by Daniel Klein

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Band-manRed on the Inside

• by Daniel Klein
• George Mason University
• dklein_at_gmu.edu

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Degovernmentalize now!

• Thats Bryans central message.
• How does that happen?
• Government has at least one important and
  necessary function
• Dismantling other governmental functions!
• Democracy the least bad system
• But why dont voters call for degovernmentalizatio
  n?

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The Hayekian Narrative

• The EEA gt Upper Paleolithic
• 10,000 years ago Agriculture, settled society,
• Rise of liberalism 1400-1900.
• Liberal heyday 1759-1863.
• Social Democratic Cultural Reaction1848-1970.
  Atavism Reassertion of stage 1.
• Liberalism shattered
• Cultural struggle ...

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Hayek texts

• Collectivism as atavistic
• The Atavism of Social Justice, New Studies in
  Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History
  of Ideas, 1978.
• Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol 2 The Mirage
  of Social Justice, 1976, esp The Discipline of
  Abstract Rules and the Emotions of Tribal
  Society.
• The Three Sources of Human Values, Epilogue to
  Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol 3 The
  Political Order of a Free People, 1979.
• The Fatal Conceit The Errors of Socialism, 1988,
  esp Between Instinct and Reason
• Essay on David Hume, in Studies volume, 1967.

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(No Transcript)
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The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation

• Our genes havent changed much in 10,000 yrs
• Small groups, 20-100 people
• An organization
• Some hierarchy in allocation (alpha male)
• But otherwise quite equal, consensus-oriented,
  democratic A gang
• Anybody can kill anybody.
• No growth, no trade with others

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Selected mentality (following Rubin)

• No appreciation of trade
• No conception of innovation or growth
• Resource access is zero-sum
• Envy and suspicion of consuming more than ones
  share
• No comprehension of consequences on modern scale

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Epistemic instincts of the small band

• I know everyone
• Everyone knows me
• No privacy
• Our alphas govern all
• Common experience
• Everyone knows THE WAY THINGS ARE. Common
  knowledge.

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Ethos of the small band

• Togetherness
• Belonging
• Encompassing sentiment, encompassing cooperation
• Social organism
• Solidarity
• Democratic
• Validation in the group
• Fit in or be visited by smack-down.
• Group survival depends on expelling the misfits.

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Intentionality makes an effect seen

• In the simple familiar society, social outcomes
  are intended or tolerated by the leader. Social
  outcomes are amenable to principles of justice.
• In organizations, actors usually achieve their
  intended goals. The intended is the seen.

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Encompassment is focal

• The coordination of sentiment would have
  encompassed all of those of any moral standing.
• Evolution may have selected for the yearning not
  merely for sympathy, for coordinated sentiment,
  but that it encompass all of the people.
• We was simple and unambiguous.
• People still carry a vestigial penchant for
  encompassment?

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Hayek

• The events to which the group could adapt
  itself, and the opportunities it could take
  advantage of, were only those of which its
  members were directly aware. Even worse the
  individual could do little of which others did
  not approve. (1978, 59)

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Hayek

• Mans instincts were adapted to life in the
  small roving bands or troops These genetically
  inherited instincts served to steer the
  cooperation of the members of the troop, a
  cooperation that was, necessarily, a narrowly
  circumscribed interaction of fellows known to and
  trusted by one another. These modes of
  coordination depended decisively on instincts of
  solidarity and altruisminstincts applying to
  members of ones own group but not to others.
  (1988, 11-12)

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Modern statism as atavism

• The whole of socialism is a result of that
  revival of primordial instincts. (1979, 169)
• Their demand for a just distribution in which
  organized power is to be used to allocate to each
  what he deserves, is thus strictly an atavism,
  based on primordial emotions. (1979, 165)

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Hayek

• The demand to restrict ones action to the
  deliberate pursuit of known and observable
  beneficial ends is in part a remnant of the
  instinctual, and cautious, micro-ethic of the
  small band, wherein jointly perceived purposes
  were directed to the visible needs of personally
  known comrades (i.e., solidarity and altruism).
  (1988, 80)

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Voluntary versus Political Romance
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Does TPR help explain history?

• The cycle of
• government-defined-group
• and
• group-finds-focal-points-in-government
• May help to explain ascension of collectivist
  notions around 1890. Sanctification of the
  democratic creed of popular sovereignty, and the
  genre and technology of The-World-is-Watching
  photographic journalism.
• Democracy and nationalism.

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Rise of liberalism

• Liberty a logic of property and consent
• Negative Like grammar, not like the rules for
  beautiful writing
• Like a great operating system

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Highlights of liberalism

• John Locke
• Scot. Enlight Hutcheson, Hume, Smith etc.
• The American founding, Paine, Mason, Jefferson
• American Abolitionists
• European 19th cent. liberals (many!)
• Social reform thru 19th century

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Liberalism and democracy

• It is today fairly generally recognized that the
  programme of nineteenth-century liberalism
  contained two distinct and in some ways even
  antagonistic elements, liberalism proper and the
  democratic tradition. The uneasy partnership
  which the two ideals kept during the nineteenth
  century should not lead us to overlook their
  different character and origin. (Essay on Hume,
  Studies, 120).

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Old Regime, Liberalism, and Social Democracy
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The Social Democratic Cultural Reaction The soft
version of the reversion

• Band-man loves society-as-organization, but he
  does not like hierarchy or dominance.
• How do they square the circle?

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Democracy de Tocqueville

• Our contemporaries are ever a prey to two
  conflicting passions they feel the need of
  guidance, and they long to stay free. Unable to
  wipe out these two contradictory instincts, they
  try to satisfy them both together. Their
  imagination conceives a government which is
  unitary, protective, and all-powerful, but
  elected by the people. Centralization is
  combined with the sovereignty of the people.
  That gives them a chance to relax. They console
  themselves for being under schoolmasters by
  thinking that they have chosen them themselves..
  Thus, citizens are turned alternatively into
  the playthings of the sovereign and into his
  masters, being greater than kings and less than
  men (694).

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Revolts against liberalism

• Rousseau
• Marx
• Romantic, nationalistic, conservative,
  socialist, and communist writers
• Social democrats, progressives

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The Mind of Band-man sees

RATHER THAN

• Society as
• Intentional order
• Or organization
• Ownership of the politys resources as
• Public or collective
• Society as proceeding on the basis of
• Common knowledge

• Society as
• Spontaneous order
• Ownership of the politys resources as
• Private
• individuated
• Society as proceeding on the basis of
• Disjointed knowledge

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The Mind of Band-man

RATHER THAN

• Yearns for
• The peoples romance
• Sees fairness in society as a matter of
• Social justice

• Yearns for.
• Club romance
• Sees fairness in society as a matter of
• Procedural or commutative justice

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Evolved instincts no longer applicable

• We have an evolved instinct for sweets.
• That instinct no longer applies.
• We learn to subdue it.
• We have Weight Watchers.
• We have evolved instincts for band ethos and
  mentality.
• Those instincts no longer applies.
• Do we learn to subdue them?
• (We need State Watchers.)

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Hayek

• It was the Rousseauesque idea of democracy, his
  still thoroughly rationalist conceptions of the
  social contract and of popular sovereignty, which
  were to submerge the ideals of liberty It was
  Rousseau and not Hume who fired the enthusiasm of
  the successive revolutions which created modern
  government on the Continent and guided the
  decline of the ideals of the older liberalism and
  the approach to totalitarian democracy in the
  whole world. (Essay on Hume, Studies, 120.)

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Hayek

• The traditional conception that the process of
  legislation was especially hedged about with all
  kinds of limitations was conceived to be a
  limitation only on the arbitrary powers of the
  sovereign. These controls and limitations seemed
  unnecessary once these powers had all been placed
  in the hands of the duly elected democratic
  assembly. And all the wisdom assembled over many
  centuries about the necessity of placing
  restrictions on the powers ultimate legislator
  was completely forgotten. Once this had been
  achieved, power had been put in the hands of the
  people and therefore it can no longer be abused.
  We are now certain that the self-interest of the
  people will not allow them to pass any laws which
  restrict their liberty. (Side A, FEE tape)

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Language subversion

• Schumpeter As a supreme if unintended
  compliment, the enemies of the system of private
  enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate
  its name. (1954, 394)
• Hayek speaks of that pseudo-liberalism which in
  the course of the last generation has arrogated
  the name. He describes their thinking as
  profoundly antiliberal. (1976, 44)

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The subversion of liberal semantics

• The language changers were explicit and conscious
  about it. New Freedom, New Liberalism.
• The true liberals were very conscious and
  disturbed.

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Undermining of language

• Confucius (as dubiously quoted by Hayek)
• When words lose their meaning
• people lose their liberty.

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Subverted words

• Freedom
• Liberty
• Liberalism
• Justice
• Rights
• Law
• Rule of law
• Equity
• Equality
• Property
• Contract

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Example justice
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Social justice

• Homelessness is a growing social injustice in
  the United States.
• Doesnt work as a system of justice.

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Managing our instincts

• Our genetic inheritance is all we have to work
  with.
• The expression of an instinct is atavistic only
  if it doesnt fit the modern context.
• UP WITH
• Private, voluntary communion
• Private, voluntary solidarity
• Private, voluntary distributive justice

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Managing our instincts

• Learn to accept and appreciate
• Disjointed knowledge
• Unintended consequences
• Commutative justice
• Private ownership
• Spontaneous order
• Learn to be wary of
• The peoples romance
• Social justice

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The end

• Thank you for your attention.