정규재, 무리수 / 벤쿠버 교민, 나무라다 [공병호TV]
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공수처가 공포의 수사처가 될 듯하다.
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https://youtu.be/PICWMtjdfcs
Scott 인간과 자유이야기
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US: Man claiming to be BLM member forces woman to get on her knees and apologize for her “white privilege” (VIDEO)
블랙 라이브 매터 운동원이 백인 여자를 무릎 끓게 하고, 백인 특권에 대해 사과하게 하는 비디오,
폭력과 야만 앞에 무너져버린 문명.
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[국제정치] 美中 언론의 '연계 현황' 집중분석//U.S.-China media conflict on truth and trust
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"김정은 건강이상 '설'이 아닌 '팩트'" [강철환TV]
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친애하는 동포 여러분
생명이 꺼져가는 마지막 소멸의 기점에서
역사의 증언을 남기고자 이 글을 남깁니다
역사의 증언을 남기고자 이 글을 남깁니다
역사란 흑백으로는 판단할 수 없는 회색과 회색의 혼돈으로
저는 시대와 마주하여 그 시대를 극복하고자 부단히 애썼습니다
저는 시대와 마주하여 그 시대를 극복하고자 부단히 애썼습니다
왕조를 섬기고 백성을 위하는 것은
일국의 재상으로서 도달해야할 최종 과업이었습니다.
본인은 그 숙명을 전력으로 짊어졌습니다
일국의 재상으로서 도달해야할 최종 과업이었습니다.
본인은 그 숙명을 전력으로 짊어졌습니다
시대와 정세가 한국의 자존독립을 미몽으로 만들고
가느다란 빛 한줄기 마저 비춰주지 않을 때
모든 걸 다 포기하고 고향으로 돌아가
여생을 보내고 싶은 마음이 왜 없었겠습니까
가느다란 빛 한줄기 마저 비춰주지 않을 때
모든 걸 다 포기하고 고향으로 돌아가
여생을 보내고 싶은 마음이 왜 없었겠습니까
하루에도 수백번 모든 걸 포기하고 도망가고 싶었지만
신민의 복리증진과 왕조의 존엄을 못본척하는 것이
어찌 일국 총리대신으로서의 올바른 처신이 되겠나이까
신민의 복리증진과 왕조의 존엄을 못본척하는 것이
어찌 일국 총리대신으로서의 올바른 처신이 되겠나이까
몸에 맞지 않은 옷이었으나 입어야했고 하기 싫은 일이었으나 했어야했습니다
그들의 영악한 주둥이에 대가리를 들이밀고서라도
나라의 발전과 식산흥업, 공업의 발달, 정세의 안정을 꾀하고
문명 개화 통치의 길로 나아가게 함이 맞다고,
그리할 수밖에 없다고 이 외줄타기같은 국제열강의 무리앞에서
저는 황제의 윤허를 얻어 합방을 할 수 밖에 없었나이다
나라의 발전과 식산흥업, 공업의 발달, 정세의 안정을 꾀하고
문명 개화 통치의 길로 나아가게 함이 맞다고,
그리할 수밖에 없다고 이 외줄타기같은 국제열강의 무리앞에서
저는 황제의 윤허를 얻어 합방을 할 수 밖에 없었나이다
그 후 수십년 이 조선 땅에 철마가 달리고
서구의 이코노미라고 하는 경세제민의 부흥이
이 땅을 채우며 조선인을 더 똑똑하게
더 강하게 세계인으로서 설 수 있게 하였나이다
서구의 이코노미라고 하는 경세제민의 부흥이
이 땅을 채우며 조선인을 더 똑똑하게
더 강하게 세계인으로서 설 수 있게 하였나이다
그러나 그 모든 문명개화를 뒤로하고 결국 나는 매국노요 망국의 재상입니다.
변명은 하지 않겠습니다
변명은 하지 않겠습니다
사랑하는 조선 동포여, 이 매국노의 무덤에 침을 뱉고
조선의 앞길을 밝혀준다면 저승에서 나는 덩실덩실 춤을 추겠습니다
조선의 앞길을 밝혀준다면 저승에서 나는 덩실덩실 춤을 추겠습니다
- 이완용(1858.07.11~1926.02.11) -
일베
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주호영 "33년 전처럼 오늘 '文 정권 몰락의 길'로 기록될 것"
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중국 사는 게이인데 지금 중국 상황이 매우 심각하다
해외 기업들이 중국에 대한 투자를 줄이고, 핵심 기술 수출, 핵심기술 이전을 거부중
홍콩 보안법이후 해외에서의 견제가 더 강해지는중
현재 미국, 영국, 일본, 호주, 인도, 캐나다는 완전히 중국하고 반대 진영으로 돌아섬
아마 독일, 프랑스, 한국도 결국에는 돌아설 것으로 예상
마치 청나라 말기에, 선진 제국주의 연합국이 청나라를 공격하던 상황하고 비슷하게 흘러감
2. 코로나 바이러스
베이징에서 다시 바이러스가 발생하고
중국 공산당 통계를 믿을 수 없기에
바이러스가 종식 됐는지 알 수가 없음
그리고 이제 중국에서 코로나 바이러스 피해가 거의 없다고 쳐도
코로나 바이러스 때문에 전세계가 중국을 증오하고 있고
중국산 제품에 대한 신뢰도가 폭락, 중국의 국가이미지도 폭망
코로나가 때문에 생긴, 중국 국가 이미지 폭락의 금전적인 가치는 얼마일지
3. 대홍수
이미 대홍수로 1000만명이 넘는 수해자가 발생했고
산샤댐 붕괴설까지 중국에서 떠도는중
중국의 권위있는 전문가가 SNS에 의미심장한 글을 남기고
(후에 자기가 올린게 아니라고 해명하긴 했지만)
중국 전문가들의 카톡내용이 공개되면서
불안감이 더 커지는중
4. 중국 공산당 내부에서 분열
시진핑하고 리커창의 치열한 권력대결이 벌어지는중
시진핑이 중국몽을 외치고, 샤오캉 사회를 건설했다고 공언한 다음날에
리커창이 6억 인민 월급이 13만원 발언
시진핑이 노점상 강제 철거 하니까
리커창이 노점상이 10만 일자리 창출 발언
2022년 3월이 시진핑 대선인데, 그때 피튀기는 전쟁이 벌어질듯
제2의 보시라이 사건이 벌어지거나, 갑자기 누가 죽을지도
5. 중국내부에서 돌고 있는 유언비어
제갈량의 '마전과'라는 예언서가 중국에서 떠돌고 있음
마전과는 과거 명나라, 청나라, 중화민국의 멸망을 예언하고, 맞췄으며
이제 곧 중국 공산당이 멸망한다는 예언이 남아있음
자세한 내용은 인터넷에 검색해보면 많이 나옴 / 일베
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
For popular books, read the text, not the footnotes.
For scholarly books, read the footnotes, not the text.
For social science books, read neither text nor footnote.
탈레브의 책 읽는 방법
대중적인 책은 본문만 읽고 각주는 읽지 말라.
학술서는 각주를 읽고 본문은 생략한다.
사회과학 서적은 본문도 각주도 읽지 않는다.
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반자본주의 크리스천 경제학자들이 오해하는 것
미국의 기독교 계통의 대학에서는 좌파 고등교육기관에서와 마찬가지로 자유시장에 대한 적대감이 대단하다.
1930년대에 미국 장로교회가 분열되었을 때, 리버럴(성서 속의 예수의 기록에 의문을 제기한 파벌)들은 그들의 목적은 사회의 개선에 집중되어야 한다고 믿었는데, 거기에는 가난한 이들을 돕는 일도 포함되었다. 후에 그들은 사회적 복음을 추구하고 결국 세속적 진보주의를 추종한 파벌과, 기독교 근본주의를 선택한 파벌로 양분되었다.
1970년대에 사회적 행동을 주장한 이스턴 칼리지의 역사학자 로날드 사이더는 <배고픔의 시대에 가난한 크리스천>이란 책을 써서, 제3세계의 가난의 원인은 미국과 서유럽이 세계의 자원을 부당하게 독점하기 때문이라고 성토했다.
책은 단순한 흑백 논리로 부자들은 가난한 사람들의 것을 훔쳐서 부자가 된 거라는 세계관을 크리스천들에게 주입했다.
하지만 그후에 소련과 위성국가들이 몰락하고 중국 역시 모택동의 사회주의에서 해방되어 자유시장 경제를 추구하기 시작했고, 세계 인구는 증가하는데 사이더 등의 주장과는 달리 가난은 증가하지 않았다.
What Anticapitalist Christian Economists Get Wrong
William L. Anderson
Almost any economist who has taught at a Christian college or operates in Christian academic circles has been asked the question, “What about the poor?” Most of the time, people ask the question in the spirit of dismissing any view of economics that favors free markets. Although there are a few Christian colleges where at least the economics faculty might look favorably upon a market economy, the hostility toward free markets is as strong at most Christian colleges as it is in the most left-wing institutions of higher learning.
In the first (and last) meeting I attended of the Association of Christian Economists in 2001, the session was dominated by a panel discussion of hard-left economists who sought to “practice shalom” in their communities in outreaches toward poor people in their area. At one point in the session, the economists all enthusiastically agreed that because of free markets, poverty in the United States had been rapidly increasing, which made it “necessary for the government to step in” with the antipoverty programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative.
That poverty rates were increasing in the USA in the post–World War II era is patently untrue, even if Christian economists swear fealty to such a belief. Indeed, poverty rates were falling rapidly long before Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and the numbers bear out that claim, but these economists stuck to the narrative that the state must forever be rescuing the poor from the hellish existence of free enterprise.
All of this might come as a surprise to people who think of evangelical Christians as being politically conservative (certainly, many, but not all, are politically conservative), and certainly evangelicals have been one of the most important and reliable political bases for the Republican Party since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. That should not be surprising given the absolutist stand by the Democratic Party on issues like gay and transgender rights and the availability of abortion on demand, issues that evangelicals who hold to the authority of the Bible deem to be important.
However, on economics, many evangelicals, while rejecting outright socialism, also have a hard time accepting free market economics and often call for a “third way” to economic life. Because of my experience teaching in Christian colleges, I believe I understand the source of the discontent: the very nature of economics, scarcity, and tradeoffs, which are fundamental to economic thinking.
In a recent Mises Wire article, I wrote that economists often are accused of being indifferent about social problems because they tend to look to reduce harm, as opposed to eliminating it (and risk) altogether. As one who has lived all of my sixty-plus years being part of evangelical circles, I recognize the cognitive dissonance that many evangelicals have when it comes to dealing with issues that have a “right or wrong” component and how to deal with them.
Take the drug war, for example. Most evangelicals I know believe that not only are drugs like heroin or marijuana bad, but that putting them into one’s body is a sinful act. (Evangelicals are more split on consumption of alcohol, and there still runs a strong prohibitionist streak in their ranks.) Thus, in their minds, if something is sinful, then it also should be illegal, and if it is illegal, then laws against taking drugs should be enforced to the maximum. If people refuse to obey the drug laws, evangelical Christians reason, then the state is justified in using maximum force, since drugs are bad, harm people, and their consumption violates the law of God and inflicts harm upon society.
For example, I have an influential Christian friend who believes free markets are good but that drugs are bad. He also believes the biblical admonition that the law “is a teacher,” so if the law says not to take certain drugs, then the law is engaged in biblical teaching and police and the courts need to enforce it. That the drug war itself has caused huge social harm, empowered the police to engage in violent acts, and has wreaked havoc in many communities is irrelevant; drugs are bad, and if people would be more virtuous and not take them, then there would be no police violence.
(I would be remiss to ignore the influence of Laurence Vance, a libertarian evangelical Christian who has been a loud—and often lonely—voice against the drug war, at least in Christian circles. While some have accused Vance of favoring drug use, he clearly draws the line between using drugs and advocating for their prohibition, and any accusation otherwise is false.)
In my recent article, I led off with a Henry Hazlitt quote from Economics in One Lesson that tends to separate economic thinking from the unambiguous views that people often have on many issues, and evangelicals certainly are among those who see much of the world in black and white. Hazlitt wrote:
The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
Many evangelicals take strong stands not only against the use of drugs, but also see the presence of poverty as a social injustice that needs to be righted. Now. This was not always the case, at least among people who held to the Bible as being inerrant truth. When the major splits in the Presbyterian Church came about in the 1930s, for example, the “liberals” (those who questioned the biblical accounts of Jesus and who doubted the authority of the scriptures) believed that their main focus should be on improving society, and that included helping poor people. However, because private enterprise, with its emphasis upon profitability, in their view was the cause of social and economic inequality, they turned either to socialism or to the welfare state as the “solution” that would most please God (if they actually believed in God).
Ultimately, there was a split between those who followed what Walter Rauschenbusch called the “social gospel” (from his book written in the 1890s), which emphasized secular progressivism (and later social activism) as the true path of Christianity, and those who called themselves Christian fundamentalists and chose to emphasize a spiritual side of Christianity that concentrated upon conversions to the faith. Not surprisingly, the mainstream Protestants who push the social gospel also gravitated toward progressivism and ultimately socialism, while the fundamentalists (and later the evangelicals) stayed mostly out of political and social disputes.
That would change in the early 1970s as a number of evangelicals tied to the Anabaptist movements and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship began to agitate for what they called “social action.” One of the leaders of this movement was an Eastern College history professor, Ronald Sider, who wrote Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (published by InterVarsity Press [IVP] in 1977), and the book had a major influence in evangelical circles and especially at Christian colleges, where professors quickly adopted it for their classes, and it became the best-selling book in IVP history.
Sider’s book looked at poverty in the world at that time and concluded that the only reason that Third World countries were poor was because North America and Europe were relatively wealthy. These countries were gobbling up the world’s resources unjustly and leaving nothing for the starving masses. Capitalism was the culprit, Sider argued, and while he did not agitate for outright socialism, he did call for a central power in the world to oversee massive wealth transfers, a worldwide welfare state.
(In later editions Sider moderated the strident tone that characterized his 1977 book, but the theme itself is largely untouched, and the narrative—that capitalism creates poverty—remains.)
The book fed well into the evangelical mindset of seeing the world in black-and-white terms. It also provided evangelicals, who were likely to be ridiculed by elites in academe, politics, and the media for their faith, a way to be relevant and to try to earn favor with those same elites for their newfound compassion for the poor. The book itself presented a simple, black-and-white view of wealth and poverty; people who had wealth had stolen from the poor, and there could be no other explanation.
Sider’s central message was that unless Americans, Canadians, and Europeans gave up their wealthy lifestyles and agreed to adhere to a simple life—and stop using so many resources—poverty and starvation would expand throughout the planet and rates of poverty would accelerate. He even prophesied that unless this was done immediately, it would be maybe a decade before Third World countries like India that had nuclear weapons would use them to blackmail the West into giving up their wealth.
We know the rest of the story. The Soviet Union and its satellites collapsed and at least some countries joined the capitalist world. China shed its Mao straightjacket (giving lie to InterVarsity Press’s claim that Mao had performed an economic miracle there) and turned toward a market-based economy, and its poverty rates fell drastically. In fact, poverty around the globe diminished even as the world’s population increased well beyond the limits that environmentalists and doomsayers like Sider had predicted. To put it another way, most if not all of what Sider wrote in 1977 was discredited.
Even as the world became less poor, much of the evangelical world—or at least its academic side—failed to notice. In the mid-1980s, Calvin College (now Calvin University) put out a book, Responsible Technology, which read like a technocratic version of Rich Christians. In the chapter on economics, the authors presented one caricature after another and declared that economists’ tools such as incentives and marginal utility were illegitimate because, well, because people just shouldn’t act that way. As for the basic economic doctrine of scarcity, Calvin’s authors declared that scarcity was a fallacy invented by ignorant free market economists, since everyone knows God has provided the world with lots of wonderful resources.
Even in recent readings of Faith and Economics, the journal published by the Association of Christian Economists, it is like a 1970s time warp in which nothing has changed, with capitalism gobbling up the resources that should go to the poor, and so on. In the view of many Christian theologians, all economic activity is zero-sum, so any gain by one party can come about only because another party is made worse off. The notion of market exchanges making all parties better off simply is rejected out of hand. (I finally gave up in the early 2000s and dropped my membership with absolutely no regrets, nor have I attended any of their annual meetings since then.)
As I noted earlier, a mindset in which poverty is seen solely as a condition brought about by someone else’s wealth is not going to be able to comprehend what actually must happen for a society to grow economically and for the rates of destitution to fall. These things take place over time, and economies grow because entrepreneurs find ways to move resources from lower-valued to higher-valued uses, working within a market system directed by profits and losses. Positive change usually is gradual, and those who believe that people come out of poverty only via wealth transfers are not going to abandon their zero-sum viewpoints.
This hardly is to say that all Christian economists see the economic world in this crabbed sort of way. I know many Christians who are part of the Austrian school, and they have found ways to integrate their faith and their economic thinking. (Economists at Grove City College, for example, are a very wonderful exception to what seems to be the rule.) However, just as many evangelicals cannot conceive that there might be tradeoffs to police violently enforcing the drug war, many Christian economists, theologians, and academics are unable to comprehend even basic concepts of economic thinking and rely, instead, on terms like “stewardship” or “justice,” which without methodologies and foundations are just buzzwords, and then believe that they have “proven” their points by trotting out such words.
Perhaps, the saddest aspect of this ignorance is that these evangelicals have completely ignored the real reductions in poverty rates in the past forty years, reductions that are due to liberalizing economies that once were in socialist straitjackets. Instead, they insist that it still is 1977 and that unless the West immediately transfers vast sums of wealth to Asia, Africa, and South America, billions of people will starve. That isn’t true no longer seems to matter in the current political climate.
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막스가 말하는 계급 의식의 아이러니
객관적인 논리가 없다는 좌파들의 주장은 자기 모순적이다.
막스는 인간들이 자신들의 계급에 따라 현실을 다르게 인식한다고 주장했다. 그리고 프롤레타리아만이 진실을 인식한다고 선언했다. 하지만 거짓된 믿음은 끝내는 현실과 충돌하고 무너지게 된다. 진실만이 승리한다. 그렇다면 브루주아가 거짓을 믿어서 얻을 이익은 없다. 그래서 미제스는 이렇게 말한다.
“거짓 이론이 참된 이론보다 인간이나 하나의 계급 또는 인류 전체에 봉사하는 일은 없다.”
막스가 논리에 일관성을 유지했다면, 그는 노동자들에게 이렇게 훈계했을 것이다.
“자본가들을 탓하지 마시오. 당신들을 착취하는 그들은 당신들에게 최선의 일을 하는 것이오. 그들은 사회주의의 길을 닦고 있는 겁니다.”
The Irony of Marxist Class Consciousness
Antony Sammeroff
Let’s set the scene.
You and I are at the local pub when we find ourselves thrust into a rousing debate with our neighbours regarding the vicious state of the world and how we ought to put it right. We say free the markets and spontaneous order will do the talking. They say socialism is the only way forward. As our third pints dwindle to their last dregs, it begins to look like it will be a while before we get away to the bar for another round. Onlookers turn from their tables to shoot us sympathetic looks when one of our interlocutors, frothing at the mouth, accuses me of bad faith, and you of nefarious motives.
I rouse myself hysterically to our defence, banging the table with my right hand while I adjure him not to make things personal. You back me up, insisting: “No, no! It’s not like that, mate—we’re just pointing out the facts!!”
His partner sniggers upon hearing this, replying with a grunt, “Nonsense, comrade! There’s no such thing as the disinterested search for truth.”
“Yes, citizen,” asserts the first, training his attention on me, “You’re just saying that because you’re middle class.”
Most people would agree that this is a bit of a silly way to end a debate. For one thing, pointing out someone else’s class background doesn’t demonstrate why their position is wrong. Secondly, a person can’t change their extraction—and neither can an argument. So, if their pedigree really does lead them to impregnable prejudices, you’d best save your time on debating them. If there’s no disinterested search for truth, why not say: “Well, I have my bias and you have yours. There’s no way to bridge the gap, so let’s order another drink and leave it at that.” To be honest, I often wish I had the will power. And what basis would our challengers have for knowing if the positions they argued for were correct given the presupposition that truth of facts is a bridge too far for human reason?
To take a more philosophical turn, it’s self-contradictory to try to convince someone that there is no such thing as objective logic. Reasoning that there is no reason? Philosophers call this a “performative contradiction” and recognize it as a logical fallacy. Other examples of performative contradictions include “Language is meaningless,” which itself uses language to convey meaning, and “There are no absolutes,” which is a statement of an absolute. Karl Marx pointed out that Proudhon, the anarchist famous for declaring that “property is theft,” was guilty of a performative contradiction because “theft” is the forcible violation of property, which presupposes the existence of property to steal!
One of Mises’s major criticisms of Marx was that he never really refuted his contemporary opponents or the ideas of the classical economists. He simply dismissed them as “bourgeois” and prejudiced (along with a string of nasty names).
If you have ever engaged in an online debate you will have likely noticed that dismissing someone’s arguments based on their identity is far from uncommon. Just today someone commented, “You may have went to uni and you may have wrote a couple of books but you haven’t actually lived the capitalists life. Where you’re forced to sign a contract to work more than 45 hours a week because if you didn’t you wouldn’t eat.”
People do this quite naturally when confronted with information they don’t want to accept. Their first reaction is to find a way to dismiss the source rather than refute the claims. I remember that growing up I had a communist friend who would wave away thinkers he didn’t like, dismissing Karl Popper as “reactionary” and Nietzsche as “thoroughly right-wing.” This is not particular to the Left either. Conservatives are known to commonly dismiss their opponents as “libtards.” Hell, Hitler dismissed all the conclusions of Einstein, Freud, and Adler as “Jewish science.” As the social psychologist Thomas Gilovich put it,
For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe this?", but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, "Must I believe this?"
Most people recognise that while we might resort to personal attacks in the heat of the moment, an ad hominem is never really logically valid. What singles Marx out is that he actually systematises the tactic into his philosophy. According to Marxism, a person’s social position determines their beliefs. They lack the ability to perceive the world except through he eyes of their class interests, which will determine the views they express. Thus there is no such thing as the disinterested search for truth. Workers are irreconcilably pitched in a class struggle against their employers in capitalist society, and so each of them is bound to adopt tainted ideologies which, while false, have the purpose of operating through them to serve their class interests. Truth lies only with the proletarian science, and thus Marx did not have to refute his ideological opponents—merely unmask them as bourgeois (pretty rich coming from the son of a wealthy lawyer and whose wife was the daughter of a nobleman). Those early economists who advocated liberalism had intentional or unconscious biases that led them to favour the free market. They were “sycophantic apologists of the unfair class interests of bourgeois exploiters, ready to sell the people to big business and finance capital.” That’s all that really need be said about them.
Mises, of course, hardly denied that people held biases. He was not naïve to the notion that people might be predisposed towards political convictions which benefited them personally. After all, he was a great critic of state subsidies and protective tariffs. He had every reason to believe that when manufacturers in Austria advocated for higher taxes on imports it was because they hoped to avoid foreign competition. What he rejected is the notion that it is impossible to attain true beliefs through reasoning. That is what debate is for—to expose faulty logic. Mises called reason “the sole instrument of science and philosophy,” by which he meant that our reason—however erringly applied at times—is still our only way to distinguish a true idea from a false one.
“All that counts is whether a doctrine is sound or unsound. This is to be established by discursive reasoning. It does not in the least detract from the soundness and correctness of a theory if the psychological forces that prompted its author are disclosed….If the failures and errors of a doctrine are unmasked…historians and biographers may try to explain them by tracing them back to the author’s bias. But…reference to a thinker’s bias is no substitute for a refutation of his doctrines by tenable arguments.”
It’s important for Mises to stress that economics, as a science, is value-free (wertfrei). It aims at describing how the world is rather than how it ought to be. It’s descriptive rather than prescriptive. It is supposed to offer us the tools to discover what the outcome of policies will be, quite independently of what we—or our opponents—may hope, wish, dream, prefer, or claim. The only way to discover whether an economic claim (such as the claim that price controls lead to gluts and shortages) is true is by discursive reasoning. Appeals to the race, religion, “national character,” or “class interests” of the originator are worthless. Mises warns of the grave consequences of believing otherwise. What begins with the innocent unmasking of bourgeois prejudice (on the left) or racial proclivity (on the right) can only lead to the persecution of dissenters and their eventual “liquidation.” Put simply, it’s reason or violence.
Now Bertrand Russell (perhaps the foremost philosopher of the twentieth century until his death in 1970) would often say, “I think if something is true one ought to believe it, and if it is not true one ought not to believe it.” This I have also always held to be true, although one of my philosophy lecturers pointed out that there are sometimes good arguments against believing the truth. For example, if you’re an Olympic athlete it might benefit your performance to have an inflated sense of your own ability. Nevertheless, we can agree that as a general way of life it is preferable to hold truth over fiction. This is why we put delusional people in institutions and argue with relatives who claim that FDR ended the Great Depression. We accept that even if “ultimate truth” is beyond the apprehension of mere mortals, truthfulness is a standard we can at least aspire to.
Mises says we could skip the controversy over whether the logical structure of the mind differs among members of different classes. We could accept—for the sake of argument—the dubious claim that the main concern of intellectuals is to promote their class interests (even if they clash with their personal interests). We could even take as given the idea that there is no disinterested search for the truth. And still, even granting Marx all of his major premises, the ideology doctrine would still fall flat on its face!
His reason for this is that there is no justification for believing that false views would advance anyone’s class interest more than correct ones—a pretty clever observation. Returning to the example of putting delusional people in institutions, we do this because false beliefs cause people to clash with reality. Fundamentally, the truth works.
If you want to put up a house, you’d better follow the laws of gravity. If you want your plants to grow, you better water them and put them next to the window where they will get some sun. People came to study mechanics for practical reasons, writes Mises. They wanted to solve engineering problems. How far would bad ideas get them? Not a single steam engine could have been invented on false premises. “No matter how one looks at it,” writes Mises, “there is no way in which a false theory can serve a man or a class or the whole of mankind better than a correct theory.” Marx never attempts to explain why an ideological distortion would help someone serve their class interests better than the truth.
Mises goes on to ask why Marx came to teach this doctrine—so full of contradictions. He then proceeds to question Marx’s motives. This may seem thoughtlessly ironic given the context. It certainly provoked a belly laugh from me. But bear in mind that Mises has already stated that once you have exposed someone’s fallacies they are fair game for the analyst’s couch. So just remember—next time you feel tempted to call someone a stupid lib on Facebook or right-wing nutjob or Twitter, make sure you refute their argument first.
Marx disseminated this philosophy, because his passion was fighting for the adoption of socialism. According to Mises, he was “fully aware” that he couldn’t actually debunk the devastating critiques of socialism set forth by the economists. What’s more, the labor theory of value which he had hinged his philosophy upon, adapting it from J.S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith, had been overturned by economists Carl Menger and William Stanley Jevons only four years after Marx published the first volume of his magnum opus, Das Kapital, in 1867. Embarrassing.
Marx didn’t grasp the new and more accurate marginal theory of value, which held that we each evaluate each unit of a good we receive less than the previous unit. Given only one glass of water, we will hold it precious and certainly drink it. If we have enough water, we will soon be taking baths and sprinkling it over our lawns. Since we put each unit of water to a less urgent function than the last, we value it less.
Smith and Ricardo were not long lived enough to have a crack at debunking the early socialist thinking that emerged as a force only in the 1830s and '40s. Mises notes that Marx didn’t attack them but did vent his “full indignation” (Mises was handy with an emotionally florid turn of phrase) upon those who followed in their footsteps to defend the market economy against its critics. Marx dismissed them with ridicule, calling them “vulgar economists” and “sycophants of the bourgeoisie.” Bootlickers sucking up to the ruling class.
Mises notes a bit of a contradiction here too, since, at the same time as Marx dismisses classical economists for being impelled by their bourgeois background, their promarket prejudice, he also borrows from them to reach antimarket conclusions. The thing is, though, it would be completely transparent that Marx was just using this as a smear tactic to discredit the economists if he hadn’t “elevate[d] it to the dignity” of a general law. So the Marxists went about interpreting all philosophical systems in light of the ideology doctrine—scrutinizing Mendel, Hertz, Planck, Heisenberg, and Einstein for their class interests.
But here’s the irony. They didn’t apply it to their own doctrines. The tenets of Marxism, of course, were not biased. They weren’t ideologies. They were “a foretaste of the knowledge of the future classless society, which, freed from the fetters of class conflicts, will be in a position to conceive pure knowledge, untainted by ideological blemishes.”
Marx attacks the arguments made in favor of capitalism as ideological, but, Mises asks, Why would the capitalists even need to justify capitalism if, according to Marx’s own theory, every class is “remorseless in the pursuit of its own selfish class interests”? Sure, if they were ashamed of their role as “robber barons, userers, and exploiters,” they wouldn’t be able to look themselves in the mirror. They’d need a good ideology to make them feel alright about what they were doing. But what need is there to satisfy a conscience free from guilt? According to Marx the bourgeoisie can’t even understand the workers, because they think differently; they are running a different system of logic.
Finally, according to Marx’s own system, capitalism is a necessary stage in the evolution of mankind. Since no social formation ever disappears before all the productive forces have matured enough to necessitate the change, capitalism is needed to bridge the gap between the feudal system and the final goal of international communism. Capitalists, predetermined in their attitudes by their place in the social order, are driven passively to fulfil the laws of history. They can’t be doing anything wrong! If anything, they themselves are playing their necessary role in building a bridge to the bliss of a classless society. They are tools of history, working according to a preordained plan for mankind’s evolution in compliance with eternal laws, independently of their own will—or any human will. They couldn’t help it even if they tried! And they certainly wouldn’t need an ideology or false consciousness to tell them they are correct to do so. Marx himself tells them.
Mises leaves us with this mic drop,
If Marx had been consistent, he would have exhorted the workers: “Don't blame the capitalists; in 'exploiting' you they do what is best for yourselves; they are paving the way for socialism.”
For more, see Theory and History (1957), chapter 7, section 4, and chapter 2, sections 1 and 4.
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