By Barry Brownstein, American Institute for Economic Research
Recently, I saw a decal on a car window with the iconic Smoky the Bear image and the caption: “Only you can prevent communism.”
In humor, there is also truth. Prevent communism, how? The person with the decal, a close friend of my daughter’s, saw her role in preventing communism as continuing to educate herself on why it is an existential threat to humanity. Yet, she is dismayed at how many of her peers have adopted collectivist positions and are unwilling to consider alternatives.
Like her, I know many well-intentioned people who have adopted positions antithetical to liberty and yet are as concerned about human flourishing as you and me. They are not ideologues committed to overthrowing Western civilization, but their adopted mindsets are leading us down a dangerous path.
If it seems that your well-intentioned friends have lost their minds, they have, and you might be in danger of losing yours too.
F. A. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit helps us understand why. Hayek explained we have confused cause and effect. Reason is not the cause of civilization; reason is a product of civilization.
What makes us human, our minds and our powers of reason, do not exist separately from our social environment. When others descend to madness, we might be complacent, believing we can retain our powers of reason; yet Hayek’s insights prompt us to reconsider our certainty.
If reason existed separately from one’s social environment, more people would resist tyranny. Instead, we witness people cheering and complying with collectivist orders issued by authorities.
If you’re sure you would have hidden Anne Frank or disobeyed orders to kill Jews in a concentration camp, you may be deceiving yourself. Famed author Primo Levi, in his account of his time in Auschwitz, wrote:
We must remember that these faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
Using Hayek’s ideas, we can ask why so many “faithful followers” lose their minds and their power of reason as civilization retreats.
In The Fatal Conceit, Hayek explained...(READ THIS FULL ESSAY HERE).
