Smart Enough to Be Wrong

I was raised in two wildly different households. One was leftist, liberal, and progressive. The other was right-wing, conservative, and merit-based. My observations and anecdotes don’t come from a think tank or a poll. They come from decades of first-hand experience observing the archetypes, habits, mindsets, and personalities on both sides. I’ve experienced, up close, how the difference between entitlement and accountability plays out in real people’s lives, including my own.

Overall, progressives may seem very “smart” from the perspective of status quo credentialism. But they tend to lack experience where it matters most: history, economics, objectivity, incentives, genetics, unintended consequences, moral hierarchy.

The institutional progressive culture’s ideology is not a healthy path to governance. It’s the path we’ve seen so prevalent in today’s popular social hierarchy. A path full of loyalty tests, state machinery and ultimately, unbridled tyranny. History supplies the repeating and rhyming examples, but it is easily and sometimes wilfully forgotten.

“Never confuse education with intelligence. You can have a PhD and still be an idiot.”

~Richard P. Feynman

Fantasy Beliefs: Borders, “Oneness,” and the Guru Cycle

People who believe we are all One are the problem. People who believe countries don’t exist are the problem. People who believe in open borders are the problem. People who believe fantasies, every wind of doctrine, and who cycle through “gurus” almost daily are the problem.

For example, Malthus has been wrong for two hundred years, yet his ideas keep resurging despite the obvious failure of his predictions. Overpopulation is a myth. Net Zero is a futile exercise for fearful toddlers. In reality, humans are extremely resourceful when allowed to freely pursue solutions. We have hardly come close to scratching the surface of what is available and possible. Human ingenuity is the real hero.

High-trust societies say: “Hey, we’re experiencing a drought. Try to save water. Thank you. It’ll rain soon. Enjoy your weekend and let us know if you need any help putting up that new barn or shed.”

Low-trust societies say: “Watering is now banned. Fines will be issued for every overage. Recycling is mandatory. Permits are required for an ever-growing list of things people used to do without asking. Call the snitch line if you suspect a neighbor of anything.”

Same drought. The difference isn’t technology or wealth. It’s the trust that still exists in one place, and has been deliberately drained out of the other.

Watching the Mask Slip During Lockdown

There’s a lot of puffery online about smart people, educated people, and enlightened people. I’ve met a few in real life. They are the principled ones who see through the bullshit. The rest seem to be riding the coattails of narrative, marketing, and questionable authority.

When many of these characters finally showed who they really were during the lockdowns, I shut my door to them and locked it. It’s been liberating in ways that they can’t fathom, because they’re still slaves to the narrative to this day.

My problem with their collectivism is entirely about how they react. A healthy membership — not really collective, just contractual arrangements with low exit costs and high individual sovereignty — tends to respond to someone exiting the contract with congratulatory well-wishes and zero to little jealousy.

Contrast that with actual “collectives,” which project extreme reactions because of their fantastical claims of monopoly on meaning, identity, resources, or because their members have high sunk costs and nowhere else to go. You find this on both sides of the left-right paradigm. The reaction is the tell. This same problem shows up on more than one layer of social life.

“I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself…but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes.”

~Murray Rothbard

When Government Monopolizes, Alternatives Disappear

Governments do the same thing with entire industries. Once a government monopolizes something, like building roads, people come to see it as natural and necessary. After enough years of monopoly, alternatives become unthinkable to the masses. The pattern is everywhere: education, mail delivery, fire protection, policing, currency, licensing, air traffic, broadcasting, and more. What starts as “Government can assist” always ends as “Only government can.”

This “new” communism/socialism is the same as old communism/socialism. Changing the adjectives — “democratic,” “eco-,” “cyber-” — doesn’t modify the underlying DNA of the philosophy. People need to learn the hard way, I suppose. But let’s look at the record: the USSR, Maoist China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Eastern Bloc states. Every one of them came to power through a Marxist movement, using Marxist ideas about class and revolution as the explicit justification for seizing power and for the one-party state that followed.

There isn’t a single counter-example of a communist state that took power some other way. And these movements were Marxist by their own self-identification, not by outside attribution. Socialism and Marxism are entwined at the root. That’s not a wishful claim about what socialism must always be. It’s an accurate description of what actually happened, every time it happened.

“The struggle is still for freedom; the main facts are still economic; the arch-enemy is still the soft-headed idealist who refuses to face facts.”

~Max Eastman

Net Zero, Wildfires, and Performative Virtue

Another example of this kind of wishful thinking dressed up as authority is Net Zero. The practical response to fire seasons is not more sermons about Net Zero timelines. It’s more targeted fuel management, better rural incentives to keep land in productive use, and fewer legal and cultural barriers to controlled burns and thinning. Those measures work. Performative virtue does not. The same holds true for the climate change zeal held by the same performers.

So much selective authoritarianism dressed up as moral urgency dominates these cycles of “the latest-thing.” Covid compliance signaled in-group loyalty. Open-borders maximalism and anti-Western cultural relativism do the same. Hierarchical identity politics is guilty as well.

If we are to remain principled, freedom-loving individuals, we should keep limited government, open inquiry, and equal application of standards consistent, instead of getting tossed about by the wind and waves of in-group purity tests and marginal pet platforms.

Building the Parallel System

These past six years I have experienced what it is like to have profound conversations with some of the best minds in the world in epidemiology, public health, governance, economics, medicine, history, philosophy, et al. It’s like being in college again, only this time there is room to openly debate. 

Brownstone Institute has reminded so many of us what collegiality is all about. It’s not about scorekeeping, one-upmanship, or purity tests. It’s about dialogue, connection, and the ability to consider other ideas without cancelling the other person.

The through-line is simple. Credentialed intelligence without historical memory, economic realism, or respect for incentives produces ideology. Ideology produces loyalty tests. Loyalty tests produce low-trust societies and, eventually, tyranny. Human beings remain resourceful when they’re not smothered by sermons and snitch lines.

The institutions most of us once put faith in have failed. Those of us who recognize what has transpired from 2020 onward need to connect, organize and create competitive parallel systems. That’s the rational response when monopolies on meaning, education, expertise, and governance have revealed themselves for what they are.