A Few Observations on Misanthropy

How many ideologies, world views, philosophies, theologies have some element of misanthropy underlying them? Why is that? Why is it so common? This element of so much thought is the source of so much evil in the world. Why does it constantly recur?

There was a time when socialists truly believed that socialism was a more efficient way of organizing the economy. However, since it was definitively proven otherwise, socialists no longer use economic arguments, and rather use arguments of fairness. More, they insist that everyone conform to their values. They think that people who have made free choices are nevertheless exploited. This suggests that these people are stupid, dupes. Anyone who thinks others are victims when they are in the position they are in due to their own free choices has a low opinion of those people. That is misanthropy.

Regulators -- including those who favor minimum wage laws -- think that people are otherwise too stupid, too rotten, too gullible to be left to their own devices. That is misanthropy.

Welfare statists think that unless the government takes care of you, you will die in the streets, so stupid, selfish, and incompetent you are. That is misanthropy.

Regulators of personal behavior -- formerly only associated with social conservatives, but increasingly associated with progressives as well -- think that you cannot make good choices for yourself, in your own private life. You have to have someone to make you live right, or else you will only ever do evil. That is misanthropy.

Anyone who thinks that without legislation, we will only ever do evil to each other, is a misanthropist.

Anyone who thinks that people are basically evil is a misanthropist. 

Anyone who "loves mankind," but then hates particular people because they never meet that person's ideals, is a misanthropist.

Anyone who thinks others to be incompetent, evil, or needing to be reformed just because they don't share their particular values or value rankings is a misanthropist.

Anyone who wants to control some one or some group holds that person or people in contempt. They are misanthropists. If you support government regulation, you want to control people. When you support welfare, you think people incompetent to live their lives and make good choices. You want to regulate people into supporting your values. That is dehumanizing, tribalistic, misanthropic. 
 

If you want to reform humanity, if you want to try to make everyone conform to your world view, if you want to re-educate people to fit your mold, if you want to "improve" mankind, then you hate mankind -- you are a misanthropist.

If you think your group is better than another group, you are a misanthropists. Indeed, this is the true source of misanthropy -- tribalism drives it -- tribalists see their group as good, human the other as evil, subhuman. In our global humanity, collectivism of this sort, derived from tribalism, is the source of misanthropy. This is the source of the idea that there ought to be a rule of the best -- aristocracy -- to rule those who cannot rule themselves. Of course, if you think others cannot rule themselves, you hold those people to be lower than you, you pity them. You only pity those you hold in contempt. Pity and compassion/sympathy are quite different. Pity is aristocratic and misanthropic; compassion/sympathy is equalitarian and philanthropic. 

The true philanthropist loves people for who they are, respects people for who they are, believes people to be competent to act and decide for themselves, embraces people in their true diversity -- even while rejecting misanthropy and misanthropic ideologies, world views, and philosophies.

I Find It Odd . . .

I find it odd that when I argue that nobody -- including me -- can know enough to control the economy, or even to create regulations the true outcomes of which we can know, that the people who think they can have such knowledge accuse me of arrogance.

I find it odd that there are people who really think that if you give people power and weapons that they won't use them against you, to force you to live as they wish, and become corrupt.

I find it odd that there are people who think that what is immoral/unjust for one person to do is moral/just for a group of people to do, so long as that group of people call themselves a government.

I find it odd that there are people who simultaneously think everyone ought to conform to their values and think they in any way support diversity.

I find it odd that people who support creationism in biology and cosmology often support evolution in economics, while many who support evolution in biology and cosmology often support creationism or intelligent design in economics and other areas of society.

I find it odd that support of an evolutionary, self-organizing network process view of society is seen as ideological and utopian, but an evolutionary, self-organizing network process of nature is seen by the same people as scientific.

Empathy, Moral Judgment, and Utilitarianism

There is more evidence that empathy plays a key role in making non-utilitarian moral judgments. This would seem to have two implications. One is that the more empathy one has, the lower one's utilitarian judgment, which may explain some aspects of libertarian vs. non-libertarian moral judgments, with libertarians tending to be more economically-literate utilitarians. (On the other side is Peter Singer's leftist utilitarianism -- with all the (in)famous conclusions that stem from it, which all become abundantly clear once you see how low in empathy he must be to be a utilitarian.) But it also explains why those who read a great deal of literature tend toward less utilitarian conclusions, even faced with economic facts.

I have argued that we should read more literature to become more empathetic to become more moral. It may seem odd, then, for a libertarian like myself to argue we need to read more literature. The above would seem to argue against reading literature and for reading economics books. However, as useful as utilitarianism is in economics, it's pretty much useless for face-to-face morality. How I should treat other people is not a utilitarian calculation. It's a moral judgment. And the more literature we read, the more kinds of people we learn to empathize with, and the better our moral judgments. We need both to live in the complex civil society in which we live.

Why Is There No Milton Friedman Today?

Econ Journal Watch asks Why Is There No Milton Friedman Today? That is, why are there no superstars of economics? One could perhaps ask the same things of a number of a number of fields. The sciences, including the social sciences, go through periods of "normal science" and periods of "revolutionary science." Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Paul Samuelson, J.M. Keynes, Mises, et al were of the generation of economics' revolutionary period. We have perhaps settled into the "normal science" era of economics.

We see this same thing in philosophy, with times of revolutionary creativity followed by scholasticism. We are clearly in the latter period in philosophy as well. And the same thing takes place in the arts. We went from the creativity of high modernism to the relative stagnation of postmodernism.

In each case, we see a transition from relative stability, as people work on the well-established problems, working out the details on the margins. But when people reach a certain point, where the models are no longer working to describe the world well, we get revolutionary periods, during which time we get the giants of the field. Milton Friedman was one such person, born and working at the right time.

Basically, this is a network effect. We expect this kind of punctuated equilibrium when there is a network.

References to My Work in Other Works

My article on "Egypt's Revolution and Higher Education" has been cited in a scholarly article, Daniel LaGraffe's "The Youth Bulge in Egypt: An Intersection of Demographics, Security, and the Arab Spring" in the Journal of Strategic Security. It has also been cited in Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East by Asef Bayat.

My more recent Pope Center piece, "Scientists and Engineers Need Literature" has been reposted at FreeThinkU.

"From Trivium to Trivality" was cited and commented upon at Community College Spotlight and ArmyEdSpace.

I'm still waiting to see my actual academic papers cited in academic papers, but I can't complain about my Pope Center pieces being so cited.

Spontaneous Orders are Naturally Occurring Processes

Humans discover far more than they invent. When we participate in spontaneous social orders, we participate in the discovery of knowledge, morals, and wisdom. But it very much goes against our arrogance as a species to admit that we are less inventors than discoverers. Humans did not invent property rights, markets, language, or morals. Rather, we have instincts for those things, which socially evolve in spontaneous orders.

As entrepreneurs, humans discover new ways of doing things that are more efficient and less expensive.

As scientists, humans discover the laws of science.

As participants in common law, we discover new laws (as legislators, humans invent legislation -- much of which is in direct violation of discovered common law). It is notable that discovered law abides by rule of law and equality under the law.

As participants in the moral order, we discover new morals. Indeed, morals are rooted in our sentiments (they are instinctual); at the same time, it is evidence our morals evolve over time. One can thus argue that morality is a discovery process, that we discover new morals, and, thus, expand our moral worlds.

We could not learn morals if we did not have a moral instinct. We could not teach morals if those we taught did not have a moral instinct. (Sociopaths are evidence of this.) If we did not have moral instincts (built in empathy and sympathy and a sense of justice), we could not have invented them. How would we know to? How would we know that the good is good to have?

The same is true of common law -- built as it is on our instinctual sense of justice and fairness. Legislation is merely the rigidification of law. It is legislators coming along and taking credit for what has already been discovered through common law (that is, for just legislation -- there is plenty of cronyist legislation which violates common law, equality under the law, and rule of law).

Free market economies are naturally occurring systems emergent from natural human interactions. The same is true of science, most of our institutions (property rights, family, etc.), morals, philosophy, religion, the arts and literature, technological innovation (the specific technologies are invented, but we have an instinct to invent, and we have a social order that rewards invention -- and not just economically), money, etc. The opposition to spontaneous social orders like market economies comes form the same psychological source as opposition to biological evolution and cosmological evolution. Humans evolved to associate order with an orderer. Theological creationists and intelligent designers think this is true of cosmological and biological evolution; social creationists and intelligent designers (who are oddly often a-theological) think this is true of social evolution.

Order requires a hands-on orderer, according to standard human psychology. This is why the fight to get widespread acceptance for evolutionary processes -- whether physical, biological, psychological, or social -- is ongoing.

Weak Bonds Make Spontaneous Orders Possible

In order for a spontaneous order to emerge, there has to be a predominance of weak social links over strong social links (of family, tribe, etc.). Randall Collins in The Sociology of Philosophies notes that studies show

that creative persons have a strong desire to make their own judgments; this in turn is typically related to childhood opportunities for independence and novel experience. Often too there is a period of physical or social isolation in which these young persons become introduced to a vicarious community of the mind. Their IR [Interaction Ritual] chains become detached from the local circulation of mundane culture and from its pressures for local conformity. The lowering of ritual density is a prerequisite for innovation; but it must also be linked to the intermittent support of the rituals of intellectual communities to give it content and energy. (34)

 That is, the creation of weak links allow one to participate in a particular spontaneous order. Much of what Collins says above could be equally applied to participation in a number of other spontaneous orders, from philosophy to technology, from markets to art. Naturally, different emotional energies, cultural capital, and interaction rituals are at play in other orders -- but that's precisely why we need to understand each kind in its own terms.

Society Does Not Decide

One often hears the phrase "society decides," but among metaphors, this has to be one of the worst -- and most damaging. The reason for this is that "society" is not capable of making a decision. To be able to make a decision, you have to be able to choose among options, and society cannot choose any more than it can decide. To be able to choose and decide, one has to be able to have goals. That means the chooser/decider has to be a teleological entity. This would include any living being, with those having complex neural structures being able to make more complex choices and decisions. Humans, having the most complex neutral networks, are able to make the most complex choices and decisions.

"Society," however, is not a teleological entity. Social processes are ateleological. They do not have goals, make decisions, or choose anything. In this sense it is utter nonsense to say that "society decides" anything.

The reason this is important is that ideas like "market failure" are premised on the idea that the market is failing to provide something that "society decides" is important, but which no individual would be willing to pay for. Thus, the market is not acting optimally (according to equilibrium theory). The argument is that since such sub-optimal products exist which people need, but which nobody would pay for, government needs to step in and provide what "society decides" it, as a whole, needs. This gets us closer to understanding what is really meant when someone says "society decides" something.

What is really meant by "society decides" is "a democratic majority agrees" about a certain outcome. But democratic decision-making is hardly appropriate for a variety of social processes. If by "society," one means a democratic majority, then any number of market products produced for a minority market would be sub-optimal. After all, the raw materials that go into a product produced for a minority market could have gone into another being produced for a majority market. And competition for raw materials drives up prices, meaning products produced for minority markets drive up the price of products for majority markets.

But what is suboptimal at one time may be optimal at another, later, time -- when prices drop. Cell phones are a good example. "Society" did not want cell phones in the 1980s, when they first came out and were extremely expensive, but "society" certainly does now that they are cheap (and are literally tiny pocket computers). But "society" would not have had the cell phones we have now if "optimality" was at all at play at the level of society. The last thing we need to be worried about is optimal outcomes for society -- especially given the fact that real economies are not at equilibrium, but are in far-from-equilibrium states.

Markets do not fail, because 1) market failure is premised on the fact that an unrealistic equilibrium model does not match the far-from-equilibrium economic reality, and 2) society cannot decide anything. Even if we accept "society" meaning "majority," the market is not a democratic process in that way -- it is far, far better insofar as minorities are able to get what they want every bit as much as can the majorities in society. When "society decides," it is minorities of every imaginable kind who suffer. This is true even though society does not and cannot ever decide anything; it is true so long as people continue to believe that society does and can decide, because the same kinds of bad decisions are being made based on the belief that it can. Who is it making those decisions? Since it cannot be society, it has to be some self-appointed spokesman, who inevitably finds that society always decides whatever HE would decide.