts)." (p. 57). Television makes a superficial effort to keep people informed of major political issues, but, with even less awareness than economists exhibit of anything beyond the present moment, "is also a characteristic manifestation of an unwillingness to recognize that morals are concerned with effects in the long run -- effects beyond our possible perception -- and of a tendency to spurn the learnt discipline of the long view." (p. 57).
Update for 2013, when I can read my own copy --
Follow the trail of the thug mob (buy the bullet in the first verse).
The reelection in 2012 of the Hey Joe political figure in the White House is the antichrist of all the reasons Jimi Hendrix and 28 Black Panthers were killed in and around 1970. Jimi Hendrix had been shaped by mob control of the music business so hit records could make money for the mob. If Jimi made $50,000 for a concert, $40,000 for his manager came out of Jimi's share. He had signed so many contracts when we wanted to be on his own in the music business that many powerful interest could keep him from getting money like he was a little kid. By 1970 he wanted to be able to play any music he liked and he was wasting so much studio time making tapes nobody was buying that his manager had no further way to profit from a black rock god packaged for white audiences.
It has been over 48 years since the election which was supposed to matter the most for me before I could vote in 1964, when LBJ used the idea of a great society to paper over the kind of numbers racket that scum were reduced to in The Autobiography of Malcolm X because a large segment of society was frozen out by laws and crop eradication of the things Nietzsche and Freud would know about. The kind of economic exchange envisioned by Hayek was subject to government control like Ezra 9:11and12 so only the privileged would have an inheritance to provide their children. Hayek's discussion of The Philosopher's Blindness mentions Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as adopted by the Roman Catholic Church for a condemnation of grab oxen for the benefit of more powerful people sitting on their asses with popular support.
Austrian economics reminds me of Vienna and Berlin in Jane Fonda's movie Julia. The defenestration of socialist thinkers and the most important witness to what happened the night Jimi Hendrix died, like the fatwa death sentences that have been the mark on Salman Rushdie since 1989 (I'm sure some translator of The Satanic Verses was killed) could also spring from Ezra 9:11-12 as described by Hayek:
The anti-commercial attitude of the mediaeval and early modern
church, condemnation of interest as usury,
its teaching of the just price,
and its contemporary treatment of gain
is Aristotelian through and through. (p. 47).
Hayek's discussion of Marginal Utility starting on page 94 establishes that no absolute values exist in a system based on:
Economic value expresses changing degrees
of the capacity of things to satisfy some
of the multiplicity of separate, individual scales of ends. (p. 95).
The idea that government can freeze spending by building a capacity to assert stop*or*I'll*shoot when the original funding scheme gets to a bisexual financial transition stage for money that has already been spent can no longer apply to people who will not be your fool.
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