Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume II: Basics of a Liberal Psychological, Social and Moral Order (Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism) 3030954765, 9783030954765

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM SERIES EDITORS: DAVID F. HARDWICK · LESLIE MARSH

Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume II Basics of a Liberal Psychological, Social and Moral Order Walter B. Weimer

Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism

Series Editors David F. Hardwick, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Leslie Marsh, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

This series offers a forum to writers concerned that the central presuppositions of the liberal tradition have been severely corroded, neglected, or misappropriated by overly rationalistic and constructivist approaches. The hardest-won achievement of the liberal tradition has been the wrestling of epistemic independence from overwhelming concentrations of power, monopolies and capricious zealotries. The very precondition of knowledge is the exploitation of the epistemic virtues accorded by society’s situated and distributed manifold of spontaneous orders, the DNA of the modern civil condition. With the confluence of interest in situated and distributed liberalism emanating from the Scottish tradition, Austrian and behavioral economics, non-Cartesian philosophy and moral psychology, the editors are soliciting proposals that speak to this multidisciplinary constituency. Sole or joint authorship submissions are welcome as are edited collections, broadly theoretical or topical in nature.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15722

Walter B. Weimer

Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume II Basics of a Liberal Psychological, Social and Moral Order

Walter B. Weimer Washington, PA, USA

ISSN 2662-6470 ISSN 2662-6489 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism ISBN 978-3-030-95476-5 ISBN 978-3-030-95477-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95477-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Pattadis Walarput/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the personal and intellectual memory of Friedrich August von Hayek

Preface

The ideals of socialism...do not really offer a new morality but merely appeal to instincts inherited from an earlier type of society. They are an atavism, a vain attempt to impose upon the Open Society the morals of the tribal society —F. A. Hayek

This volume continues from Volume 1 the discussion of the nature of liberalism and a false theory of rationality called, for want of a better term, rationalist constructivism, which has subverted the original liberal position into something almost entirely opposed to it, while now calling it liberalism (or progressivism) in its stead. While the task of Volume 1 was to trace the development of classical liberalism and outline its evolutionary basis, our task here in Volume 2 is to elaborate classical liberalism in a more contemporary framework, showing its connection to developments in our understanding of spontaneously ordered complex phenomena such as the mammalian central nervous system, the market order, the nature of inference and expectation, the relationship of morality to social organization, what education ought to be, and more.

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Perhaps the best way to introduce this is to repeat the essence of the Preface to Volume 1. Back in the 1930s the interventionist economist John Maynard Keynes, in the book for which he was most famous, had this to say about the role of earlier ideas in shaping the affairs of humanity: The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood . Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Mad men in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.… In the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest but, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil (Keynes, 1936, pp. 383–384). The ideas of Keynes himself were equally subject to the influence of “some academic scribbler of a few years back,” and those ideas have turned out to be very wrong and very dangerous. They are dangerous because they represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the position from which they arose, a misunderstanding which has enormous consequences for how those “civil servants and politicians and even agitators” have come to believe that the world ought to be organized or governed. Keynes and twenty-first-century advocates of his and similar progressivist views have come to believe with all their hearts and souls that they know how to control the social and political and economic orders for their own benefit (and according to their beliefs, for the benefit of everyone else). They wholeheartedly believe that since true or classical liberalism was good, they know how to make it better. Convinced that they understand and can control the order of society and the economic marketplace, they have agitated for the replacement of liberalism by what has come to be called progressivism. And all of this is done in the name of achieving “the greater good” in a “scientific” society (recently many have dropped the claim of science, however: now one virulent version, cultural

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Marxism, has, like the French Revolutionaries centuries ago, abandoned even science). To continue the assessment of such views this volume examines philosophical, political, and psychological topics. Volume 1 examined the development of liberalism and traced the shift in that doctrine from classical liberalism to the contemporary dominance of progressivism, which is totally antithetical to the insights of the original liberal position. This second volume continues to overview how a dominant conception of reason and rationality (and its actual as well as apparent failure) led to that shift to progressivism and away from liberalism. Psychologically it examines the nature of cognition and social behavior, and argues that the tenets of progressivist “scientific” organization are incompatible with known facts about complexity and organization. From an interdisciplinary standpoint, it examines the overlap and interdetermination of political, psychological, and social views, arguing that what we know about spontaneously evolved complex phenomena shows the untenability of the progressivist reinterpretation of “liberalism” and the dominant models of “rational” behavior in psychology and philosophy. The villain in these cases is a particular conception of the nature and power of explicit rationality (or algorithmic computation in computer science methodology)—a received view (i.e., one that, as a dominant position, is taken for granted by the vast majority of both the intelligentsia and the lay population) that assigns far more power to conscious reason and explicitly directed or coerced behavior than it is capable of achieving. Politically this conception leads to the view that we can consciously and deliberately shape society and remold our values to fulfill certain goals by the redistribution of resources and wealth, and equally easily effect the deliberate direction of scientific research. As a consequence, this position leads inevitably to the substitution of the idea of “social” or distributive justice for both individual freedom (and selfdirection) and real or individual justice. Psychologically it leads to a conception of humanity as rational epistemic agents who are in control only to the extent that all the factors governing human behavior are made subject to conscious organization and direction by explicit reason. Methodologically, it leads to the idea that there is a known and codified method, called the scientific method, that leads to proven knowledge

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claims when correctly applied. Therapeutically, it leads to the idea that adequate treatment of our contemporary neuroses and alienation, stemming from the existential predicament and personal alienation of modern humanity, which is due to our partial transfer in the last thousands of years to an abstract society, should consist in intervention with approved algorithms (either behavioral or cognitive) to make the “client” fit a preconceived model of adequate adjustment or “correct” rational behavior. Against this false conception of reason and its role in our affairs, and the pretense of method and knowledge (which is merely the substitution of scientism for science), far more adequate and informative conceptions of reason and method (as well as the nature of humanity and our attunement to the environment) have been available in numerous areas, in outline often for as long as millennia or at least centuries. More recent developments in those conceptions, which emphasize the spontaneous evolution of complex orders, the nature of freedom and with it the rule of law, tacit dimensions of cognition and society, parallels between science, society, and cognition, and much more, must be studied to see how superior views were abandoned or distorted by the unquestioned rise of rationalist constructivism and scientism stemming from the progressivist movement beginning from the period of the Enlightenment to the present. Volume 1 took an historical overview approach to show that advances in philosophy, scientific methodology, and social theory have repudiated rationalist constructivism and scientism, while at the same time many theories and practices in social or “moral” science areas (such as economics, linguistics, psychology, and political “science”) unwittingly and uncritically accepted and fostered constructivist doctrines. The net result has been that the social studies are increasingly contributing to the destruction of humanity and society—just as the revolutionary “intellectuals” in eighteenth century France—rather than advancing our understanding of either. We have come to the point that, through intellectual error, our best intentions have been leading us to disastrous consequences. We have unwittingly paralleled the case of the apocryphal immigrant lady who, when confronted with a question on an immigration form that asked “Do you advocate the overthrow of the government by force

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or violence?” thought carefully for a while, and then answered “force” because she reasoned that it was somehow more civilized than violence. Our society is now rephrasing the question to “Do you advocate the destruction of civilization (including democratic government and the spontaneous order in economics) through ignorance or error?” Since none of us want to admit our inevitable ignorance, we check “error” as the more “reasonable” alternative and then double down upon a reformulation of the constructivist errors. But both ignorance and error it is, and has been—at least on the part of the “intellectuals” of the last two centuries who have shaped public and political opinion. It has been the intelligentsia or “educated” intellectuals, the secondhand dealers in ideas as Friedrich Hayek called us, who rushed to embrace rationalist constructivism, invariably for what they feel are the most humanitarian of tribal or face-to-face reasons. Volume 1 overviewed why and how this has happened, and what we need to (re)learn in order to guard against the “clear Cartesian commonsense” engineering mentality of the tribal organizer—whether he or she is in business, politics, or increasingly, in science and “liberal” education, and especially our ubiquitous social mass misinformation media. The message of the chapters that follow will not sit well with many “intellectuals” and those who are “educated” in the recent tradition of Western (largely British and American) academia. They have been conditioned to be “scientific” and thus are required to be sympathetic to “liberal” social and political activism, predisposed to embrace any new cause and to automatically despise any tradition, while having grown up calling themselves “liberals.” Those who feel they already know how to cure society of its ills and inequities will waste little time dismissing the views that are argued for here. As Marxism has shown us, one of the easiest way to oppose a position is to damn its pedigree (and then ignore the counter arguments), and they will lose little time in doing so. That is why I devoted considerable space to the history of the ideas that are involved. We need that background to see that the attitude of the rationalist constructivist is in fact an atavistic throwback to the tribal organization of primitive societies rather than being the “scientific” and “rational” path to the future. We need to see that the labels constructivists have attached to classical liberalism—such as fascist, reactionary,

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atavistic, class-based, and whatever—actually apply to their progressivism instead of to classical liberalism, which actually explicitly repudiates such views. The views of progressivism are not based upon any “advanced” scientific understanding, but rather on a longing for a wished for but nonexistent golden age of the past. They are literally an atavism, a throwback to unscientific thought, and a very pernicious factor harming the modern world. When we examine the tenets of progressivism it becomes obvious that they would lead to a sterile utopianism that in fact prevents progress rather than fostering it. But some goals and genuine humanitarian interests that led to the popularity of progressivism need not be abandoned because the progressivist program can lead only to disaster. Progress can indeed occur, but it depends upon understanding the liberal distinction between planning to achieve conditions which will maximize the possibility of growth and progress if any is to occur, and the constructivist attempt to deliberately plan the particulars of progress itself beforehand. Progress itself simply cannot be “planned.” It turns out that the best way to actually be a “progressive” is to be a classic liberal. Progressivist thought reverted to an attempt to superimpose a deliberately planned program as an attempt at a “feel good,” comfort-giving social organization upon the gradually emerging abstract and impersonal society that has replaced the face-to-face society based upon interactive benevolence so familiar from our long evolutionary history, when human populations increased beyond the possibility (the carrying capacity) of any taxis based or tribal dictatorial control. When that transition occurred we stepped into the abstract society based upon impersonal cooperation rather than mutual or face-to-face benevolence, even though we neither liked its impersonal nature, liked how we felt, nor understood it. The chapters that follow must show how we can survive and thrive in the increasingly abstract society in which we are now becoming embedded. The task is not easy, but the potential benefits far outweigh the losses that would be inflicted by any return to primitivism from following the siren song of socialism and directed “organization.” So to re-emphasize, by a liberal I mean an individual who adheres to the original formulation of the theory, based upon the concept of liberty as freedom from unnecessary restraint, ensured and provided

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by an evolving context of largely tacit constraints, including the rule of law binding equally upon all members of society, and the concept of private property as that which is within the individual’s protected sphere of control. This conception is antithetical to the now more common progressivist usage of “liberal” to denote one who thinks freedom has successfully been redefined as freedom from want, and the “law” to now mean only legislation directed to achieve particular ends specified in advance, so that equality is no longer defined correctly as equality of opportunity for all under the rule of law but rather as equality of outcome guaranteed by legislation. This latter conception is correctly called rationalist constructivism and progressivism. The progressivist-constructivist position is literally an atavistic throwback—it will inevitably return our society to dictatorial tribalism and primitivism, despite the good intentions of its advocates. This second volume focuses on the nature of spontaneously organized complex phenomena such as the human nervous system and the evolved market order in society in order to show that the simplistic conceptions which constructivists propose to govern or control social interaction would force society to regress to the organization of a tribal dictatorial (linear or hierarchical) structure, and would be incompatible with known facts of human CNS functioning, creativity in language and behavior, and the growth of both knowledge and human social progress. If successful it will show that progress in many fields, some far from political theory, dovetails with and reinforces the classical liberal theory of society as an evolved structure of essential constraints that has brought us all the wealth, knowledge, and progress, we have accumulated in the centuries since we moved from the tribal order of society of our mamallian ancestry. Washington, USA

Walter B. Weimer

Reference Hayek, F. A. (1976). Law, Legislation and Liberty (Vol. 2, p. 147).

Acknowledgments

These volumes exist because of conversations with Friedrich Hayek about the nature of liberalism and the nature of an adequate conception of knowledge and the human mind. More than any other single theorist he saw clearly the inadequacies of traditional approaches to those issues and problems, and pointed to the direction in which more tenable views could be found. What follows is in the main an update of themes and positions he elaborated. Preparation of the text that follows has been aided by input (in many cases, over many years) from the work of and conversations with the late F. A. Hayek, the late W. W. Bartley, III, and the late D. T. Campbell, and more recently the late Steven Horwitz. I wish also to thank my former economics students Professor William Butos and Professor James Wible, and clinical psychologist Dr. Neil P. Young, the members of my Hayek seminars, and especially Professor John Anthony Johnson, who provided a page by page critique and commentary. I must also thank Elizabeth Weimer for copyediting and critical commentary, my wife Suzanne Weimer for putting up with the project, and Leslie Marsh for wanting it

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in the Palgrave Macmillan series he edits, and his considerable assistance while shepherding it into print.

Epigram Source Acknowledgments

Preface

F. A. Hayek, (1976) Law, Legislation and Liberty Vol. 2, P. 147. Chapter 1 H. H. Pattee, (1981) Symbol-Structure Complementarity in Biological Evolution. In E. Jantsch, Ed., The Evolutionary Vision, Page 126. W. Wundt, (1902) Ethics: The Facts of the Moral Life, Page 331. Chapter 2 J. von Neumann, (1951) The General and Logical Theory of Automata. In L. Jeffress (Ed.), Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior. Page 24. M. Polanyi, (1951) The Logic of Liberty. Page 145. Chapter 3 F. A. Hayek, (1952b) The Sensory Order, Page 121. Chapter 4 H. B. Acton, (1971/1993) The Morals of Markets and Other Essays, Pages 10, 24. F. A. Hayek, (1983) Knowledge, Evolution and Society, Page 43. H. B. Acton, (1971/1993) The Morals of Markets and Other Essays, Page 156.

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Epigram Source Acknowledgments

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Lord Acton (1907) The History of Freedom and Other Essays, Page 297. B. de Jouvenel, (1957) Sovereignty: An Inquiry Into the Political Good , Page 136. Tao Te Ching, Chapter 57 K. R. Popper, (1962 Edition) The Open Society and its Enemies Vol. 1, Page 176. W. James, (1892/1963) Psychology, Briefer Course. Page 140. Justice Robert H. Jackson (1950) American Communications Association v. Douds, 339, U.S. 382, 442–443 W. W. Bartley, III, (1990) Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth, Page 17. L. Mises, (1933/1981) Epistemological Problems of Economics. Pages 183–84. A. Alchian, (1959) Private Property and the Relative Cost of Tenure. In P. D. Bradley (Ed.), The Public Stake in Union Power. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, Page 368. D. Hume, (1875) Essays Moral, Political and Literary, Page 393. L. Brandeis, (1927) Dissenting Opinion, Olmstead v. United States XXX, 277, U.S. 479 of 1927. W. James, (1892/1963) Psychology, Page 139. Originally in Popular Science Monthly, 1887. H. James, (2016) Autobiographies. New York: The Library of America. H. L. Mencken, (1918/2018) In Defense of Women. F. A. Hayek, (1983), Knowledge, Evolution and Society, Pages 39–42.

Contents

1

Problems of Complexity and Explanation in the Moral Sciences Explanation of the Principle A Precise But Unspecifiable Definition of High Complexity Limits of Explanation: Complexity and Explanation of the Principle Explanation and the Search for Laws Experimentation or Demonstration? Experimentation and the Problem of Measurement Social Science Is Fine with Demonstration Studies The Power and Role of Negative Rules in Complex Orders Negative Rules of Order Constrain Behavior in the Social Cosmos The Catallactic Order and Its Genesis We Are Indispensably Adapted to Ignorance Science Is Both a Social Cosmos Constrained by Negative Rules and a Taxis Activity Directed to Particular Results

1 3 5 5 7 8 10 12 13 14 17 20 21

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Society Evolves in Analogous Fashion to Science Consequences for Understanding the Social Domains References

23 26 31

2 The Essential Evolutionary Tension: Cosmos + Taxis The Nervous System as a Complex Phenomenon Powerful Control Structures Require the Surface-Deep Structure Distinction Of Clocks and Clouds, Determinism and Determination Creativity Is a Matter of Rule Governed Constraint Cosmic Structures Are Based Upon Taxis Information Structures The Social Cosmos Is Full of Taxis Structures References

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52 53 56

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Inference and Expectation Adaptation is a Basic Biological and Evolutionary Phenomenon Learning Requires a Model of the Environment Anticipation Requires a Particular Type of Modeling Inference and Expectation are Different in Society Inference and Expectation in Economics Anticipatory Systems in the Economic Domain Another Look at Science The Strangulation of Science and Society You Cannot Legislate Scientific Results Corruption of Language Inevitably Corrupts Our Knowledge References Markets and Morals It All Starts with Means Versus Ends and Property Individual Freedom Requires Responsibility, Which Comes at a Price The Morality of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood Is Tribalism and Totalitarianism Inevitable? The Immorality of Tribalism

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60 61 65 72 74 77 79 81 85 89 103 107 110 115 117 120 122

Contents

Rawls and Kohlberg on Socialist Values and Justice The Contradictory Nature of Utilitarianism and Similar Maximization Hypotheses Back to the Inevitability of Our Ignorance A Psychological Approach to Individual Moral Judgment Does Not Address the Differences Between Progressivism and Liberalism Heroes’ Journeys and the Joan of Arc Syndrome The Abstract Society Does Not Ask for Sacrifice Morality in an Abstract Society: Going Beyond Our Childhood References 5

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123 128 130

132 136 137 138 154

Alienation, Malaise, and the Abstract Society The Malaise of Youth and the Inevitability of the Gap Between Generations The Psychological Reality of Stress and Alienation Therapy According to the Behavioral Engineer Civilization and its Discontents: The Freudian Attitude Toward Therapy What is Therapy for, if Not to “Relieve the Burden of Civilization?” The Biology and Psychology of Depression and Malaise Utilizing an Agile Mind The ANS is Not the CNS Reason Remains the Slave of the Passions Confusions About Planning and Rationality Limping Before The Lame: Progressivism and its Guilt References

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Education in a Free Society How Education Changed The Sainted Book Burners There Are No Market Constraints in Academia Knowledge Is Not Personal Expression of Opinion A Little Alienation Is Good for You Steps Toward Education for an Impersonal Society

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160 164 168 171 173 174 175 177 183 189 191 200

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Back to Beginnings: The Family or Small Group Our Neoteny and Our Language Require Family Structure Educating the Cultural Marxist Warrior References 7

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Constructivism Within the Liberal Tradition All These Positions Expect Too Much from an Inadequate and Outmoded Conception of Rationality The Failure of Justificationism Unfusing Criticism from the Attempt to Prove Rationalist Identity Requires no Conception of Commitment Popperian Critical Rationalism Cannot Adequately Defend Liberalism Polanyi and the Overextension of Authoritarianism The Physical Is Neither Functional Nor a Priori The Anarchism of the Right Is Just as Untenable as the Anarchism of the Left Block on Property Rights Versus Friedman and Hayek Causality: Polanyi Showed Us That Life (and Cognition) “Harnesses” Physicality A Case Study: Pushing Change Too Fast and Hard References Classical Liberalism Has yet to Be Either Achieved, Refuted, or Improved There Is No Silver Bullet for Freedom Back to the Basics The Overextension of Government and the Entitlement Mentality Is Sovereign Government Always Necessary? Excursus: What Exactly Is Anarchism, and What Problem Was It Proposed to Solve? Government Based on Rights and Contracts, or Entitlements?

225 229 232 242 245 249 249 253 254 255 258 260 265 272 276 278 295 299 303 304 311 314 318 319

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Property Rights and the Distribution Problem: Socialism or the Free Market? How to Make Progress, Slowly Civilization Is Very Recent—And We Have Never Had a Liberal Civilization References

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321 324 325 329

References

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3

Chaining control (lower linear line) versus hierarchical structuring Polanyi’s representation of polycentric control (From Polanyi, 1951) Pribram’s modified TOTE with anticipatory bias Rosen’s prototypical modeling relation Rosen’s anticipatory system

40 41 67 70 71

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1 Problems of Complexity and Explanation in the Moral Sciences

Inherent in all innovative visions are the complementary constraints that execute these visions. Howard H. Pattee Reality is always fuller and richer than theory. Hence the most that is allowed to us is to anticipate the general outline of the course that will be taken by the immediate future. Wilhelm Wundt

The principles of a liberal social order are adaptations to the complexity of interactions in a society in which individuals cannot know, interact with, or anticipate the behavior of all the others in the order. This leads directly to the problem of how an individual’s limited knowledge of local particulars—of their particular knowledge, resources, desires, etc.—can interact with that extended order and its evolved or grown institutions. Growth and progress (in both society and science) are dependent upon properties of complex phenomena. That complexity

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume II, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95477-2_1

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results in a qualitatively different class of problems from those encountered in the less complex natural or physical sciences. This chapter makes the case for that qualitative difference and puts into perspective the problems of the social sciences that result from the inherent complexity of their subject matter. What science can achieve, and what our understanding consists in, is fundamentally different from what the traditional models of science can provide. We need to overview how our understanding of complex phenomena has evolved (primarily in the last half-century), and see how it fits with liberalism as a social theory. What was traditionally called the moral sciences, which have evolved today primarily into the psychological, social, and economic disciplines, have different sorts of problems and require different sorts of analyses from what suffices in the simpler or physical science domains. We must note some of the constraints Pattee said must be present, and focus on spontaneous complexity and the explanation of principles rather than particulars within the social studies. Modern (essentially, post-Galilean) science has greatly increased our ability to understand phenomena of low complexity. Physics became the paradigm of science, and the majority of analyses of the nature of science attempt to force what emerged as the physics model upon all domains that would be “scientific.” From Comte’s brand of positivism with its social physics model to Skinner’s attempt to fit society into a clearly delimited Skinner box, it has been suggested that progress can only be achieved in the social and psychological domains if we explicitly copy the practices and procedures of “hard” science. Constructivists and progressivists have attempted to outline one or another hard science approach as the (meaning: the only) means of moving beyond what they perceive to be the outmoded and primitive nature of classical liberalism. The physicists have been model builders: their models (either formal or material) are used to derive quantitatively precise values for events to be explained or predicted. Stemming from Hertz in the nineteenth century, explanation in the physical sciences that deal with simple phenomena has been limited to the deductive subsumption of particulars (the “facts” of the domain) under general or “covering” laws (as in the classic Hempel &

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Oppenheim, 1948, account). That model is for explanation of the particular. It does not work, even as an approximation, in complex realms.1 The constructivist approach is in fact unscientific.

Explanation of the Principle Another kind of explanation, explanation of the principle, occurs in complex systems in which explanatory value is claimed for theoretical models even though they do not enable us to ascertain precise values (or point predictions) of the variables involved. For those enamored of explanations of the sort for which physics is famous, these “mere” explanations of the principle are a source of embarrassment—at best preliminary efforts to be replaced by better accounts that will confirm the causal mechanisms involved when the science “matures” enough to make point predictions. Thus Comte’s “social physics” attempted to move directly to the hard science physics model and “explain” all social phenomena by deducing them from first principles. But what sort of understanding does explanation of the principle provide? All we know is that so long as the observed phenomena we study keep within the range of possibilities indicated by the theory as possible, there is good reason to regard our explanatory model as exhibiting the principle(s) at work in a complex phenomenon. As Hayek noted, such accounts and their limited (compared to detailed point predictions) conclusions and predictions will “refer only to some properties of the resulting phenomenon,… to a kind of phenomenon rather than to a particular event” (1967, p. 15). Explanation of the principle—reference to general kinds or classes—is the rule rather than the exception in complex phenomena such as biological evolution, human culture, economics, and psychology. Whereas the hard sciences assume as a matter of course that increased experimental precision will always result in more precise prediction of particulars, it has never been that way in the “soft” sciences (as Meehl, 1967, cogently noted). Instead, increased precision does not aid prediction, it decreases it. This is not surprising since all living subjects are unique, and so the more precise our information the more we limit the generalizability

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to fewer and fewer subjects, until finally only to that individual who provided the data. As Hayek emphasized: Physics has succeeded because it deals with phenomena which, in our sense, are simple. But a simple theory of phenomena which are in their nature complex (or one which, if the expression be preferred, has to deal with more highly organized phenomena) is probably merely of necessity false--at least without a specified ceteris paribus assumption, after the full statement of which the theory would no longer be simple. (1967, p. 28)

This contention was independently reached from pioneering work in automata theory done by John von Neumann. von Neumann proved in informal but rigorous fashion that, for phenomena of high complexity (to be defined below), the least complex model of a complex phenomenon would possess a degree of complexity equal to the thing itself. Thus a model capable of behaving exactly like a complex phenomenon would for all practical (and of course, for theoretical and explanatory) purposes, be another instance of that phenomenon. When we reach such a degree of complexity (as in evolutionary phenomena, the nervous system functioning, social and cultural interactions, economic systems, etc.) explanation of the principle is all that we can hope to achieve granted the finite nature of the human condition. In our formal models, as attempts at understanding, we need abstract principles of determination for complex behavior, not a new instance of the phenomenon itself. This situation was informally noted by Arturo Rosenblueth in a paper jointly written with Norbert Wiener, “The Role of Models in Science” (1945), which distinguished material from formal models: “A material model is the representation of a complex system by a system which is assumed simpler and which is also assumed to have some properties similar to those selected for study in the original complex system. A formal model is a symbolic assertion in logical terms of an idealized relatively simple situation showing the structural properties of the original factual system” (ibid., p. 317). In this paper was the famous comment that the best material model for a cat is “another, or preferably the same cat.” Hayek cited this paper in his article “Degrees of Explanation” in

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1955, and Weiner discussed the issue with von Neumann prior to the latter’s published treatment of complexity.

A Precise But Unspecifiable Definition of High Complexity The transition point at which the least complex rigorous model of a phenomenon is another instance of that phenomenon can serve as a definition of high complexity. Above this level of complexity are the selforganizing structures we have referred to as cosmic or catallactic; below this level are the taxis and other organizational structures that can be exhaustively specified and “overseen” by the human mind or a central control structure. Consider some cryptic remarks of von Neumann (in von Neumann, 1966): You can perform within the logical type that’s involved everything that’s feasible, but the question of whether something is feasible in a type belongs to a higher logical type.… It is characteristic of objects of low complexity that it is easier to talk about the object than produce it and easier to predict its properties than to build it. But in the complicated parts of formal logic it is always one order of magnitude harder to tell what an object can do than to produce the object. (p. 51)

Substitute the term explanation for logical type and you have a specification of high complexity: the simplest possible explanation for a phenomenon of high complexity is of higher complexity than the phenomenon itself.

Limits of Explanation: Complexity and Explanation of the Principle If explanation is equivalent to modeling, there are abstract constraints that apply to all systems that create such models. One important constraint will be the limit of explanatory capability that a given

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modeling system possesses; it will be beyond the capacity of systems to explain or model phenomena that are more complex than the systems themselves. An obvious limitation is reached in self-explanation—the system can only be itself, it can never be a model of itself. Consider in this regard an attempt to model the human central nervous system: Any apparatus of classification must possess a structure of a higher degree of complexity than is possessed by the objects which it classifies;… therefore, the capacity of any explaining agent must be limited to objects with a structure possessing a degree of complexity lower than its own. If this is correct, it means that no explaining agent can ever explain objects of its own kind, or of its own degree of complexity, and, therefore, that the human brain can never fully explain its own operations. (Hayek, 1952, p. 185)

This is a logical point that is independent of explanation of the principle, but it relates directly to that concept. If the phenomena of interest are those of “organized complexity” such as our brains, market systems, social structures, etc., it follows that all our understanding can hope to achieve is explanation of the abstract principles according to which the system operates. No one will ever succeed in modeling such a system completely, nor will we be able to confirm the adequacy of our models in all their particularity. Instead our knowledge of the model’s adequacy will be determined negatively—by falsification—in which case we will learn only that the model was incorrect, and a “good model” will be one that, as Popper (especially in his 1959) emphasized with regard to science, has thus far survived our sincere attempts to refute it. The original example of an explanation of the principle that Hayek used as an illustration was the theory of evolution, which cannot ever predict the emergence of a single organism (or even a single species), but which explains the principles according to which species (and hence organisms) arise. Other examples are found in the theory of the growth of knowledge, in the genesis of the market order, and all spontaneously ordered social phenomena that are the result of action but not design. In general all the phenomena of life and its evolution will require explanations of the principle, as would all cybernetic phenomena if we

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extend Wiener’s original definition beyond control by feedback systems to include anticipatory or feedforward mechanisms (see Chapter 3). We would not be upset by this limit of explanation if a strong scientistic prejudice, that we should be able to deal with complex phenomena in exactly the same manner as simple physical phenomena, were not so well entrenched. This prejudice is what has sustained the attempts from Comte through Russell and Skinner up to the present day to find the “laws of nature” from which we can deduce all human and social behavior in full particularity. Today it dominates artificial intelligence research.2

Explanation and the Search for Laws Simple phenomena can often be explained by a specification of relationships between a few variables. Determinate equations such as Newton’s F = ma became the paradigm of this. One notion, the concept of force, can be specified in terms of algebraic relationships between only two others—mass and acceleration. Such simple relationships form the model for most areas of low complexity, and it was just assumed that similar relationships would hold for the psychological and social domains. Their problem was presumed to be their alleged immaturity, not the impossibility of such relationships being found. We can dismiss that notion by noting that, for example, Sir William Petty, founder of econometrics, was a somewhat senior fellow of the Royal Society to a young upstart named Isaac Newton. And the authors of the Port Royal Grammer (in 1662), so applauded by Chomsky, preceded Newton’s Principia by about 20 years. It is not a problem of youth or accidents that, say, evolutionary theory or the psychology of cognition have not surpassed “mere” explanation of the principle. All we can expect in such areas are pattern predictions that result from postulating abstract rules underlying an indefinite welter of different surface particulars. The notion of a law of nature as a relationship obtaining between a few phenomena, linked together by simple relationships such as cause-and-effect, simply does not apply to complex phenomena. No one saw this more clearly than Hayek (1967), who noted that while we

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may well have achieved a very elaborate and quite useful theory about some kind of complex phenomenon, we have to admit that we do not know a single law, in the ordinary physics sense which this kind of phenomenon obeys: “the search for the discovery of laws is not an appropriate hall-mark of scientific procedure but merely a characteristic of the theories of simple phenomena… in the field of complex phenomena the term ’law’ as well as the concepts of cause-and-effect are not applicable without such modification as to deprive them of their ordinary meaning” (p. 42). We need to abandon as a prejudice with no actual basis the idea that to be scientific one must produce “laws” of the sort that are found in physics.3 We also need to understand that many areas of spontaneous complexity do not allow one to conduct experiments of the sort that are found in the natural sciences. Those areas simply do not have measurement and thus cannot do experiments. When we put these two conclusions together it becomes obvious that the progressivistconstructivist claims to “scientific superiority” over liberalism are abject scientism and hubris.

Experimentation or Demonstration? The natural sciences have been enormously successful in employing experimental methods. The laws of (physical) nature are the result of our ability to constrain situations sufficiently that we can perform experiments. The ability to experiment is essentially the ability to simplify and control a situation—to impose a sufficient number of constraints— to the extent that it can be repeated either under identical conditions or conditions which we choose to systematically vary. The experimental or testing techniques at the command of the natural scientist are designed to isolate and to identify definite regularities in observed phenomena. The phenomena studied must, by definition, be regular and repeatable, and subject to control and manipulation by experimental procedures, and capable of being separated from the natural environment for the purpose of study.

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In domains of complexity, however, this conception of experimentation—as the ability to isolate relevant phenomena in an experimentally designed “box” apart from the rest of the natural order—can never be realized (nor can it be even in the quantum domain of physics). It is not possible to experiment because all the relevant variables cannot be either isolated or controlled. In addition, it is not possible because subjects are never exactly identical to other subjects. They are unique and require a historical analysis to determine how they are related to other subjects. Physical objects, on the other hand, are identical—one electron or photon is completely identical to any other electron or photon, and both will behave in identical fashion in any situation. Instead of the experimental isolation of relevant variables found in physics, empirical research in the social domains consists in the construction of situations in which we demonstrate to ourselves that we can produce patterns of “facts” of which we are already well aware. Our demonstration studies “test” our theoretical models only in the sense that they compare the consistency of our theoretical model (the range of possibilities it allows) with our available analogical knowledge of social phenomena. They neither confirm nor refute them in any logical sense. We are in the position of W. V. O. Quine’s hypothetical linguist attempting to experimentally “induce” what his informant means when he says something as a “response” to some “environment.” Quine’s example was an informant uttering “gavagai” in the presence of a rabbit. We cannot infer that that utterance means the same as rabbit. It might refer to a young rabbit, an old rabbit, stages of rabbithood, not being a squirrel, or an indefinite number of other things. This is why what Quine (1960) called the problem of radical indeterminacy of translation is indeed in point of fact always indeterminate. All we can do is get larger and larger samples of the informant’s speech and check them for consistency with our hypothesis. The informant, as a subject of conceptual thought and not a passive physical object, is qualitatively different from an electron as an object. It is worth noting that this point about empirical (but not experimental) demonstration is in agreement with both of the classic fathers of psychology in the 1870s, Wundt and Brentano. Wundt’s original program, sketched in his Physiological Psychology, was to leave the “lower” mental processes such as sensory physiology to experimental procedures

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where control and isolation were (hopefully) possible, while treating the “higher” mental processes such as language and thought in his Volkerpsychologie, where demonstration studies and gathering information by case studies was all that was available. This domain was to be studied historically and with cultural anthropological techniques. Brentano, in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, defined psychology as the study of the higher mental processes and argued that although an empirical discipline, it could not be experimental. This point of agreement in otherwise opposed viewpoints, to say nothing of its implication for the conduct of research, was lost with the rise of scientistic positions such as behaviorism, which owed their success in the main to either ignoring the higher cognitive phenomena or reductively defining them into nothing but “lower” mental processes.4

Experimentation and the Problem of Measurement Before we can do experiments we have to have measures. Measures require that the assignment of numbers to “data” fulfill the requirements of the appropriate scaling theory. The easiest way to understand why neither psychology, economics nor any other social domain can be experimental in the manner of physics is to note that experimentation requires measurement, and not just the mere assignment of numbers to records of events. An experiment constructs a repeatable situation by the use of artifacts chosen by an experimenter in order to eliminate two sources of error—first, fortuitous changes in the setup conditions of the experiment—usually called boundary or initial conditions; and second, systematic factors in the subject matter—which are “errors” only for this experiment, and become the subject matter of inquiry in subsequent experimentation. Experiments attempt to determine lawful regularity in dynamical variability by factoring out or controlling all except variation showing the lawful relations. This requires measurement of the essential variables. Measurement requires that the conditions of quantity must be satisfied in order to be meaningful (see Michell, 1997; Nagel, 1961; Stevens, 1951; Trendler, 2009). Quantity refers to a kind of property

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possessed by empirical objects (in physics, such things as length, width, height, mass, or temperature) which vary in terms of their magnitudes (specific levels or amounts). We must have this information in order to interpret any experiment as meaningful . But quantitative structure can be ascribed to some attribute of choice only if it empirically satisfies the conditions of quantity. This implies that we need to adequately test empirical hypotheses to determine if the conditions of quantity are satisfied. The first and most basic condition of quantity requires that any two magnitudes of the same quantity be either identical or different. What happens if we try to test even this first and easiest condition of quantity in social studies? The problem is that we cannot achieve even this simple result. Psychology provides a clear case: Psychological phenomena are not sufficiently manageable. That is, they are neither manipulable nor are they controllable to the extent necessary for empirically meaningful application of measurement theory. Hence they are not measurable… Contrary to physical phenomena, psychological phenomena cannot be made to depend on a small set of manageable conditions.… The very effective method used in physics of manipulating and controlling phenomena through apparatus construction is not applicable in psychology. (Trendler, 2009, p. 592)

And it is clear that if psychology cannot experiment, neither can economics nor social or political theory, nor indeed any other discipline that deals with living subjects—all of whom are entirely different in terms of their evolutionary and developmental history from any other subject Note that measurement is entirely dependent upon scaling theory. One must select the appropriate scaling techniques in order to know that what is “measured” (really, what the marks put down on paper or recorded by a computer that an experimenter actually “records” or describes) is meaningful according to the scaling technique employed. It was a happy historical accident that physics was able to employ what are today called ratio scales (and often a restricted ratio scale with an absolute zero point specified) for its variables. The requirements for ratio scaling are far stricter than those scales that are available in psychology and economics—usually nominal, ordinal, and sometimes interval scaling

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techniques. That means that when we attempt to use ratio scaling (especially statistical techniques that require ratio scaling) to analyze psychological results, the conclusion is simply not meaningful. We have no way of determining what the data actually support or deny. Since we have never succeeded in fulfilling any of the conditions of quantity, we cannot legitimately draw the sorts of conclusions that physicists can draw when they make measurements according to ratio scaling techniques. We can generalize Trendler’s (ibid., p. 593) melancholy conclusion from psychology to all the social studies: The application of measurement theory, irrespective of whether it is construed as deterministic or probabilistic, is also not relevant to achieving substantial progress in psychology. Other, more suited methods for the domain of psychology must be found. It might therefore be wise to seriously reconsider Johnson’s recommendation: “Those data should be measured which can be measured; those which cannot be measured should be treated otherwise. Much remains to be discovered in scientific methodology about valid treatment and adequate and economic description of non-measurable facts.” (Johnson, 1936, p. 351).

Social Science Is Fine with Demonstration Studies So where are the social studies without the equivalent of natural laws and physical science measurements? Where we always have been. We are looking for rules, not laws of nature. Rules are neither inexorable nor inviolate. They are regularities (statements of regular behavior), and they have a developmental history analogous to living subjects. Further, they are subject to error (laws clearly are not) and can be corrected or modified by larger samples of data (or even the first actual samples). What we do in psychological research is set up demonstration situations in which we look for happy accidents, i.e., “clear cases” that show us, with minimal constraint imposed by any apparatus and research situations, what the regularities or rules seem to be. The seemingly more advanced field of economics does exactly the same thing. Empirical research in economics

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looks at differences in results that have arisen as a result of different initial conditions. The “testing” of an economic hypothesis is thus always after the fact. All we can do is look for patterns of regularity that differ between the situations chosen for study. And we do this “looking” only after recording, which is to say, only after the fact of using scaling techniques to apply numbers that are less informative than the ratio numbers of physics. The paramount question is what actual information can be provided in these “experiments.” The situation in the social domains is exactly as Hayek reminded us: in physics all the individual phenomena are regarded as exactly alike and totally interchangeable. When dealing with living and social phenomena that is never the case: no two human individuals are ever exactly the same, and they are usually completely different in terms of their prior experience and learning history, their values and needs, and in general, all the variables we have chosen to study. We will never be able to measure all those differences. All we will ever be able to do is record their existence. What we can expect from science in these domains is fundamentally different from the point prediction of results that we have come to expect in physics. All we have available is explanation of the principle and the “prediction” of general patterns of behavior.5

The Power and Role of Negative Rules in Complex Orders Organisms learn something new only when an expectation, the equivalent of a theoretical hypothesis in science, is falsified. This is why so-called inductive confirmation cannot exist, whether conceived as knowing “for certain” or merely knowing “probabilistically.” This methodological point has been argued extensively by Bartley (1984) and Weimer (1979). What organisms (such as humans) learn is not what is correct or “true,” but rather what mistakes to avoid making again. We learn what does not work. And in that respect there is no difference between a scientist’s most esoteric conjecture, a rat’s deciding to try a new maze alley, or the simplest organism with a nervous system trying

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to find nourishment. In an unpredictable world with unforeseen consequences resulting from both behavior and changes in the environment, it is possible to learn new things about situations when an hypothesis is shown to be falsified, i.e., when it does not lead to an expected result. But it is not possible to learn more than that an hypothesis is thus far compatible with our expectation in the event of a “positive” or confirming instance. What we learn is what mistakes not to make, not that we are ever “right” or that the hypothesis is “proven true” or “justified.” A similar situation obtains in the interactions of individuals in the social cosmos.

Negative Rules of Order Constrain Behavior in the Social Cosmos This is because positive rules that specify particular actions or results to achieve cannot deal with the indefinite welter of events in the cosmos. Novelty can never be addressed by positive prescriptions (if something novel occurs it has to have broken free of the prescription, which, by definition, had specified the already known as what was to be achieved). Successful theorizing in domains of essential complexity utilizes a context of constraint consisting of three overarching regulative principles in order to specify the regularity of these dynamic equilibrating systems. These constantly changing systems exist and evolve only as a delicate balance of essential tensions. Three sets of principles regulate change in every spontaneous order I am aware of. The first principle is creativity or productivity. These phenomena exhibit fundamental novelty, change at the level of particulars that is inherently unpredictable. The second principle is rhythm and its progressive differentiation over the time dimension. Changes in rate-dependent (patterned) domains are subject to dynamical laws rather than being rate independent. The third principle is regulation by opponent processes. As a result of the tension, development fluctuates between extremes that constrain the limit of possible changes. An example is provided by the nature of cybernetic steering or control mechanisms: an autopilot or helmsman steers a boat by small deliberate swings around a central tendency, thus

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constraining the deviations from an expectation of direction into as close an approximation of a straight path along the specified course as is physically realizable. Interaction of these three principles creates an essential tension, literally a context of constraint, between the previous form of organization, the present state, and allowed future changes. This is an essential tension between tradition and innovation, stability and change, and it is a dynamic equilibrating tendency common to all essential complexity. It shows the superior power of forces of disequilibrium over equilibrium in such structures. As Lachmann (1971) said, we have to account for “those disequilibrating forces which prevent equilibrium from being reached. In other words, to explain the continuous nature of the market process is the same thing as to explain the superior strength of the forces of disequilibrium” (p. 48). We see this power first manifested in the orienting response to novel stimulation in the CNS of chordate organisms. Against a dynamic ongoing pattern of neural activity as a background (as close to equilibrium as can ever occur in a living system) the occurrence of novel stimulation disequilibrates the ongoing pattern and begins an ongoing process toward re-equilibration. This is the first judgment or decision on the part of the nervous system—it must decide whether a new pattern is significantly different from the background. This is a dynamic process which tends toward equilibrium but which, due to the ever present occurrence of new stimulation, can never attain it. These regulatory principles are strikingly different from the “positive” principles that prescribe particulars in simple domains—these abstract regulatory principles are essentially negative or prohibitory of certain classes of action. The context of constraint manifests its power by prohibiting the occurrence of particular classes of events, while allowing others to be unconstrained. This allows for the occurrence of novelty. Creativity and complexity can neither be explained nor brought about by the positive prescription of particulars (e.g., commands that one must do X in situation Y). Successful theory is negative: it specifies its domain in terms of constraints that the phenomena cannot violate. Consider the difference between two types of directives. First, the “simple” prescription of a particular behavior: sit up straight in your chair. This is algorithmic or computable, and we can all decide whether or

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not a subject has completed this task. In contrast consider the directive: lead a just life. This is abstract, indeterminate, and not computable, or capable of fulfillment by specification of a list of positive particular actions. It is a never-ending task whose precise character can never be specified in advance (it would take specification of an infinite number of particulars). It is not a computable function—and thus the computation metaphor of mind so popular is not adequate to address this. The only way this command can be approached is negatively, as a directive prohibiting all forms of injustice. The taboos and “don’t do’s” are the only type of rules that regulate indefinitely specified and unforeseen conduct in the spontaneous cosmos. This is why the principles of morality, the abstract rules of conduct in a spontaneously arisen order, are workable only as prohibitions to certain classes of actions.4 Even when given positive verbal formulations the mores and conventions we follow in society are negative prohibitions in their import. They work precisely because they tell us what mistakes to avoid without attempting to delimit in advance what class of particulars must be achieved. They allow novel behavior to occur rather than restricting us to what is already known. The practice of falsification in scientific praxis is an example of this essentially negative information transmission system. Since all theories worthy of our exploration are productive, i.e., have an infinitude of particulars as their logical consequences, it follows that confirming results (no matter how many) can never show that a theory is true. All we can do is show that a theory is false (which is to say, inconsistent with the combination of the theory plus background assumptions) if even one of its predicted results fails to obtain. We then know that we cannot retain both the theory and all of those assumptions. We have no more information available to us than this bare minimum. All we can do then is test the assumptions to see if we can localize the inconsistency (for an elaboration of the topic of negative rules see Weimer, 2020). This distinction first began to be clear when nomos, as the abstract rule of law in a cosmos, was recognized as different from thesis, the legislative direction to achieve a particular end. When the task to be achieved is specific (as we would say today, a determinately computable outcome) a positive rule which enumerates all those outcomes suffices. When a standing order task, one that cannot be delimited in terms of

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any number of specific actions, no matter how large, is at issue it simply cannot be addressed by thesei. The issue involved is not simply the fact that nomos is abstract—it has to do with the fact that abstractly specified domains are indefinitely extended, and the only way to specify them is in terms of negative prohibitions. This problem of how to convey information in a usable form throughout the social order has vexed the formulation of moral rules. We all intuitively understand that the classic taboos—formulations that start “do not”—such as “do not commit adultery” or “do not commit murder,” convey a maximal amount of information. But we seem to insist upon formulating other moral rules as positive prescriptions—as in Kant’s categorical imperative to act unto others as you would have them act unto you. The problem here is the same: stated as a positive prescription it cannot address unknown or unforeseen circumstances or situations. To specify how such a categorical imperative would apply to unknown future situations would require transmitting an immense amount of knowledge to all the members of society. Because this is both conceptually and, in this case more importantly, practically impossible, we resort to negative prohibitions. We translate Kant into: “Never do unto others what they may do that you would not condone if done to yourself.” One must have the negative in the formulation to adequately delimit the sphere of actions to which it applies without attempting to list infinite particulars. Given the finite nature of our information processing capabilities, there is no other way to deal with indefinitely extended domains. Morality always faces what Wundt called the heterogony of ends.6

The Catallactic Order and Its Genesis We need to understand that the human mind can never have created the catallactic order. The mind is instead the product of that order. The constructivist has it backward: we are the result of group selection according to abstract rules that we have only begun to understand. Those rules coordinate an individual’s actions, and those actions then exert selection pressure on group reproduction. What we regard as our

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highest product, our conscious reason, has been created by our interaction with that order. Modern society is the result of two evolutionary forces: the first, long emphasized by economists, is the division of labor. The second, almost universally ignored, is the division of knowledge that is an inevitable accompaniment of the division of labor. These are mechanisms of social evolution because they have enabled those groups who employ them to supplant those groups who did not. These divisions decentralize control (away from the father figure or mother or tribal leader or ruling council or committee) and, along with the development of the concept of property, freedom of contract, law, and other factors of voluntary cooperation, allow a spontaneous order of actions to take the place of consciously directed commands to bring about particular aims. The market order is a means that serves indefinitely extended classes of different ends for indefinitely extended groups of different individuals and allows each individual who participates in the order to take advantage of resources (especially knowledge, but also their own labor) that vastly exceed the capabilities of any single individual or even tribe. Competition for scarce resources, as the mechanism of the market order, is a discovery procedure for the production of new “goods” (knowledge, matériel, wealth, or whatever). And competition is also the most effective cooperative procedure when the benefit of all who participate is considered—by competing, individuals are made to cooperate with unknown others for the benefit of them all. From the selfish the selfless arises. Modern society is abstract and impersonal; we no longer know the members of our tribe or identity group affiliation, nor do we interact with those others directly in the production of goods or services, or even in the conduct of our daily lives. But by participating in this order we bring about benefits to ourselves and to unknown numbers of others that greatly exceed what we could have produced in any face-to-face or tribal grouping when attempting to aid particular individuals. This order of interaction arose without planning when small groups stumbled upon the fact that individuals can benefit to different degrees from the same goods. This was not consciously known to the groups. It is rather that groups exhibiting this behavior came to displace those who did not. When different individuals have different uses for the same goods, barter and trade arose as a means by which the parties could

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benefit in return for providing the others with what they desired. When this procedure was extended to unknown individuals united only by rules which prescribe property ownership and transfer of property by consent, the market order arises. In the open-endedness or productive power of the market order, with the decentralized information processing capacity of spontaneous interaction, humanity created all the benefits and drawbacks of our abstract society. Behavior in this order unleashes the most powerful force on this planet, and its open-endedness has brought us all our wealth and material goods, all the knowledge of science and power of technology, and all the culture we possess. Market orders allow us to reap the benefits of knowledge possessed by others without having to learn all their knowledge ourselves. Thus they are the means by which our capabilities for knowing and acting are extended beyond the limits of any single individual. We no longer have to fend for ourselves for everything. The market order allows unknown and divergent (often conflicting) ends to be achieved by a common means. The tremendous advantage of markets is that they are merely means connected and thus remain open, i.e., requires no agreement whatever on specific ends for individuals to possess in order for them to participate in the order. All that an individual needs to know is provided by the momentary price of goods or services. The price mechanism provides the signal or information that gives the market its superior efficiency for the achievement of any end. This totally impersonal factor is crucial: all any market participant needs to know is his or her local knowledge—what goods or services are available and at what price where they are available. The current price of goods or services is always a signal to an individual indicating what should be procured (or what is too expensive) to realize that individual’s given end at a given time. Thus a gain to one’s self, purchasing at the lowest available price what one needs, also serves the needs of unknown others. It is as Hayek (1976) said: “Each is made by the visible gain to himself to serve needs which to him are invisible, and in order to do so to avail himself of to him unknown particular circumstances which put him in the position to satisfy these needs at as small a cost as possible in terms of other things which it is possible to produce instead” (ibid., p. 116).

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This is what underlies Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the efficiency of an impersonal order based upon negative feedback controls that arose spontaneously as a result of a context of constraints. Individuals learn what they are able to do in the market order in terms of discovering what courses of action they cannot afford to engage in. This economy of knowledge transmission (understanding that something is too expensive) is the key to the superior power of the order. It is why the social selfless arises out of the individually selfish. When you take advantage of the order by making a purchase (satisfying your individual ends) you provide information (which adjusts the price system) that then benefits all other market participants.

We Are Indispensably Adapted to Ignorance We can never satisfy expectations in advance in an order that has no common ends—we can only aim at providing the best basis for eliminating unnecessary uncertainty, and in so doing to secure continual adaptation to what could not have been known before. Our conceptions of justice and fairness require only that everyone be allowed to play the game of catallaxy—without the rules being broken to favor anyone over anyone else. Uncertainty and ignorance are indispensable to the game, if we try to eliminate them it would destroy the spontaneous order and turn the social cosmos into a taxis. This is why justice and fairness require only that everyone be allowed to play the game—in that sense justice is blind to the particular. Since adaptation to a cosmos is a never-ending task of trial and error, and it must involve constant risk and disappointment of the expectations of all involved, including those who achieve their ends and come into great rewards, there can be no assurance of achieving any benefit. No one can correctly anticipate the particulars of the market order—not even those whom the order rewards. Market participants must remain ignorant in two respects: first, who else (which individuals) are order participants and what constitutes their local knowledge; second, how the order actually works in any given instance. We should not know the individuals involved because our “tribal” emotions would no doubt cause us to overcompensate those we regard as somehow

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disadvantaged (or shun participating with those we dislike or consider overprivileged) and thus distort the efficiency of the order. And if we knew the specific workings we would certainly attempt, like the oligarchs and overlords of more tribally oriented societies, to rig the outcome for our particular benefit, and thus replace the spontaneous order with a command structure. We can survive only by strictly adhering to negative rules of order (our social, moral, and occupational taboos which outline our acceptable social organizing principles). Our conscious rationality alone is not what leads us out into the unknown and the unforeseen. We are led out into an uncertain world by consistently adhering to a framework of abstract rules that are often unknown to us even when we attempt to discern them.

Science Is Both a Social Cosmos Constrained by Negative Rules and a Taxis Activity Directed to Particular Results Science, like society, contains taxis and tribal components that are constrained by being embedded in a wider cosmic order. Scientific methodology tries to reconcile how these opponent process factors both occur. Kuhn’s conception (1970, 1977) of normal science as paradigmbased puzzle solving (according to inculcated traditions that arise within the history of a research community directed to particular ends) is a pioneering account of science as a tribal process that eventually pushes beyond itself into the market or catallactic order. The power of tradition in the unverbalized but undergone initiation into rules of “scientific methodology” is the tacit knowledge that an apprentice researcher gradually learns from being around more established practitioners. Novices just “pick up” the rules of practice from exposure to the behavior of more senior researchers. This tacit dimension of research practice cannot be captured in explicit methodological prescriptions (as Polanyi, 1958, emphasized). For science as a whole, including all relevant research communities, negative prohibitions constitute the only

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enduring methodological rules. Many of those have been familiar from Popper’s (1959, 1963) discussions, and they include the obvious ones of do not fabricate data, do not ignore contrary results, do not plagiarize, etc. Indeed Popper even characterized the empirical domain of a theory, the so-called primary data of science, negatively, as that which is forbidden to occur (if this given theory is correct). C. S. Peirce proposed a supreme maxim in a lecture in 1898 that is now a universal commonplace: “There follows one corollary which deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry” (Peirce, 1992, p. 178). But following these negative constraints guides puzzle solving research to the limits of what is foreseen by the available theory and research. At those limits, at the fringe, anomalous results that do not fit the paradigm expectations begin to accumulate. When that happens, researchers begin to explore what is outside the delimited structure provided by the paradigm and its exemplars, and sooner or later someone sees far enough into the cosmos surrounding that normal science tradition to suggest looking at things in a different way. When such a “revolutionary” reconceptualization occurs, the entire conception of science (for that research community) will over time change to embrace what will become a new accepted paradigm structure. In this process science has a mechanism that both explores in detail what we think we know according to the perspective at the present time (normal science research) and in that exhaustive exploration, research is invariably led beyond itself into a new and more informative framework (revolutionary reconceptualization). This is an opponent process model that vacillates between two extremes. Like the cybernetic helmsman, science attempts to steer a straight line, but it does so by tacking back and forth between the power of tradition and the necessity to break with it in order to provide a new tradition that is ultimately seen as more adequate. The history of science is a history of alternating periods of attempts at normal science taxis practice interrupted by or punctuated by the intrusion of the spontaneous cosmos at the edge of normal science, which shows the inevitable limits within which that praxis must be embedded. Like the stars seen at night, crises and revolutions make the darkness of the cosmic fringe surrounding normal praxis very visible,

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while the daylight attempts at normal science puzzle solving show only the dazzling sun of that research tradition shining at the center of the starless enshrined puzzle solving exemplars. Normal science traditions are prescriptive of particulars to be achieved (because it is assumed that they are within reach). The research community believes that we are at some specified point A and says that our task is to achieve another point B, which although presently unknown will be recognized by the researchers in the community when it is found. The task of normal science puzzle solving is to ingeniously find a way from point A to the anticipated but as yet unavailable point B. Revolutions occur sooner or later because of the inevitability of our ignorance and error, which is exposed at the limits of the taxis approach when the cosmos intrudes with anomalous results at the fringes. But while it occurs, normal science attempts to block out certain avenues of inquiry which are beyond acceptability and to prevent researchers from straying into those areas. It sanctions only specific approaches that are manifested in the exemplary puzzles to which that tradition adheres.

Society Evolves in Analogous Fashion to Science Society as a whole is comparable to the catallactic order surrounding normal science research. Within that abstract framework certain traditions come to resemble normal science puzzle solving. Society gains new knowledge (what we ordinarily call common sense) as the details of overall market exchange and more restricted taxis organizations accumulate. We gradually learn two classes of things: what works tolerably well in the traditions and framework, and when they occur, the unintended consequences of our actions that have changed how we interpret that framework of tradition. For instance, the Western world and especially the United States and Great Britain have recently undergone a push toward what is euphemistically called free trade—dropping restrictions to trade (tariffs) in order to take advantage of the fact that other markets than our domestic ones may produce the goods and services we want at a lower price. Thus the prices of many of our consumer goods have

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steadily dropped (relative to inflation) over the last several decades. We have learned that “farming out” the manufacture of a wide range of goods can be accomplished more cheaply even when the increased cost in transportation from far away is factored in to the overall price. So for that reason, score some points for the advocates of laissez-faire trade. Unfortunately we have found that there are many unanticipated consequences to this “global” approach, and they have greatly increased the actual cost of such goods. For example, we now face a tremendous problem of invasive species having hitchhiked to North America in the ballast and holds of cargo ships and in the wood or packing materials used to protect manufactured products. As a result our North American rivers and lakes are being decimated by the introduction of the Asian carp, a voracious predator destroying native fish, because there are no predators here to keep it in check. Similarly, the Asian Emerald Ash Borer is decimating our hardwood forests and some conifers because nothing holds it in check here in North America. Earlier we faced exactly the same problem when the American elm became extinct as a result of an invasion of the Dutch Elm disease. Before that it was the American chestnut tree that was overpowered by an introduced disease. Similarly, we are now in the midst of a health pandemic due to a coronavirus that appears to have spread in Chinese bat populations that also spreads rapidly to human beings. We have only now realized that we need to have large reserves of local or native supplies of medicines and ancillaries such as personal protection gear (such as N95 masks). Some things arise from obvious benefits that could have been predicted but were never considered. For instance, the US Interstate highway system was a boon to travel and a necessity for national defense, but no one bothered to think that the pest of the southwest, the coyote, would use the resultant land bridge system to infiltrate the remainder of the country and totally disrupt the ecosystems there. The increased availability of travel and the relative decrease in its cost, which would normally be considered positive to all concerned, turn out to have had very unpleasant side effects which have considerably increased the actual costs involved, including the present buzz word problem of global temperature increases, perhaps due to burning excessive amounts of petroleum-based fuels.

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Similar problems are occurring with the increase in movement of individuals between sovereign countries. Immigration is a currently unsolved problem because it has very high costs associated with it. Advocates of freely allowing immigration point out that our country was entirely founded by immigrants from many different nations (an argument which totally ignores the population of Asian “bridge” and boat people who were here before the European invasion), and that it thrived as a result. Advocates now incorrectly call them “migrants” (migration occurs within a country, immigration when borders are crossed). Opponents of free immigration correctly point out that when the country was founded it was largely unsettled and land and resources were freely available to all those who expended the effort to go out, as settlers, and utilize them. Now, however, there is no frontier left anywhere in any Western country, and while the early immigrants were perfectly willing to “make do” on their own (without then nonexistent welfare and subsidies from the government) according to their own abilities, we have now changed our social organization to a welfare state where any new immigrant who does not bring sufficient wealth or job skills to earn their own living is a net cost to the taxpayers of the country. So the situation in which immigration was once a benefit is not what we have today. There are no longer any open frontiers and freely available resources. And the presence of clusters of immigrants in small areas leads to conflicts of religions and customs that often totally disrupt the previous “locals.” Such issues present an unresolved tension that is presently shaping not only individual citizens’ attitudes and behaviors but the policies legislated into existence by our government. This has created a political party divide, with in the United States the Democrats supporting unlimited immigration (believing that the newcomers will then vote for them) and the Republicans supporting restrictions (believing that the current legal residents will continue to vote them into office). This conflict provides a prime example of the conflict between the ancient emotions of our gut—directing us toward tribalism and benevolence—and our dawning understanding of the superior power of the abstract order, directing us toward implicit cooperation in the market instead of benevolence (see Levendis et al., 2020). We will examine that side of the problem in Chapter 5 below.

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Consequences for Understanding the Social Domains Earlier I noted three principles that constrain all complex phenomena: productivity or creativity, rhythm, and opponent processes. We need to study more carefully how these principles occur in various domains. The problem of creativity is easily studied by looking at what does and does not change in cases of revolutionary reconceptualization. Kuhn’s evolutionary account of science provides a model for understanding how novel formulations arise. We need to understand more adequately what factors (or clusters of factors) are most common to these episodes, and most importantly, to see how they differ in the “moral” sciences from cases in the hard sciences. The rhythm of the opponent processes has not been studied at all. One common-sense observation is that the speed of change has increased considerably since the time of the ancient Greeks. We need more careful study of what factors influenced the so-called Renaissance 500 years ago, in order to see if those factors have changed substantially as we get closer to the present. We also need to study instances of the retardation of advancement or creativity in a field (see Young and Weimer, 2021) to see how, for example, the effects of an overly dominant personality can constrain the development of a normal science research program. We have just begun to study both science and society as an evolving series of social structures and context of constraints. Complex dynamic self- “equilibrating” orders are an essential tension of constraints exhibiting productivity, rhythm, and opponent process regulation, and it is time for in depth study of how this is so.

Notes 1. It doesn’t work in physics either. Since the 1950s this positivistic conception of laws being deduced from theories and in turn entailing the occurrence of factual propositions has been increasingly questioned by philosophers and practicing scientists. Physicist David Bohm (1965) argued that science is simply an extension of perception, specifically a search for invariants in the perceptual array, rather

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than an accumulation of “knowledge” when that latter is conceived to be the codification of facts. He felt knowledge is a higher-level abstraction, based on what is invariant in a wide range of experiences (see p. 219). At about the same time philosopher Wilfred Sellars (1963) argued that the laws of nature are “season inference tickets,” i.e., generative conceptual schemata that enable one to infer to an indefinitely extended domain of empirical occurrences. N. R. Hanson (1958, 1970) argued that theories are “structural representations” of reality. Those structural representations are abstract principles that are similar to what Bohm regarded as perceptual invariants. At about the same time Körner (1966) showed that the so-called “deductive unification of experience” by theories entailing covering laws could never in fact occur, since the only linkage between experience and theory had to be a theoretical identification rather than a deductive consequence: no empirical statement is ever a logical consequence of the theory. So if the dominant model of explanation does not work in the hard sciences it cannot possibly work in the social domains either (see also Weimer, 1979). 2. The founders of A I research never questioned the adequacy of the hard sciences explanation of particulars model. Assuming that linear and hierarchical models (examined in detail in Chapter 2) were adequate to understanding intelligence, they made literally absurd claims. The history of Artificial Intelligence is rife with presumptions of knowledge and top-down style solutions.… The ambition of early pioneers is well captured in the words of Herbert Simon, “Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.” It was 1965 when he made that claim. Shortly thereafter, in 1966, Seymour Papert and others at MIT proposed they would solve vision during that summer. (Ott, 2020, p. 60)

It never occurred to these mathematically sophisticated and dedicated constructivists that such programs could never succeed because complex phenomena, such as human cognition (and vision, as von Neumann had emphasized) would require a fundamentally

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different approach from what had been successful with the “simple” phenomena of physical science. Hopefully we will someday realize that Comte’s approach is and always has been smoke and mirrors substituting for science. 3. We might note in this regard that the recent Keynesian “revolution” in economic interventionism is in large measure the triumph of both rationalist constructivism and an outmoded conception of what science should be. Keynes attempted to bypass all the difficult problems of micro-level foundations for economics by concentrating on easily numbered, but not therefore quantified, aggregate relationships. It was easy to pretend that this approach assured that one could both “measure” simple relationships between “global” phenomena and simultaneously give theoretical legitimacy to the interventionist policies that, as a result of desperation, were employed in the depression. Thus Keynes could argue that employment could be “caused” by deficit spending, if only the government would simultaneously “create” jobs. Similarly, it was assumed by later interventionists that something like the Phillips curve is an “exploitable” relationship involving “rational expectations.” But this entire framework assumes that economic “laws” relating macro-phenomena can be discovered and then manipulated as easily as physical theory did the same for something like Newton’s F = ma. This quest for control as found in the physical sciences, and the will to power (so common in constructivist thought) put Keynes and his intellectual descendents in the same class as Comte and Skinner. Even if there are simple descriptive laws of the market (such as, for example, supply and demand) it does not follow that they can be directly manipulated or “intervened” with. Keynesians never distinguished between planning for progress by setting up an efficient self-organizing market, and planning progress by reducing the cosmos to a taxis. As Hayek (1978) noted about his opponent, Keynes’ theories will appear merely as the most prominent and influential instance of a general approach the philosophical justification of which seems to be highly questionable. Though with its reliance on apparently measurable magnitude it appears at first more scientific

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than the older micro-theory, it seems to me that it has achieved this pseudo-exactness at the price of disregarding the relationships which really govern the economic system. (p. 289)

For further discussion of Keynes along lines noted here see Butos (1994, 2020) and McCormick (1992). 4. This is why even the most avid constructivist and progressivist writers are forced to use negative rules of order when they talk about morality. Consider Bertrand Russell in this regard, who said that the 10 Commandments that, as a teacher, he should wish to promulgate, would be set forth as follows: a. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything. b. Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is surely to come to light. c. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed. d. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory. e. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found. f. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you. g. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. h. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent then in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter. i. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it. j. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness. These rules are repeated in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (vol. 3, 1969, pp. 71–72), after first appearing in 1951, so he felt them important enough to reprint after nearly 2 decades. Note that each

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one is either directly stated as a negative prohibition to action or is easily translated (and shortened in so doing) into one. It is simply not possible to state these as positive prescriptions of particular behaviors that one must achieve: the list required to do so would be neverending. That is the superior power of the negative rule in the tuition of what the computer would find to be a nonterminating “positive” command. 5. This makes the interpretation of otherwise innovative and informative research very difficult. The entire “behavioral economics” and “experimental economics” literature is a case in point. Competent researchers such as Smith (2007, 2019), who is a defender of the overall arguments of these volumes, unfortunately defend their empirical demonstration results as being “experiments,” and in arguing against a priori explicit “rational” positions (that turn out to be false when confronted with actual behavior), portray themselves as hard headed experimentalists rather than rationalist apriorists. Examination of the empirical situations Smith and others actually set up indicates that they are demonstrations of empirical phenomena rather than the actual experimental controlled manipulation of ratio scaled variables that is found in the physical sciences. 6. A number of us (Blumenthal, 1970, 1977; Weimer, 1974, 1987) attempted to bring this approach back to a more mainstream position. I note here only Wundt’s (1902) refutation of the constructivist approach to psychology later endorsed by Watson, Skinner, and the behaviorists. Speaking of what he called the law of heterogony of ends (which he defined as the productivity or creativity of actions which always extend beyond their original motivation), he opposed the positivist approach this way: While it [the law] teaches that every state is the necessary preparation for that which follows, it flatly forbids the setting of bounds to the course of future events for reasons drawn simply from our present outlook over the universe. Reality is always fuller and richer than theory. Hence the most that is allowed us is to anticipate the general outline of the course that will be taken by the immediate future. Here,

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then, the law warns us with no uncertain voice that we may not regulate the ends of morality at large to the narrow circle of our personal hopes and wishes. The particular thing must be regarded sub specie aeternitatis. At the same time, we may not, with the philosopher who coined this phrase, look upon the infinity as something given and hence directly apprehensible by our idea: we must rather consider it as a becoming, as an infinite problem, parts of which we come to know by solving them. (Wundt, 1902, p. 331)

Earlier Russell had refuted behaviorism by noting that our knowledge of the external world cannot be accounted for by phenomenalism in any form, and that the behaviorist could therefore not rely on what we naively take to be sense experience in the form of observation (of behavior), because the “observation” was not of reality but rather of the nervous system’s interpretation or construction of that external realm. So, for example, Skinner’s hated “man from within” is an intrinsic and indispensable part of all science. Here also was Wundt, presaging Chomsky’s emphasis on creativity or productivity by over half a century, noting that the fundamental fact of the higher mental processes of the man “within” was creativity, explainable only by recursive rules and not “laws” of anture. It is simply amazing that this double fronted repudiation of Comte’s social physics approach to the social domains is still ignored by so many.

References Bartley, W. W., III. (1962/1984). The retreat to commitment. Open Court (Now Cricket Media). Blumenthal, A. (1970). Language and psychology: Historical aspects of psycholinguistics. Wiley. Blumenthal, A. (1977). Wilhelm Wundt and early American psychology: A clash of two cultures. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 291(1), 13–20.

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Bohm, D. (1965). The special theory of relativity. W. A. Benjamin Inc. Butos, W. (1994). The Hayek-Keynes macro debate. In P. J. Boettke (Ed.), Elgar companion to Austrian economics (pp. 471–477). Edward Elgar. Butos, W. (2020). The Keynes perplex. The Independent Review, 24 (4), 1–13. Hanson, N. R. (1958). Patterns of discovery: An inquiry into the conceptual foundations of science. Cambridge University Press. Hanson, N. R. (1970). A picture theory of theory meaning. In R. G. Colodny (Ed.), The nature and function of scientific theories (pp. 233–274). University of Pittsburgh Press. Hayek, F. A. (1952/1999). The sensory order. University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (1967). Studies in philosophy, politics, economics, and the history of ideas. University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (1976). Law, legislation and liberty: The mirage of social justice. University of Chicago Press; Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hayek, F. A. (1978/1985). New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas. University of Chicago Press. Hempel, C. G., & Oppenheim, P. (1948). Studies in the logic of explanation. Philosophy of Science, 15, 135–175. Johnson, H. M. (1936). Pesudo-mathematics in the mental and social sciences. American Journal of Psychology, 48, 342–351. Körner, S. (1966). Experience and theory. Humanities Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1962/1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1977). The essential tension: Selected studies in scientific tradition and change. University of Chicago Press. Lachmann, L. (1971). Ludwig von Mises and the market process. In F. A. Hayek (Eds.), Toward liberty: Essays in honour of Ludwig von Mises. Institute for Humane Studies. Levendis, J., Eckhardt, R. B., & Block, W. (2020). Evolutionary psychology, economic freedom, trade and benevolence. Review of Economic Perspectives/Narodohospodarsky, 19 (2), 73–94. McCormick, J. (1992). British Politics and the environment. Earthscan. Meehl, P. E. (1967). Theory testing in psychology and physics: A methodological paradox. Philosophy of Science, 34 (2), 103–115. Michell, J. (1997). Quantitative science and the definition of measurement in psychology. British Journal of Psychology, 88, 355–383. Nagel, E. (1961). The structure of science. Harcourt and Brace. Ott, J. (2020). The pretense of knowledge: On the insidious presumptions of artificial intelligence. Cosmos + Taxis, 8(10+11), 60–65.

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Peirce, C. S. (1992). Reasoning and the logic of things: The Cambridge conference lectures of 1898 (K. I. Kettner, Ed.). Harvard University Press. Polanyi, M. (1958/1974). Personal knowledge. Harper & Row; University of Chicago Press, 1974. Popper, K. R. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery. Harper. Popper, K. R. (1963). Conjectures and refutations. Harper & Row. Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and object. MIT Press. Rosenblueth, A., & Wiener, N. (1945). The role of models in science. Philosophy of Science, 12(4), 316–321. Russell, B. (1969). The autobiography of Bertrand Russell (Vol. 3). George Allen & Unwin. Sellars, W. S. (1963). Science, perception and reality. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Smith, V. L. (2007). Rationality in economics: Constructivist and ecological forms. Cambridge University Press. Smith, V. L. (2019). Humanomics: Moral sentiments and the wealth of nations for the twenty-first century. Cambridge University Press. Stevens, S. S. (1951). Mathematics, measurement, and psychophysics. In S. S. Stevens (Ed.), Handbook of experimental psychology (pp. 1–49). Wiley. Trendler, G. (2009). Measurement theory, psychology and the revolution that cannot happen. Theory & Psychology, 19 (5), 579–599. von Neumann, J. (1966). Theory of self-reproducing automata. University of Illinois Press. Weimer, W. B. (1974). The history of psychology and its retrieval from historiography: Part 1. Science Studies, 4, 235–258. Weimer, W. B. (1979). Notes on the methodology of scientific research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Weimer, W. B. (1987). Spontaneously ordered complex phenomena and the unity of the moral sciences. In G. Radnitzky (Ed.), Centripedal forces in the sciences (Vol. 1, pp. 257–296). Paragon House. Weimer, W. B. (2020). Complex phenomena and the superior power of negative rules of order. Cosmos + Taxis, 8, 39–59. Wundt, W. (1902). Ethics: The facts of the moral life (E. B. Titchener, J. H. Gulliver, & M. F. Washburn, Trans.). Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Young, N. P., & Weimer, W. B. (2021). The constraining influence of the revolutionary on the growth of the field. Axiomathes, 29 (4). https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10516-021-09584-1

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We are dealing here with parts of logics with which we have practically no past experience. The order of complexity is out of all proportion to anything we have ever known. We have no right to assume that the logical notations and procedures used in the past are suited to this part of the subject. John von Neumann The span of control of a spontaneous system, divided by the number of its members, increases proportionally to this number, while the span of control of a corporate system, divided by the number of its ultimate subordinates, is practically unaffected by an increase in the size of the system. Michael Polanyi

Classical liberalism provided the first consistent evolutionary approach to the genesis and growth of society. It did so by describing how society evolved from a limited structure or taxis organization to an unlimited spontaneously organized complex phenomenon which could be encompassed only by a cosmos. Two centuries later Hayek went back to the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume II, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95477-2_2

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Scottish moralists and their intellectual descendents to outline a theory of how that sort of complexity appears to be organized. It is time now to overview crucial features of that organization and to see how it applies to all spontaneously ordered complex phenomena instead of just the market order. Once it becomes obvious that such an account is required to explain biological evolution and speciation, the organization of the chordate nervous system, the psychology of cognition, the philosophical problems of inference and expectation, and more, we are in a position to see that the conception of humanity and society underlying progressivism and rationalist constructivism is not just missing details but is simply false. There is no sense in which it can be regarded as a viable alternative to liberalism, especially as a somehow “scientific” account that is in some fashion superior to the alleged “primitivism” of liberal thought. When one understands what must be present in their organizational structure to understand any spontaneously ordered complex phenomena, the progressivist approach becomes nothing but a nostalgic yearning for a mythical form of social organization that in fact never existed (or could have existed) in the form in which constructivists have argued. This chapter must build upon the previous three by detouring into other sciences and epistemology with respect to spontaneously ordered complexity. Then we can address tensions and problems that this evolutionary development forces upon us with increasing urgency in the final chapters.

The Nervous System as a Complex Phenomenon Studies in liberal philosophy rarely address spontaneous orders beyond the market order. Discussion usually centers on the problems of the economy of knowledge and its dispersion by the market, which, economically, is the most important factor in its functional superiority over taxis organizations. Since the market is a decentralized order, it is usually assumed that there is no control structure according to which it operates. There is little acknowledgment of how other spontaneous orders have arisen, or of the principles according to which they operate. Thus a

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detour to note how we function as psychological individuals can help inform those social and philosophical accounts. There are constraints that are common to spontaneously ordered (or grown) structures. We can begin to see this by examining the control structure of the mind. Although anatomically isolated within an individual’s body the CNS is as highly complex as any social cosmos, and in terms of numbers of constituents (about 5 × 1011 power of neurons in the human neocortex) the brain constitutes a far larger aggregation than the present world population. It is worth looking at possible mathematical systems and control relations that have been specified as models for its operation. We find when doing so that it has only been in the last 80 or 90 years that the necessary conceptual tools for such an analysis have been available. Prior to that it had simply been universally assumed that a linear or chaining model was adequate to explain brain functioning. This is why the doctrine of associationism, attempting to model neural function from an initial causal node or nexus through to subsequent nodes in deterministic billiard ball fashion, was so prevalent from the time of Hobbes through to Skinner. The next step “up” in control complexity is a hierarchical model, and theorists have proposed that as a replacement for associationism since World War II (see Hayek, 1952; Lashley, 1951; von Bertalanffy, 1968). At nearly the same time Polanyi (1951) emphasized a fundamentally different and more powerful model which he called a polycentric order, to explain the difference between the spontaneous market and simpler, more “monocentric” orders such as corporate control of a company. At that point, it became necessary to ask whether the central nervous system is functionally equivalent to a cosmos or to a taxis—whether a polycentric order or a giant hierarchy of hierarchical control structures that eventuate into linear chains (as associationism had proposed)? An easy way to answer the question is to consider the effect of disruption on possible control models. In a chaining model, breaking a link terminates ongoing performance at that point: there is no control passed over the disruption. Karl Lashley’s (1929) experimental results had already shown that no chaining model could possibly succeed1 — although behaviorists, blissfully unaware of physiological data as well as the nature of associationism, continued to utilize chaining models

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through the 1960s, and the Skinnerians still do. A hierarchical structure is far more powerful: since the controlling relations are from top to bottom rather than between adjacent terminal elements, even the removal (perhaps, as Lashley did, by cortical lesion) of a higher node does not totally disrupt behavior. Lashley’s earlier results had already supported that conclusion: the decrement in trained performance in various tasks was always partial, unless virtually all the cortex was obliterated. But a hierarchy, even if it has other hierarchies embedded under it, is still a centralized control structure with one node functioning as the chief executive officer (first considered as the little homunculus in the head, later as the “command neuron” hypothesis—see Meehl, 1989). So now the question became do we really have such a “little man or woman” upstairs in our heads? We can get rid of this piece of rationalist anthropomorphism very easily, despite the fact that our waking consciousness is quite pleased to be regarded as a single self who is in control of our behavior. Several lines of evidence are relevant. One is reflected in our intuitive familiarity with the tacit dimension of skilled performance. Not only can we recall a difficult problem (in say, algebraic structure theory or string theory in cosmology), but also we can do so while carrying on a conversation about something else as part of our tennis game, or while driving with a friend (during which we are also breathing, digesting our food, and carrying out myriad other bodily functions). While they all mutually interact they are far too independent to be within a single hierarchical structure. There is constant interaction—better put as mutual coordination—between highly complicated activities that individually might each look to be hierarchical, but there is no single locus of control. Another line of evidence stems from research begun by Roger Sperry (1969, 1976), when he sectioned the corpus callosum (the neural transmission highway between the two hemispheres). Here the data indicate a plurality of “selves” that function largely independently of each other when commissurotomy removes the main linkage between hemispheres. Such divided consciousness or “split brain” results support the ancient yoga tradition that asserted that consciousness and the other higher mental processes are but tools used by an “I” that cannot be exhaustively identified with any of them. This has led to the idea that the brain

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contains modules devoted to social and interpersonal communication (Adolphs, 2009; Fodor, 1983; Gazzaniga, 1985). Additional evidence for independence greater than that permitted by hierarchical control was provided by work on traumatic cerebral insult, such as the patients (largely war wounded) studied earlier by H. L. Teuber (1960), and the effects of direct cortical brain stimulation pioneered by Wilder Penfield (Penfield, 1975; Penfield & Roberts, 1959). Still a third line of research stems from looking at more basic biological processes such as the remodeling of the face and head during growth (pioneered by Enlow, 1968) to see the same problem: there is no single locus of control determining the remodeling of the face as an individual ages. When combined with the results from the complexity of language, initiated by Chomsky’s transformational revolution in linguistics in the late 50s and 60s, it becomes obvious that the human brain must minimally exemplify the degree of complexity of control Polanyi called a polycentric order, or more likely what von Foerster (1962) and Robert Shaw (Shaw & McIntyre, 1974) termed coalitional control. A person (a functioning CNS) as a whole seems to be a coalition of hierarchical structures, each embedded in one or another polycentric order somehow functionally but not anatomically allied together, but with no single locus of control except for brief periods of time when observable behavior appears to be exclusively occupied with a particular task, or when conscious awareness says “I am in charge of this.” There is cooperation and mutual coordination and constraint but no single control center. Decentralization of control is one of the definitive properties of polycentric orders and coalitions. A second is the lack of determinately specifiable boundaries among the coordinated systems. Perception is clearly not memory or locomotion, but one cannot sharply separate any of the three. Thus the boundaries of a coalition both as a whole and within itself are intrinsically “fuzzy.” A third crucial property is that coalitions are superadditive: as the Gestalt phrase put it, the whole is more than the additive sum of its parts. What the coalition can “do” is vastly greater than any of its components could do (even polycentric orders) when the components are summed up. Graphic illustration may help clarify what is involved in these control structures. Compare the control relationships represented by a chaining

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Fig. 2.1 Chaining control (lower linear line) versus hierarchical structuring

model and the hierarchy in Fig. 2.1. If one were to disrupt the chain (erase the linear linkage) at the occurrence of d, for example, the chain is broken and nothing else can occur. If we look at a hierarchy, if one were to remove the abstract or higher-level node labeled D, it would remove f and i, but the remainder of the sequence would still be intact. Now consider the circular structure Polanyi used to represent a polycentric order in Fig. 2.2. The complexity of relatedness in this arrangement increases as the number of nodes is increased, and the consequence of disruption at any given location is minimal in comparison with the hierarchical model of control. A still more adequate representation of a cosmos such as the brain would require a three dimensional sphere with control connections running through the interior of the sphere. By the time one considers the possible interconnections of 5 × 1011 power of neurons such a sphere is in effect a solid: anything can be connected with everything, and anything can “control” anything else in a dynamically active nervous system consisting of ever shifting patterns of neural activity. (Recall that Hobbes said that association “can lead the mind from anything to anything”—what he did not realize was that a surface structure chaining

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Fig. 2.2 Polanyi’s representation of polycentric control (From Polanyi, 1951)

model such as the British Associationists proposed could not do that.). One can also “see,” by looking at Fig. 2.2, why coalitions as systems of polycentric orders have fuzzy boundaries and superadditive capacity compared to single polycentric orders or hierarchies. Perhaps at this point one can better appreciate von Neumann’s remark that “the order of complexity is out of all proportion to anything we have ever known” (1951, p. 24). Subsequent research on the structural and functional organization of the cortex made it obvious that the brain functions as a distributed information processing system that is effectively coalitional. Forty odd years ago Mountcastle (1978) noted three findings that put brain functioning in a new light. First, the neocortex is constructed by a process of cloning identical multicellular units or modules (an organization first proposed by D. O. Hebb in 1949, and later elaborated by philosophers such as Fodor (1983)). The modular unit for the neocortex is a vertically organized or columnar group whose functioning appears to be similar

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throughout. Second, the extrinsic connectivity between larger anatomical entities in the brain is vastly greater than earlier research recognized. Third, the separate modules of large entities are fractionated in turn into subsets, linked by a particular pattern of connections to similar modules in other entities (this would be the highest level at which a “command neuron” (Meehl, 1989) could exist). The effect of these findings is to corroborate a picture of distributed systems linked in echeloned serial and parallel connections. Mountcastle emphasized that any information flow through such a system can follow a number of different pathways and that the dominance of one pathway over another is a dynamic and changing property of the system over time. There is no anatomical localization of functioning, only momentary patterning (Hayek, 1952) that transcends any anatomical localization. This leads to coalitional control that is distributed throughout the entire functioning system, so that any “command function” may from time to time reside at different points in the system, as determined by the entire interaction of all other functioning subunits. As Mountcastle (1978) said about the complex function controlled or executed by the system, it “is not localized in any one of its parts. The function is a property of the dynamic activity within the system: it resides in the system as such. Part functions, or simple aspects of simple function, may be executed by local operations in restricted parts of such a system” (p. 40). This capacity, underlying the tacit dimension of human cognition, is what separates us from a machine, including the conceptual machines we have produced such as Turing machines, so long as they are assumed to compute in discrete steps. Jacob Bronowski (1978) put this point succinctly in his Silliman lectures back in 1967: Where does the brain fail to be bound by those uncertainties and paradoxes (due to Gödel, Turing, and Tarski)?… The wholeness of the human being must not be violated by separating the brain from the body.… There is no little observer who looks at the camera obscura inside your head. This notion arises from problems of consciousness and selfconsciousness, divisions between the world and ourselves, and essentially it arises from the whole Cartesian dualism between the mind and the body. What is wrong with this? What is wrong is that if you think of

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the brain as receiving the information, processing it, and then giving an instruction to the muscle, you have already falsified the whole procedure. There is no nerve without the muscle and no muscle without the nerve in the total animal. (p. 99)

Sharply separating mind and body, or perceiving and acting (as computer simulators and information processing and AI approaches are want to do) is the same thing as putting the individual in a Skinner box—it attempts to treat a cosmos by restricting it to a taxis, as having a single “command neuron” instead of a dynamic coalitional structure. It is the idea of that “command” neuron that leads to postulating the equivalent of a homunculus in the head to do the ultimate perceiving and acting. The research cited above is by contemporary academic standards ancient history. Why have I not followed the publish or perish procedure of citing what has just come off the presses or the internet? I have done this to point out that this information has been available for decades. And its consequences have been ignored for those decades not only within psychology but also throughout the other social sciences. Economists neither know nor cite anything from this research, despite the fact that they are more than willing to borrow experimental techniques and statistical methodology from psychology. Social philosophers will occasionally look at such data, but usually only for its impact upon more traditional philosophical issues such as free will or how we perceive the external world. They do not make note of the point that I am emphasizing: that these results show that the individual human being functions exactly analogously to the way the evolutionary epistemologists and Scottish Moralists have said that the market order functions. The reason the results above are important for liberalism as a social theory is because they do two things: first, they show that spontaneous orders such as the market and spontaneous orders such as the central nervous system require theoretical accounts employing polycentric or coalitional “control” structures in order to account for their complexity. They simply cannot be reduced to command or taxis structures. Second, they are the clearest of possible indications that the scientific study of complex orders cannot be modeled upon the explanatory pattern and research procedure

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of experimentation that have served so well for less complex domains such as those studied by physics and chemistry. There will be no “experimental method” for these domains, they will never be able to make point predictions of particulars, and the type of explanatory conjectures that we are limited to will be able to do no more than making pattern predictions of general classes of phenomena. There will be no Galilean revolution for the social studies—they will never make measurements with ratio or absolute scaling techniques, or do actual experiments. It is time to recognize that fact of life and stop trying to “fix” things by forcing essential complexity into a Skinner box provided by the Procrustean methodology proposed by the rationalist constructivist mentality.

Powerful Control Structures Require the Surface-Deep Structure Distinction Linear chains connect surface phenomena with other surface phenomena. Taking language as an example, that would be the chaining of words to words. A sentence would link its constituents by going word to word. Breaking the chain at any point would prevent the output of the remainder of the sentence. More powerful control models, minimally a hierarchical model, make a fundamental distinction between the surface structure elements and an abstract level of non-terminal elements that range over higher-level control structures which in turn control the occurrence of the terminal items. For instance, the sentence “the boy hit the ball” has those words as the terminal or surface structure elements. But “the boy” is a noun phrase and “hit the ball” is a verb phrase. And in that verb phrase is embedded a direct object—“the ball.” We do not speak the non-terminal elements—we do not speak noun phrases, verb phrases, or similar abstract entities. Nonetheless, the derivation of a sentence requires us to understand those structures that generated the surface structure utterance. When we move to higher order control structures in order to explain the occurrence of observable phenomena we are inevitably required to postulate the existence of abstract levels of entities that are “above” (at least in the diagrams we use to represent them) or temporally before or causally productive of

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the generation of the terminal items or surface strings. Thus when we deal with complex phenomena such as language—or behavior—we are forced to acknowledge levels of abstract “control” structures that do not appear in the overt surface phenomena but must be acknowledged to exist as causally productive of them. In terms of human behavior, this is represented in the abstract concept of meaningful action. When we look at a particular instance of human behavior we need to ask “what action does it represent?” before we can explain it. These higher-level abstract entities are purely functional concepts. They cannot be defined in terms of any physical specification alone, and they make the meaningless physical events into meaningful actions. Given any physical specification whatever, it is in itself fundamentally ambiguous—the only way we can ever understand how it was generated by a living subject is with a concomitant specification of its semiotic causation. We need to specify the pragmatic context in which the behavior occurred, as well as its meaning to the subject who exhibited it, and finally the syntactic structuring by which it was generated and eventuates into linear strings of “physical” events. If we do not have all three semiotic components we do not have an explanation. This is another reason why the realm of human action is vastly more complex and requires fundamentally different explanatory procedures and principles than the relatively “simple” physical domains (see Weimer, 1984, 1987, 2020, 2021).

Of Clocks and Clouds, Determinism and Determination The physics model that is part and parcel of our contemporary common sense seems to enshrine a strict determinism. The metaphysical thesis of strict determinism says that everything in the universe is a clockwork mechanism—regular, orderly, and entirely predictable once we know all the laws of nature. It surprises most researchers—especially those in the social sciences—that physics does not (and indeed has never) actually support this metaphysical thesis. To see this we need to note distinctions between boundary conditions, initial conditions, and the laws of nature.

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Physical theory never deals with initial or boundary conditions at all. For instance, there is no conception of the present moment, of “now,” or of the location of the individual, of “here,” in physics. Boundary conditions cannot be reduced to laws of motion and the action of forces—and all theoretical explanations in physics are for any time, for anywhere. We have been used to simply tacitly accepting obvious and uncontroversial boundary conditions and going on in order to conduct research into the laws of nature. But laws do not determine everything . You should hear this fundamental fact from a physicist: The most common misconception of physics is that because laws are inexorable--that is, no event can disobey laws--the implication is that laws determine all events. That is not the case. Most of the structures in the universe are undetermined by laws or are accidental. In principle, measurement of initial conditions cannot be determined by laws. Measuring instruments obey physical laws but are not determined by laws. Eddington (1929, P. 260) emphasized this fact in The Nature of the Physical World : “there is nothing to prevent the assemblage of atoms constituting a brain from being of itself a thinking object (including free will and consciousness) in virtue of that nature which physics leaves undetermined and undeterminable.” Gell Mann (1994, P. 134) again pointed this out in The Quark and the Jaguar: “the effective complexity (of the universe) receives only a small contribution from the fundamental laws. The rest comes from the numerous regularities resulting from ‘frozen accidents’.” The principle condition for physical laws is their inexorability and universality--the same laws must apply in every place and time, and for every conceivable observer. Furthermore those events that we treat as deterministic are actually probabilistic events, often with such reliable statistics that they are effectively deterministic. (Pattee, 2012, p. 15)

Let us unpack this long quote to see its implications for methodology and the nature of our knowledge. What do physicists do in attempting to discern the laws of nature? They make measurements. Measurements are records—they record what the experimenter chooses. That choice on the part of an experimenter of what to record, as well as when to record it, guarantees that such events are unique and non-repeatable. Measurements or records are choices

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which “freeze out” from the passage of time something that was part of a continuous dynamical process. Consider a distinction first made by von Neumann (see his 1966, Chapter 6) between two necessary but complementary modes of description. One set of processes are discontinuous, noncausal, and instantaneously acting; and on the other hand, he defined the second set as continuous and causal changes through the course of time. Newton was clearly aware of the necessity to make this separation when he separated events into those which are regular, to which the laws of nature apply, and which are therefore independent of any choice upon the part of an observer; and those which are dependent upon the choice of an observer, which we now call initial or boundary conditions. This duality of descriptions can be restated as a matter of rate-dependence and rate-independence. Laws apply to all possible systems, while measurement gives information only about a particular system. Laws are rate-dependent equations that are reversible (symmetrical in the time description), while measurements have no time at all—once made, they are not reversible, they are rate independent, and exist forever in that form. It is only in the timeless rate-independent realm, in our fixed-forever theoretical specifications, in which meaning fuses disparate things with the necessary connection, that we find any determinism to exist. In the rate-dependent regularity of nature, in contrast, only statistical regularities exist. Determinism is a theoretical concept found in cognition only.2 Consider why this must be so. The only way we can attach a so-called law of nature to reality is for us to determine a specification of initial conditions. We must make a record—make a measurement— in order to apply the putative law to some given empirical reality, to see whether the events in question follow the law. But records have two things that are not found in laws: they are inherently probabilistic and can never be deterministic, and since they are at best an approximation to the events themselves (i.e., the record never captures all the infinite complexity of the events from all possible perspectives), they increasingly propagate error in recording, and they do so to all subsequent measurements. Any statistical record is inherently probabilistic and can never be deterministic. Since all our knowledge is intrinsically theoretical, we have no problem discussing the time reversibility of laws of nature in

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that rate-independent realm. But in any attempt to apply any given law to anything in dynamical nature we cannot avoid the fact that physical record-keeping is irreversible and subject to error (inevitable incompleteness of description) and must be statistical and probabilistic as a result. Science finds it indispensable to use a duality of descriptions—one for the rate-independent realm in which we can meaningfully talk about the inexorability of laws, and another when we move to empirical reality and then attempt to see if those laws hold. If we did not make this separation, there would be no way of distinguishing between knowledge and reality; between the knower on one hand, and that which is known on the other. What this means is that all clocks are actually clouds in the dynamical world. What we presumed to be deterministic (such as the tick-tock of a clock dependent upon the functioning of its gears and the constant input source of power to drive them, is actually determinate, constrained to follow principles of regularity but not strict determinism. If that is the case for physical reality it must also be the case for the behavior of human beings. The lack of determinate predictability of our behavior— especially our creative use of language and cognition—is quite cloud-like as opposed to clock-like. As many have emphasized, what goes on in the brain resembles a cloud far more than it does any sort of clockwork (indeed that is the emphasis of the discussion of coalitional control structures and Polanyi’s distinction between tacit and explicit knowing and behaving). As Bronowski (1978) said, speaking of word associations, “these responses must have this statistical character: you feed in a perfectly definite piece of information, you get out a perfectly definite answer, but what goes on inside is not at all a computer-like process. It must be much more like the process which we imagine to go on in a cloud of gas” (p. 105). Or consider this somewhat cryptic remark of von Neumann (1958): What matters are not the precise positions of definite markers, digits, but the statistical characteristics of their occurrence, i.e., frequencies of periodic or nearly periodic pulse-trains, etc.

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Thus the nervous system appears to be using a radically different system of notation from the ones we are familiar with in ordinary arithmetics and mathematics: instead of the precise system of markers where the position--and presence or absence--of every marker counts decisively in determining the meaning of the message, we have here a system of notations in which the meaning is conveyed by the statistical properties of the message. (p. 79)

This is an indication that the tacit dimension underlying our surface linear strings in language and subvocal thought, the deep structural, abstract principles of determination, have the coalitional structure that would underlie the dynamical unity-in-diversity of a cloud rather than the billiard ball deterministic appearance of a linear chain of language or behavior. What is required to explain this in the nervous system? What is required is an addition to the digital, all or none spike potential activity of neural firing that had been the only model employed up until the 1970s. We need to realize that in addition to the all or none firing there is the fuzzy, or cloud-like, graded potential activity emphasized by Pribram (1971, 1977) as providing a mechanism for wavefront interference phenomena to underlie memory and recordkeeping. Pribram postulated a holographic model of neural functioning, which takes advantage of the clouds of pre-and post-synaptic dendritic slow potentials to provide a plausible interpretation of the distributed information processing and retrieval characteristics of the CNS. Thus he proposed that the nervous system simultaneously uses both a digital code and an analog one. Such a dual coding or dual languages of the brain approach can easily encompass the key characteristics of polycentric and coalitional ordering. Dual coding, functionally equivalent to the duality of descriptions necessary for physics, can also show how the brain as a cosmic structure can depend upon and utilize taxis or command structures within its overall patterns of activity.

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Creativity Is a Matter of Rule Governed Constraint How does novelty occur? How can one explain the fact that, within the limits of the energy degeneracy requirements specified by thermodynamics, we can harness physical laws to produce novel thoughts, sentences, and behaviors? How can functional semiotic processes in brain activity produce changes in the physical structure of the universe? We can begin to see what is involved by looking at the nature of creativity or productivity in language. The first thing to note is that even advanced technical languages have a very small number of words— a natural language such as English makes do with less than 50,000 words in the ordinary vocabulary (in the dictionary) and probably has less than 10 times that in the abstract, technical jargon of specialized fields. Yet despite that limited vocabulary, there is a “potential” infinite number of sentences that can be produced. How do we get from a limited vocabulary to an indefinite number of meaningful sentences? The answer is found in the power or generative capacity of the rules according to which language is structured, in combination with the operation of recursion. The import of the transformational revolution in linguistics is that the rules necessary to explain the capacity of natural language generation must make use of the distinction between abstract or deep structural principles of determination and also the mathematical process of recursion to generate an indefinitely extended domain of terminal (or linear) strings of the vocabulary. Recursion is crucial because it allows adding modifications to an existing sentence (surface string) to make it indefinitely longer (and hence have a different meaning with each iteration), and we can embed other full sentences within a sentence and thus make an indefinitely larger number of sentences. Having this power available is essential, regardless of whether all extant human languages use it. The point is that most do use it, and that shows its generative capacity is present in the CNS.3 Recursive capacity means that there is no “highest number” of sentences, which is a definition of an infinite totality. A rule applies recursively when, in anticipatory fashion (see Chapter 3), the output of the rule contains its own input.

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The generative power of the rules is important because there are differences between the generative capacity of languages that vary with types of rules of different power. By studying the formal power of types of rules for grammars we can differentiate whether or not a given rule structure is adequate to generate (and thus to explain how our nervous systems must operate when using) a type of language. Operations on surface linear strings alone—finite state grammars—cannot be productive of novelty. That fact ruled out any behavioristic learning theory as a model of the speaker-hearer of a language and with it the notion of associationism as a mechanism of mental functioning. Phrase structure grammars can make the surface-deep distinction and thus can address embedding, but cannot account for sentence transformations, which occur when the rules can rewrite entire strings (sentences) into new ones. Chomsky’s initial formulations in the late 50’s required transformational rules, but his later work (as in the twenty-first-century formulation) has emphasized recursion alone as the key. All we need to note here is that the power of recursive functions and the surface-deep distinction are necessary. Language is only one form of human behavior. Thinking about a new theory, or performing a complicated motor skill such as driving (while digesting that heavy meal you just ate, while simultaneously worrying about whether your income will survive a pandemic, etc., etc.), are others that human beings engage in. All those functionally specified concepts— acting, thinking, digesting, and myriad others—go on simultaneously with our chattering away in a language, such as while we are also listening to others in a conversation. There are fuzzy boundaries between these often overlapping cognitive and behavioral skills, and the nervous system clearly cannot be explained without admitting that the principles of its organization require a rule structure to generate behavior that is capable of explaining novelty, and explaining it on many levels at once. The rules governing that creative behavior must necessarily range over levels of abstract entities that do not ever come into consciousness or into surface linear strings, and they must be at least in the most part a series of negative constraints or prohibitions to certain forms of behavior. In so far as they are cosmic structures they will be regulated by a context of constraints provided by negative prohibitions to certain classes of

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action rather than by the positive specification of particulars that must be achieved.

Cosmic Structures Are Based Upon Taxis Information Structures We never experience abstract entities as such, or directly. We experience particulars that exemplify those abstract concepts or generative structures that we know as such only by following abstract rules for their determination that are in our tacit processing. The “raw data” for forming concepts and achieving new knowledge is always particular in form. Just as we never “see” a crowd but only individuals in groups there is a counterpart to methodological individualism in all thought. We “experience” particular events but we can do so only because we already operate according to rules of determinate “seeing.” We gain new knowledge by classifying particulars into new abstract conceptual structures. We “experience” the double slit experiment in physics as patterns of dots on a screen, but interpret the result as indicative of the interference pattern of waves as the wave equation for quantum theory predicts. New abstract conceptions are based upon interpretation of “old” particulars. New functionality and meaning arise through such interactions of previously available “input” with ongoing new abstract classification patterns. This is analogous to the way an individual’s interaction with the market order adjusts the entire market structure. Polanyi used the example of one’s listening to a program on the radio as subtly altering the entire structure of content on the radio waves. Likewise, a consumer’s purchase of an item subtly influences the entire balance of products available for purchase in the market. Kuhn’s evolutionary account of science similarly shows how experienced particulars in normal research traditions lead a field to eventually change when the cosmic structure in which all knowledge is embedded is forced, by the accumulation of anomalous results, from the normal science taxis approach to a reconceptualization.

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The Social Cosmos Is Full of Taxis Structures The abstract society is a cosmic structure. But it is composed of taxis components. When one considers the role of the individual as a participant in the market, that individual is, effectively speaking, equivalent to a taxis structure “controlled” by a shifting series of particular purposes and goals. For an understanding of the market we do not need to be overwhelmed by the complexity of any individual, but rather must focus upon the very limited role the individual plays at any given time in the particular dynamic market process. That is an aspect of the division of knowledge in the market process. From the standpoint of market analysis, we subtract away from the total individual with his or her welter of conflicting goals, desires, purposes, etc., and focus upon one highly delimited choice (or action)—whether the individual buys or sells. From that level of analysis, the market is composed of a congeries of taxis structures. Looking at modern society shows a welter of hierarchically controlled organizations. Business companies—the entire corporate structure of modern business—consist of top-down hierarchically controlled groupings of individual behaviors. In all cases, there is the equivalent of a tribal chieftain or a central planning board which is at least nominally in control—the “command neuron” of that corporate nervous system. It is obvious that with increasing size (number of individual employees) that command structure will break down because some individual will either not hear, misinterpret, or disobey its instruction. That is one source of innovation, and when it is beneficial to the company it is lauded, and when it is detrimental that individual is scapegoated. But that does not change the fact that for the limited purposes of the corporate organization, it is a taxis structure. All our common forms of deliberate organization entail taxis structuring. The cosmic structure arises when one moves to the unintended consequences of our behavior in the surroundings to all that taxis activity. There is no consolation for the rationalist constructivist in this empirical fact of the ubiquity of taxis structures in society. The insurmountable problem remains that there is no possible supreme dictator capable of integrating and controlling the disparate and opposed actions of them all. Our society is the result of human action but not

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deliberate design. We are not the deliberate authors of our moral rules and social organizations, we are their product. We are the result of our social nature, not its cause.

Notes 1. Lashley was well aware of the problem of serial order in action and perception, and how it destroyed simple chaining and even basic hierarchical models of control for either perception or production. Context sensitivity—the framework in which a behavior is embedded—carries over into both interpretation and production. Context determines meaning. In a lecture to a conference of geniuses (published in the conference proceedings of the Hixton symposium), he said this: The understanding of speech involves essentially the same problems as the production of speech and definitely demands the postulation of an after-effect or after-discharge of the sensory components for a significant time following stimulation. Thus, in the spoken sentence, “Rapid righting with his uninjured hand saved from loss the contents of the capsized canoe,” the associations which give meaning to righting are not activated for at least 3 to 5 seconds after hearing the word. (Lashley, 1951, p. 120)

But his entire audience heard him say “Rapid writing with his uninjured hand.” By the time they heard “capsized canoe” they had to make a complete reinterpretation of what they had thought they heard. Lashley set this up in his audience more than five minutes prior to saying that sentence, when he had been talking about carryover typing errors, and he had used as an example, putting a W in front of “rapid” because of anticipating typing the W in “writing.” So having given his audience “Wrapid writing” hundreds of words prior to uttering that sentence, everyone heard it as “writing” instead of “righting.”

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This is a “clear case” example of the fact that we cannot understand linear strings of behavior without a knowledge of the context in which the string is produced. The transformational revolution in linguistics forced this fundamental fact back into the analysis of language, showing that it is impossible to understand the meaning of any sentence unless one comprehends the derivational history of that utterance. That derivational history supplies its context. Lashley’s example shows that not only is that the case within a given sentence, but also that the problem situation holds for the entire context in which many sentences (or bits of behavior) are embedded. The only way to understand any human behavior is to understand its derivational history. This requires understanding the deep structural framework of abstract entities that are in the tacit domain of brain functioning, temporally and causally prior to the surface structure linear strings. Any behavior, any utterance, is fundamentally ambiguous and indeterminate (better, under determined) until that derivational history is specified. This is why both the psychological and the social domain can only be understood in historical context. 2. There is a tendency to assume that physics was deterministic up until the quantum revolution forced the abandonment of determinism in the subatomic realm. That is not the case. Boltzmann’s research into thermodynamics decades before had abandoned the attempt to know anything about individual molecules in a gas in favor of studying global properties pertaining to very large ensembles of molecules. Thermodynamics provides precise information about global properties of statistically indeterminate ensembles. Thus it was not surprising that physicists who were aware of the conceptual foundations of thermodynamics quickly took to the indeterminacy or “chance” that was indispensably involved in quantum accounts. They had already originated the gulf concerning the limits of measurement and observation, on the one hand, against laws of nature that were to apply everywhere and every when in deterministic fashion, on the other. This is how Schrödinger put it in an address in 1931: A physical system cannot be determined by a finite number of observations. But in practice a finite number of observations is all that we

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can make. All that is left to determinism is to believe that an infinite accumulation of observations would in principle enable it completely to determine the system. Such was the standpoint in view of classical physics, which latter certainly had a right to see what it could make of it. But the opposite standpoint has an equal justification: we are not compelled to assume that an infinite number of observations, which cannot in any case be carried out in practice, would suffice to give us a complete determination. (1935, p. 67)

This makes it obvious that this situation is an epistemic limitation upon any ontological speculation. It is our rate-independent formulation of the laws of nature that are deterministic. We know that the rate-dependent dynamics must be inherently probabilistic, statistical, subject to measurement and error, and hence not deterministic but rather determinate. 3. There is a recent controversy between Chomsky and a field researcher (Everett, 2012) who has studied a language which apparently does not employ subordinate clauses at all, and hence would not have embedded recursion. But one should note two things: first, recursion and embedding are not at all synonymous; and, second, the existence “proof ” for recursive capability in language does not require that every single language employ it, or employ it in the same way. If a single language does employ recursion (as the majority do), the human CNS encompasses that possibility in its functioning. For the Chomskyian reply see Watumull et al. (2014). The controversy really only applies to the nature of a “language acquisition device,” or model of the language learner.

References Adolphs, R. (2009). The social brain: neural basis of social knowledge. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 693–716.

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Bronowski, J. (1978). The origins of knowledge and imagination. Yale University Press. Eddington, A. S. (1929). Science and the unseen world . Macmillan. Enlow, D. H. (1968). The human face: An account of the postnatal growth and development of the craniofacial skeleton. Harper and Row. Everett, D. (2012). Language: The cultural tool . Pantheon Books. Fodor, J. (1983). The modularity of mind: An essay on faculty psychology. MIT Press. Gazzaniga, M. S. (1985). The social brain. Basic Books. Gell-Mann, M. (1994). The quark and the jaguar. Henry Holt & Co. Hayek, F. A. (1952/1999). The sensory order. University of Chicago Press. Hebb. D. O. (1949/2002). The organization of behavior. Wiley; Psychology Press Edition, 2002. Lashley, K. (1929). Brain mechanisms and intelligence. University of Chicago Press. Lashley, K. (1951). The problem of serial order in behavior. In L. A. Jeffress (Ed.), Cerebral mechanisms in behavior (pp. 112–135). Wiley. Meehl, P. E. (1989). Psychological determinism or chance: Configural cerebral autoselection as a tertium quid. In M. L. Maxwell & C. W. Savage (Eds.), Science, mind, and psychology: essays in honor of Grover Maxwell . University Press of America. Mountcastle, V. B. (1978). Brain mechanisms for directed attention. In G. M. Edelman & V. B. Mountcastle, The mindful brain (pp. 7–50). MIT Press. Pattee, H. H. (2012). Laws, language and life. Springer. Penfield, W. (1975). The mystery of the mind . Princeton University Press. Penfield, W., & Roberts, L. (1959). Speech and brain mechanisms. Princeton University Press. Polanyi, M. (1951). The logic of liberty. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Reprinted by Liberty Fund. Pribram, K. H. (1971). Languages of the brain. Prentice-Hall. Pribram, K. H. (1977). Some comments on the nature of the perceived universe. In R. Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, acting, and knowing (pp. 83–101). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Schrodinger, E. (1935). Science and the human temperament. W. W. Norton. Shaw, R., & McIntyre, M. (1974). Algoristic foundations to cognitive psychology. In W. B. Weimer & D. S. Palermo (Eds.), Cognition and the symbolic processes (pp. 305–362). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Sperry, R. (1969). A modified concept of consciousness. Psychological Review, 76 , 532–536.

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Sperry, R. (1976). Mental phenomena as causal determinants in brain function. In G. Globus, G. Maxwell, & I. Savodnik (Eds.), Consciousness and the brain. Plenum Press. Teuber, H. L. (1960). Perception. In J. Field, H. W. Magoun, & V. E. Hall (Eds.), Handbook of physiology, neurophysiology III (pp. 1595–1668). American Physiological Society. von Foerster, H. (1962). Biologic. In E. E. Bernard & M. R. Kare (Eds.), Biological prototypes and synthetic systems (Vol. 1, pp. 1–12). Plenum Press. von Neumann, J. (1951). The general and logical theory of automata. In L. A. Jeffress (Ed.), Cerebral mechanisms in behavior. The Hixton Symposium (pp. 1–31). Wiley. von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General systems theory. George Braziller. von Neumann, J. (1958). The computer and the brain. Yale University Press. von Neumann, J. (1966). Theory of self-reproducing automata. University of Illinois Press. Watumull, J., Hauser, M. D., Roberts, I. G., & Hornstein, N. (2014). On recursion. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 10–17. Weimer, W. B. (1984). Limitations of the dispositional analysis of behavior. In J. R. Royce & L. P. Mos (Eds.), Annals of theoretical psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 161–198). Plenum Press. Weimer, W. B. (1987). Spontaneously ordered complex phenomena and the unity of the moral sciences. In G. Radnitzky (Ed.), Centripedal forces in the sciences (Vol. 1, pp. 257–296). Paragon House. Weimer, W. B. (2020). Complex phenomena and the superior power of negative rules of order. Cosmos + Taxis, 8, 39–59. Weimer, W. B. (2021, in press). Problems of a causal theory of functional behavior: What the Hayek-Popper controversy illustrates for the 21st century—Part 1, Cosmos + Taxis, 9 (11 + 12), 1–29. Part 2, Cosmos + Taxis, in press 2022.

3 Inference and Expectation

Representation of the existing situation in fact cannot be separated from, and has no significance apart from, the representation of the consequences to which it is likely to lead. Even on a pre-conscious level the organism must live as much in a world of expectation as in a world of “fact”, and most responses to a given stimulus are probably determined only via fairly complex processes of “trying out” on the model the effects to be expected from alternative courses of action. F. A. Hayek

We need to examine in more detail how limited structures such as the central nervous systems of living organisms can become adapted to and can come to know their indefinitely diverse and extended environment. We need to discuss the nature and relation of concepts such as adaptation in biology and inferential cognition in psychology to see how we have come to create representations of the world, and how we use those representations to anticipate and thus to guide our conduct within it. When we do so, we find that the control structures representative of the rationalist constructivist ideals cannot cope with the inevitable novelty © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume II, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95477-2_3

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and unpredictability of our constantly changing and evolving econiche. We must overview the developing series of models of our minds’ coping mechanisms for dealing with an evolving order to better face unknown and unforeseen events. We must see how what has been called anticipatory systems enable us to understand more and more and hence to plan for the unforeseen and unanticipated. While the previous chapter overviewed the complexity of the control structures our nervous system must possess in order to exhibit creative behavior, here we focus upon requirements for understanding inference and expectation, which are the mechanisms of our acquisition of new knowledge, and the utilization of old or available knowledge. Together they provide the basis for our anticipation of and adaptation to both the known and unforseen in the individual and society.

Adaptation is a Basic Biological and Evolutionary Phenomenon To say that an organism is adapted to its environment is to imply that as a member of its species it possesses structures which enable it to survive, to the extent necessary to exhibit reproductive fecundity in its particular environment and competitive niche. Evolution is an intrinsically historical process. Evolution has built in necessary adaptations to effect survival for every species presently alive on this planet. It did so by utilizing the selective winnowing procedures of those environments to weed out species that were unfit and hence did not in fact survive. Speciation is the logical equivalent of a conjecture or theory (of survival value), and the factors of environmental selection the equivalent of testing, to determine empirically the “survival of the fittest.” Environmental tests constitute the equivalent of attempts at refutations of that conjecture. There is no teleology, no purpose, intrinsic in some agency that we call evolution which determines a species’ survival. All that is involved is the impersonal selection pressure of a harsh environment upon the group of organisms involved. Over the immense timescale of evolution, changes in the allelic structure of organisms result in the creation of new species. Biological evolution is not a property of individuals, it is a matter of group

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selection. And a group that has become quite well adapted to its econiche is never guaranteed future survival. When things change in the environment that group of organisms can suddenly become extinct. When an environmental catastrophe occurs dominant life forms can suddenly go extinct, and previously insignificant ones can go on to achieve greater and greater adaptability. Just ask the dinosaurs what they thought of those puny little mammals scurrying around prior to the arrival of an asteroid in what those mammals’ descendents now call the Yucatán Peninsula. Biological adaptation is a matter of what Donald Campbell (1974a, 1974b) called downward causation, which is the effect of higher order constraints operating over time and generations to change the lower order physical structure of organisms. The example he used is the gradual change in anatomical structure of the jaws of ants and termites to produce warriors so adapted to defense of the colony that they could no longer feed themselves and had to be cared for by workers. Such specialization cannot occur overnight, and it always requires a context of higher order functional constraint to force the lower or physical order to change. But that adaptation is “mindless” and is not at the level of evolutionary development we need to study. Let us restrict the term “adaptation” to the evolutionary change in biological structure and function, and move on to ‘inference’ and ‘expectation’ in cognitive capability.1

Learning Requires a Model of the Environment While all organisms are in effect theories of their environment, those aspects that are built in by biological adaptation have now become part of the structure of the organism. We need to look at anticipatory systems in terms of concepts such as “maps” and “models” of the environment as representations that evolve and restructure within the central nervous system, so that they can be part of the control structure of behavior during the individual’s life and not just across generations. While adaptation is over generations, learning occurs within the lifespan of the individual. Learning involves anticipatory systems in addition to biological adaptation. It can become cumulative with the development

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of culture and thus provides an exosomatic evolutionary force in addition to the somatic development studied by Darwin and most biologists. Consider the evolution of explanatory models of adaptive cognition as they have characterized the last century or so of psychological theory. The first widespread model was a “convenient fiction” put forth by C. S. Sherrington (1906). This was the conception of the reflex arc: the idea that an incoming stimulus (such as the bite of a flea on a dog’s leg) stimulated a neuron that went in to the spinal nervous system, and at its synapse, the incoming spike potential stimulated a motor neuron causing muscular contraction in the leg. Thus moving the leg (or scratching it, etc.) was said to occur reflexively. This model did not even require the presence of a cerebrum: it seemed to account for reflexive behavior as a simple input connected to output. None of the original physiologists believed that the reflex arc was anything other than a diagrammatic simplification, an explanatory idealization. Only later behavioristic psychologists took it as a true representation of neural functioning (up until the 1930s). The thing to note about this model is that it is entirely reactive—there is no mechanism within it to anticipate what to do until the flea bites. All responsivity is “directed” by and to past events. By 1932 the “purposive” behaviorist E. C. Tolman spoke of cognitive “maps” and expectancies in the brain of his rats when they ran complicated mazes for the expectation of food in a goal box. What he meant was that the rat had a forward-looking anticipation of reward, the expectancy, in its cognition instead of just the chaining of behaviors that could be broken down into reflexive units of running movements. Tolman was a “cognitive behaviorist” who, in oxymoronic fashion, believed that there was more to psychology than overt behavior. Unfortunately he had no detailed account of what either a map or an expectancy could be in the nervous system, but he did at least require the functional language of purpose and teleology in his account. In 1943 the philosopher-psychologist-pioneer cybernetition Kenneth Craik discussed the philosophical concept of explanation in terms of an internal model in the brain which represented external reality. His point was that internal thought models or parallels external reality. As Craik said, “By a model we thus mean any physical or chemical system which has a similar relation-structure to that of the process it imitates.

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By ‘relation-structure’ I do not mean some obscure non-physical entity which attends the model, but the fact that it is a physical working model which works in the same way as the process it parallels, in the aspects under consideration at any moment (Craik, 1943, p. 51).” Thus for Craik thinking is always a symbolic process: the model which is the thought is only structurally related to the reality which it imitates or parallels, and hence is a symbolic or semantic representation. The activity of neural excitation per se is totally unlike, say, the patterns of stress in a bridge, yet the patterns of excitation which constitute the thinking about (or calculating) that stress are isomorphic (in a structural sense) to the stress itself. “It is likely then that the nervous system is in a fortunate position, as far as modeling physical processes is concerned, in that it has only to produce combinations of excited arcs, not physical objects; ‘its ‘answer’ need only be a combination of consistent patterns of excitation–not a new object that is physically and chemically stable (ibid., p. 56).” But what is that “fortunate” situation in nervous functioning? How can we understand the symbolic processes of neural activity? In The Sensory Order in 1952, Hayek explored mapping and modeling as a matter of the patterning of the classificatory activity of CNS functioning. The effect of doing so was to divorce our knowledge of the external world from that world entirely and to re-create knowledge not as somehow having ever been originally attached to the external objects of the world, but as patterns of neural activity resulting from the nervous system’s classificatory activity in conjunction with the response to novelty first studied by Russian researchers (see Lynn, 1966; Sokolov, 1960). This led him to assert that the sensory (or other mental) qualities are not in some manner originally attached to, or an attribute of, any individual physiological impulses, but that the whole of an organism’s qualities is determined entirely by the system of connections by which these impulses can be transmitted from neuron to neuron. It is a property of the memory of the nervous system. It is thus the position of the individual impulse or group of impulses in the whole system of such connexions which gives it its distinctive quality;… this system of connexions is acquired in the course of the development of the species and the individual by a kind of “experience”

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or “learning”; and… reproduces therefore at every stage of its development certain relationships existing in the physical environment between the stimuli evoking the impulses. (1952, p. 53)

Hayek’s key conclusion is that instead of first having sensations which are then preserved by memory, it is only as a result of the physiological memory that the physiological impulses are converted into sensations: “The connexions between the physiological elements are thus the primary phenomenon which creates the mental phenomena” (1952, p. 53). Thus the only modeling of external, non-mental reality that thought can accomplish is of its structural properties. And even then we will never know whether those structural properties inhere in further primary or non-structural properties of external objects, or whether they are the result of nothing but the properties of our cognitive structure. The classes of sensory order, which are the result of our evolutionary history, determine what counts as stimulation. It follows that if there were a stimulus which was not regular, i.e., not an instance of one of the appropriate kinds determined by prior acts of classification, we could not “know” anything about it. It would not be singled out as different from the background activity of the nervous system, and thus would (because could) not be detected at all. This is the neurophysiological correlate of the philosophical-epistemological doctrine of structural realism (see Russell, 1948; Maxwell, 1970, 1972; Weimer, 1973, 1976): the qualities which our acquaintance attributes to experienced external objects are not properties of those objects at all, but rather a set of relations by which our nervous system effects their classification. This is an unavoidable epistemological restriction upon all knowing and cognition. All we can perceive of external events is their structural relation to each other and to our experience. We are truly theories of our environment: all we can know about the world external to our senses is inherently theoretical, and all our “experience” can do is modify our extant theories.2

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Anticipation Requires a Particular Type of Modeling In the 1960s two innovations (actually developed in the 1950s) occurred which changed how we regarded models, and made it obvious that anticipatory systems have to be forward-looking instead of merely reactive to stimulation that has already come in. The first of these innovations was due to von Neumann (1966), who studied what was involved in the origin of life and reproduction with respect to what would be involved in a self-reproducing automaton (which would be, effectively speaking, a life form). His insight into self-reproduction was that anything that was capable of self-reproduction had to include within itself the complete specification of what it was. This can be understood intuitively by asking what happens if you could build a machine that would reproduce another machine. The constructing machine (of the reproduction) would have to have available within itself, within its operating program, a complete description of the machine to be copied. But suppose we “push the button” and the copying machine produces a machine which is the exact copy of what it was to reproduce. Now we ask the crucial further question: Can that machine that was just produced now reproduce itself? The answer must clearly be “No,” it cannot reproduce itself, unless it already contains a complete specification of itself within it. The machine that constructs or does the copying can (ex hypothesi) reproduce whatever it is given. But the next generation, the reproduced offspring, will not in turn be able to reproduce itself unless it already contains a complete specification of itself as a given. So for anything to be capable of self -reproduction it must contain within itself a complete specification of what it is and how to build it (i.e., how it builds itself ). The import of this analysis is that modeling a living system must contain a forward-looking or “feedforward” component in that living system that reproduces itself, and that forward-looking system must be an exhaustive specification of what it is. But another form of modeling, anticipatory modeling, is necessary for any living organism to be able to adapt to environmental change (or learn) during its lifetime. Any such

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anticipatory modeling or learning likewise entails feedforward components in the modeling structure. This is what Hayek noted in the epigram for this chapter. The second insight occurred in 1960 when Miller, Galanter, and Pribram published Plans and Structure of Behavior. This book introduced the TOTE unit, which stood for test-operate-test-exit to specify what procedure was necessary for a behaving system to achieve a goal. And by definition we note that a goal is a forward-looking functional concept that cannot be specified without incorporation of anticipated behavior. This is why no purely physical specification of behavior, even down to the micro-particulate level of analysis, can disclose anticipation or expectation or purpose. Functional concepts are not physical, so cannot be specified by physical accounts. But to return to the reflex, the central problem of the reflex arc conception is that it cannot begin to address behavior that shows the central control of receptor mechanisms. Cerebral initiation of behavior—instead of response to stimulation—requires a different kind of “servo” mechanism model. And when it is realized that there must be a feedforward component in any behavior model, we get the diagram shown in the bottom of Fig. 3.1. This is a two-process model: (1) the test, which consists of activity in the patterns of all or none neural spike activity plus the slow graded potentials from pre- and post-synaptic activity, and (2) an “operation” on that state either by nerve impulses generated by receptors or by other central nervous system activity (designated in Fig. 3.1 by the bias mechanism, which is ongoing central activity). This sort of mechanism is inherently oriented toward changing the output responsivity to take into account new “information” resulting from the combination of initial stimulus input and the bias of ongoing central neural activity. (Perhaps the simplest common model of the bias is a thermostat, which turns a furnace on or off when the temperature reaches a predetermined set point). The addition of that bias through a feedforward neural mechanism allows it to anticipate and correct for an intended future state. And it does so not by invoking some sort of Aristotelian final cause pulling from the future but, like the thermostat, by taking advantage of ongoing central neural activity to direct and shape Aristotelian “material causation” in the present. The servo mechanism of the TOTE procedures is

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Fig. 3.1 Pribram’s modified TOTE with anticipatory bias

a taxis (a hierarchical centrally directed command structure) within the ongoing coalitional structure of ongoing (and thus biasing) CNS activity. There is a psychological phenomenon that demonstrates the power of anticipatory systems within our nervous system. This is the Zeigarnik effect (1927) or the incompleted task effect. If you are in the middle of performing some task and are interrupted before completing it, you will remember that task longer and in more detail than you will remember comparable tasks that you completed without interruption. This is an indication that the disruption of an anticipatory cognitive structure

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leaves traces (memory) of its activity (and incompleteness) that persist over time. In comparison, the completed task, in which the anticipatory structure has been achieved by our behavior, leaves no similar traces to be incorporated into the subsequent modeling procedure. Disrupting a feedforward system is more long-term consequential than disrupting a feedback system. Up to this point we have been concerned with embodied structures in the central nervous system. In the 1980s the mathematicianphysicist Robert Rosen (1985) published Anticipatory Systems, a general computational-mathematical study of the abstract logico-mathematical structuring for anticipatory systems such as the biased TOTE unit. Apparently unaware of any of the psychological results that preceded his research, Rosen reached a conception that greatly resembles the servo mechanism proposal of Plans and the Structure of Behavior. As one of his students (Louie, 2012) said: There must be information about self, about species, and about the evolutionary environment, encoded into the organization of all living systems. He (Rosen) observes that this information, as it behaves through time, is capable of acting causally on the organism’s present behavior, based on relations projected to be applicable in the future.… Organisms seem capable of constructing an internal surrogate for time as part of a model that can indeed be manipulated to produce anticipation.… This “internal surrogate of time” must run faster than real time. It is in this sense that degrees of freedom in internal models allow time its multi-scaling and reversibility to produce new information. The predictive model of an anticipatory system must not be equivocated to any kind of “certainty” (even probabilistically) about the future. It is, rather, an assertion based on a model that runs in a faster time scale. The future still has not yet happened: the organism has a model of the future, but not definitive knowledge of the future itself. (p. 20)

This model depends crucially on feedforward (as does Pribram’s modified TOTE conception or Hayek’s mechanism of classification in the response to novelty). Feedforward is what can compress the time dimension. In contrast, feedback control is in essence observed present tense error actuated—the stimulus to corrective action is the discrepancy

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between the system’s actual present state and the state that the system should be in according to the model. So feedback control works only when a system has already departed from what it was supposed to be doing before that feedback control can begin to be exercised. In a feedforward system, on the other hand, the system behavior is preset, with an internal memory model based on an anticipation (relating present inputs to their predicted outcomes) being in control. So feedforward systems have the necessary corrective present change of state determined by a presently existing model of an anticipated future state (as does a thermostat). It is crucial to note that the vehicle of anticipation is in fact an internal model—the stimulus for change in action is not simply the present input from outside the system—it is the prediction under those present conditions that is contained within the model: the discrepancy between outcome predicted by the model and the present input drives behavioral change. But what is the modeling relation? How do we know that one of two systems models the other? The key here is new knowledge: we may learn something new about a system of interest by studying the system which is its model. As Louie (2012) put it “the essence of a modeling relation consists of specifying an encoding and a corresponding decoding of particular system characteristics into corresponding characteristics of another system, in such a way that implication in the model corresponds to causality in the system (p. 21).” Thus for the mathematical modeler, a theorem about the model (an implication) becomes a prediction about the system behavior. A computer program can “derive” behavioral consequences from the commands written into the program in that fashion. Rosen’s prototypical modeling relation is shown in Fig. 3.2. This shows the interaction between the natural or physical system (N) and a formal (semantic) system (F) analogous to a computer program, and their mutual encoding and decoding relationship. It also shows that within the natural system our normal conception of causality holds, while in the formal system the equivalent of causality is inferential, specified as the relationship between premises within a deductive system and a consequence of that system as the “inference.” Rosen felt that error and emergence were crucial to models and anticipatory systems. In the first place, no model is ever exactly the same as the

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Fig. 3.2 Rosen’s prototypical modeling relation

system actually will be in the future: there is statistical or probabilistic “error” always present, as well as finite or incomplete representation. Since this is so, error will arise as a necessary consequence when the behavior predicted by the model diverges from what actually is exhibited by the system. This shows how the system can fail—if it’s behavior as directed by the incomplete and inaccurate model—(or by a failure in the system, such as a defective receptor causing a bad input or a broken effector causing behavior to deviate from what was intended)—is sufficiently far from what actually transpires in that future period, there can be catastrophic failure. Emergence enters in when the discrepancies are not sufficiently great to cause catastrophic failure, as when the content of the model contains something new, or not found in the system itself. This has been studied by philosophers of science, who have noted that a model or metaphor contained within a theory can lead to new knowledge of the theory’s domain when it shows that the theory must be enriched by the content of that novel material (see Hesse, 1963; Hanson, 1970). Such novelty is, strictly from the standpoint of the theory of anticipation, an error or discrepancy. But in this case, from the standpoint of scientific knowledge gathering, it is an “error” with beneficial results: the generation of new, not yet acknowledged, knowledge. The resulting diagram of an anticipatory system (in Fig. 3.3) is a nearly upside down version of the TOTE plus bias diagram, with S denoting the primary (natural) system, M denoting the model, and E denoting an effector system to move S so that it will pick up new

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Fig. 3.3 Rosen’s anticipatory system

input as time unfolds. Anticipatory behavior would be generated by any system that (1) contains an internal predictive model of itself and/or of its environment and (2) uses its dynamical law governed response capability by employing the predictions of its internal model to guide behavior. For Rosen, anticipatory systems are simply a special class of adaptive control systems. Wiener’s (1948) cybernetic helmsman is the prototypical example. It has opponent process “swings” constantly trying to zero in on an intended destination (central tendency) by swinging between two limiting constraints (anticipatory models or thermostat like set points). Behavior centering on the destination is a result of swinging between limits. This is what a thermostat does to keep a near constant temperature that its preset bias point specifies. It is interesting to note in hindsight that Rosen, publishing in 1985, had only managed an alternative account (and diagram) to what Hayek published in 1952. As Hayek had said, “the organism must live as much in a world of expectation as in a world of ‘fact’, and most responses to a given stimulus are probably determined only via fairly complex processes of ‘trying out’ on the model the effects to be expected from alternative courses of action” (Hayek, 1952, p. 121). Thus an Hayek noted, an organism lives in an environment that is actually an econiche or umwelt of its own construction due to anticipation. Due to the memory of its dynamic nervous system activity, an organism is a constantly evolving series of perceptions initiating behavioral actions which in turn bias perceptions. The functional mind is a relational structuring and restructuring device. And as in the case of those who ignore history

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being doomed to repeat it, those who ignore interdisciplinary results are doomed to eventually reinvent or repeat them.3 More recent neuropsychology has provided considerable empirical support for Hayek’s “memory and anticipation of the nervous system” model of cognition. While Pribram (1977) was perhaps the first neuroscientist to refer to “the marketplace in the mind,” the work of Fuster (1980, 1995, 2003, 2013) produced and summarizes much relevant work in support of dynamical memory, distributed cognition, and control structures, the interdependence of perception–action cycles with memory, even what the more social fields call the economy of knowledge and its nervous system underpinnings. Fuster explicitly related Hayekian social themes to CNS functioning: It makes sense, metaphorically, to speak of a cerebral marketplace of knowledge. This would be the cognitive counterpart of the subcortical marketplace of values and rewards that Ainslie and Monterosso (2004) hypothesize….. [With current knowledge] Hayek could have extended to the brain concepts very similar to those he used to explain the relationships between marketplace participants and between price and cost…. Current cognitive neuroscience not only confirms Hayek’s hypotheses on the brain/mind relation but also incorporates gradually into the cerebral cortex some of the same principles of operation that he and other liberal economists tell us govern the behavior of individuals in an economic system as complex as the human brain. (Fuster, 2011, p. 9)

But there are also significant differences between the brain of an agent and the impersonal market order.

Inference and Expectation are Different in Society Individuals are agents: as subjects of conceptual activity they embody expectations and inferences in their cognition (as anticipatory models) at all times, both tacitly and explicitly. Social groupings have no agency— they cannot embody future expectations in some trans-individual super

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agent. The market order, to take our most commonly used example, provides a basis for an individual’s expectation, but the market order itself cannot “expect” anything at all—it is not an agent, not a subject of conceptual activity. The market cannot anticipate because it is not a functional entity. All it does is provide necessary information to an agent (actually, to many agents)—any market participant—who uses that information to update his or her internal model, and adjusts their behavior accordingly. Functionality is found only in the market participants—never in the market itself. Market participants use the information provided by the order—the price of goods or services that are momentarily available—to adjust their internal model of a desired future state of affairs in conjunction with their present perception of the ongoing state of affairs. They anticipate how to bring about their goals by adjusting their momentary behavior to make it consonant with what the model specifies the goal (the future state that is desired) to be. Functional agency incorporates expectation into its physical system by incorporating input from a model which specifies what that expectation looks like, and simultaneously (that is, in real time) incorporating that semantic information as a guide to (again, in real time) adjusting its ongoing physical behavior. Such combined physical-functional systems depend entirely upon the detection of error—upon the perception of a discrepancy between the model’s prediction of the situation specified in predicted results in the future, and the agent’s simultaneous perception of where he or she is in relation to the model’s prediction. And we should note that this simultaneous perception is itself an expectation based upon a model, because, as Hayek said, the organism lives in a world of expectations in every moment. The whole point of the agent’s behavior is to eliminate an error—the discrepancy between what the model specifies must occur, and what the agent’s perception of the situation presently is. Feedback and feedforward are inextricably linked in all adaptive behavior based upon anticipation and expectation. Success—achieving a goal—requires error elimination and/or correction of behavioral trajectory that is specified by feedforward anticipatory specification of that trajectory. Physical systems may have feedback, but they cannot have either success or failure. Success and failure are functional concepts, and only agents—subjects of conceptual activity—possess such

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concepts. Feedforward occurs only in living or functional systems,4 all of which, including machines, are derived from agency. The market order is not a thermostat set by a person—it is just the input stimulation to an agent, which tells the agent to turn on or turn off the agent’s functional behavior. Market “information” is not contained in any bias or “model” internal to the market order itself. The market is simply a source of information—it provides an ongoing pattern or flow of functional information (analogous to the flow of patterns within CNS activity) that is potentially available to agents. On the basis of that information available in the market an individual may choose to behave or not to behave—to join the market process and make a purchase (or put something up for sale), or not to participate in the order and hence to do nothing, at least for the moment. This is why there are no diagrams of servo mechanical principles or Rosenesque treatises on the market as an adaptive system in the expository texts of Austrian economists or of actual liberals. It is only constructivists, confusing the spontaneous cosmos of the market with a taxis, who attempt to reduce the market order to simple physical flowcharts, logic trees, and similar linear or hierarchically controlled structures. The market has no functionality except in providing information, distributed equally throughout the order, to any potential participant, to use or ignore at their discretion. Its control structure is that of the decentralized coalitional or polycentric models in which an individual agent is represented by a single node in the diagram, and any agent can be removed from order participation without any great effect on the overall prevailing order. Hierarchical order works up to the corporation as an organization (taxis) structure, but not for a market order. And this is so even though the corporation is a prominent feature of the capitalist economy.

Inference and Expectation in Economics Cosmic structures neither infer nor expect. Such forms of anticipation are unique to the human participants whose behavior has resulted in the structure of the market order. This presents a unique form of interaction:

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by definition the social cosmos is a cosmos, and when taken as a whole, so is the human being. But when human beings as individuals intend to interact with the market order they do not do so as cosmic structures. They do so as a directed taxis, with only a limited set of specific goals and requirements in mind, ignoring all other potential concerns or goals. In this fundamental respect all cosmic social orders exist only because of this required integration of taxis activity into the overall cosmic structure. Taxis organization is in fact an indispensable component of cosmic structures involving human beings. Here we need to provide two things: first, a demonstration of how this is so, for which we will use the practice of science as an example; and, second, an overview of the limits of taxis controlled phenomena, to show how the attempt to reduce cosmic structures and grown institutions to taxis directed organizations can never succeed. The key to understanding both points is the realization that models and anticipatory structures exist only within agents—subjects of conceptual activity. The market order, like all cosmic orders, is totally impersonal and without expectation, inference, or any actual mechanism of anticipation. It is the result of human action, but not intentional design. All it can do when it functions is provide information which may (or may not) be utilized by an individual. Ever since Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions it has been obvious that understanding science requires a dual process (opponent process) model. Kuhn (1970, 1977) clearly distinguished between (at least) two aspects of science praxis: normal research periods and much rarer revolutionary reconceptualizations. Normal science research is taxis based. A relevant research community bases its practice on shared exemplary puzzles and their accepted solution in conjunction with a tacitly accepted background theory of what research will disclose in the future. When that normal science research accumulates a sufficient number of anomalous results, ones that do not fit the framework of those exemplary puzzles and tacit theory even with additional auxiliary assumptions, a revolutionary reconceptualization, bringing in fundamentally unanticipated formulations, will eventually occur and reestablish a new period of normal science praxis to replace the previous one. The overall process is like the evolution of speciation: when a species encounters a sufficient number of environmental anomalies and

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its adaptation to its environment becomes more and more tenuous, it will “die out” only to be replaced by a new species that is, in unanticipated ways, fundamentally new. In that sense Kuhn provided the first satisfactory evolutionary account of the growth of science. What we need to note here is that normal science practice is a taxis phenomenon. It is structured and directed by dominant individuals to produce results that fit a pattern delimited (but not totally specified) in advance. What constitutes acceptable research is determined by a “committee” of the senior researchers in the tradition who, because they share common goals and conceptions of what the field should be, instill this, along with acceptable research practices and traditions, in all new researchers who enter the community. Like a corporation’s board of directors, the dominant researchers determine what the “company of science” is going to do and how it is going to do it. There is top-down direction (albeit in many cases tacit) at all levels of normal science activity. Just as companies have a “corporate personality” or corporate “ethos or ethic,” or corporate “culture,” normal science research traditions enshrine similar conceptions in their research community. Those shared traditions and values (even when entirely tacit) make the research tradition what it is. Where is the cosmic structure of science? The answer is it is omnipresent in the background, or at the fringe, of normal science research traditions, in the immense amount of what we are ignorant about, which always surrounds any research tradition. The cosmic structure of science appears at the immense circle of ignorance surrounding the little bit of knowledge provided by normal science practice. When things go wrong with that normal practice, when anomalous results accumulate, or when an innovative researcher sees beyond the possibilities of the available research tradition, a reconceptualization of the entire field is likely to occur. Such a reconceptualization will replace whatever theoretical framework had been in place and will bring in an entirely new set of exemplary puzzles which will train the research community’s practitioners in how to do a “new” form of activity that will structure an entirely new tradition of normal science research. This transition is similar to an anticipatory system being constantly unable to achieve its goal (reconciling what its model says the situation should be with present

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input about the actual situation) because it could not alter its behavior enough to bring it in line with the anticipated state in the future that had been pictured in its model. After repeated failure, the agent as the anticipatory system would have to simply give up the old goal and then would attempt to achieve a new one specifying a different anticipated state. Abandoning the old goal in favor of a new one is analogous to the switch from a normal science research tradition when a revolution occurs and unexpectedly forces a newly emergent tradition upon the field. After the revolution everything “looks different” to research practitioners. Note again that it is the individual—whether thought of as anticipatory system or research practitioner—who has the goals and the expectations, as well as a specification of what their achievement would look like. Science as a whole has no goals, no expectations, and no specification of what its final state would be. In that sense it is, like evolution, a cosmic structure—impersonal, undirected, un-anticipated, and in sum, unforeseen in its results.

Anticipatory Systems in the Economic Domain Recently there have been attempts to incorporate the general schema of anticipatory systems into the study of market processes. Building upon Hayek’s notion of mapping and modeling in the sensory order, several authors have attempted to specify what would constitute adaptive “systems” in the economic realm. As McQuade and Butos (2005) note, the market order, without being conscious and without any central locus of control, displays what looks like an emergent kind of behavior, generating particular configurations of knowledge, principally in the form of prices and quantities over time and often in space. And that information could not have been produced in any other way (see p. 344). They argue it is at the market level—in the changes in market prices and quantities traded in both spot and futures markets—that we observe a manifestation of the anticipatory aspects of the system when it responds to environmental change. But does the change in information that constantly occurs in the market—the changes in prices, the quantities of goods, and indeed the

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goods themselves—show that the market order itself is an anticipatory system? Or is it the case that “we observe” an impersonal order which neither anticipates nor does not anticipate, and to which we as agents want to perceive “anticipation” in analogy to that which exists in ourselves and other agents? Here we need to be careful.5 The “anticipatory aspects of the system” are found in the interactions of agents with market information rather than in the market itself. We need to carefully distinguish between what the market order is and the use we make of it. There is no doubt whatever that we use market information in our anticipatory models. But that does not imply that the market itself anticipates anything (or is an anticipatory model), even though it provides us with information. The market in itself is just an organization of human behavior. We begin by reminding ourselves that concepts such as “mapping,” “modeling,” and “anticipating” are purely functional structures. As such they cannot be defined in purely physical terms. Functional concepts are inherently ambiguous from a purely physical point of view. That is why a given physical analysis of an agent’s movements in space can never determine what action it represents. The same neutrally described physical movements could equally represent “cashing a check,” “signing a love note,” or even (to a Freudian analyst) “exhibiting latent hostility to one’s mother.” Functionality is not physicality and vice versa. Now we ask a question: is the market order a functional or a physical concept? Clearly it is functional in the sense that it can be instantiated in an indefinite number of physically specified “bits” of human behavior and physical structures. And there is no doubt that physical systems can display emergent behavior—as in physical chaos and far from equilibrium thermodynamic systems—but the emergence of novelty or new patterns is one thing, while functional specifications such as adapting and anticipating are quite another. Now another question: Does a market order have knowledge apart from the knowledge of its individual participants? Clearly its ordering of events provides knowledge to an agent, and in that sense it may “embody” knowledge, but it is obvious that the market order does not exist as an independent knowledge structure, one capable of “knowing” its environment. The market just generates prices (or more generally, information which we interpret functionally as prices), it does

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not generate knowledge in its activity. That “knowledge” is “generated” by and within an agent, a subject of conceptual activity, a market participant who interprets the price signal. That interpretation upon the part of an agent is the only place in which the “generated knowledge” exists. While the statement that “the market order is a knowledge transmission system” is a truism we cannot afford to lose sight of the fact that that “knowledge” is always within an agent, and not something possessed by the market itself. It would be more accurate to call the market order itself an information transmission system and to restrict the term knowledge to (what is possessed by) the agents who participate in and in fact generate the order.

Another Look at Science It is more accurate to talk about the genesis of knowledge in the practice of science than in the market order, simply because we know intuitively that it is the researchers who embody (old) and make (new) knowledge as a result of interacting with other agents and their recorded results in an institutionalized setting. The research community structure provides them with raw material—information in a broad sense—from which individuals do indeed create knowledge. We all know it is scientists— and not science as an abstract mechanism—who create knowledge and transmit it to others. And the knowledge researchers create comes in two important ways: first, (and this method works in both normal science puzzle solving and revolutionary reconceptualization) they can use their own cognitive creativity to go beyond what is available in the scientific community and formulate something that is intrinsically novel; second, they can look more carefully than others at what is already available within the informational structure of science and become “mining” entrepreneurs who do something new with material that others have overlooked but could in principle have discovered. Kirzner (1979) noted that this entrepreneurial aspect of scientific discovery involves a seeming paradox: there is knowledge that is “un-deliberately” discoverable, that is, found as a matter of luck instead of intent.6 This is a point at which the idea of “explicit, rational discovery” gives way to all the problems posed

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by what Polanyi called tacit knowledge. If you look at the available forms of normal science knowledge as constituting a potentially shared map, then as McQuade and Butos (2005) say, the map constitutes the order’s “long-term” memory (see p. 348), serving as the backdrop or context for newly generated ideas. But that map or memory is the repository for knowledge generated by individuals, not knowledge in itself. Knowledge is always an individual creation. There is no sausage machine that automatically or impersonally cranks out new knowledge. Thus while science allows individuals to anticipate the future, and in so doing generate new knowledge, the process of science itself is not a sausage machine that automatically delivers anticipations and expectations. Science per se is not an adaptive system in that sense. So we need to ask if we could substitute “nothing but” normal science puzzle solving without any revolutionary reconceptualization and still get the edifice of scientific knowledge. This was the intent of the classic “cumulative record” model of scientific history as a building block or “workers on the Cathedral of knowledge” account of justificationist philosophy in which individual researchers simply add their own bricks and a bit of mortar to the ever-increasing sum total of our knowledge. If we could do that then science could be done by a giant corporation, a taxis, such as is found in the government control of scientific research. The problem, of course, is that there are definite revolutions in science, and these revolutionary periods have torn down what we had previously thought was a wonderful Cathedral and required us to construct an entirely new one. Everyone is familiar with Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity and the advent of quantum mechanics as fundamental changes in the nature and structure of physical knowledge. Similarly, almost every field of scientific endeavor has seen at least one revolutionary reconceptualization. Along with those familiar physics examples (to cite only examples that have occurred in my lifetime) the plate tectonics revolution in geology, the transformational revolution in linguistics, the cognitive revolution in psychology, and the semiotic revolution in the biology of life have occurred in science, and in philosophy the advent of non-justificational epistemologies, have all transformed the nature of knowledge in their disciplines. What we think we know in the

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twenty-first century would have been all but unrecognizable to anyone in those fields in the year 1900. What would be the fate of science if it were to be restricted to a “cumulative record” or “top down” approach directing that only specified presently available approaches be allowed to place the next bricks in the scientific edifice? What would happen, for instance, if science were restricted to being “politically correct?” Then it could change direction only when the dominant political culture allowed it to do so.

The Strangulation of Science and Society Unaware of the consequences of their actions, and obviously hoping to better the situation that they had faced in the 1920s, the conscientious citizens of Germany made what can only be regarded as the most regrettable of decisions: to elect Hitler to take charge. This is how the inhabitants of a functional democracy committed political suicide by voting for a dictatorship. It was an unintended disaster, but one whose consequences could easily have been predicted. At nearly the same time what happened in Soviet Russia, when the communist powers-that-be unilaterally declared that Lysenkoism was to replace biology and genetics, constituted not so much the suicide of biological science as its deliberate execution by a dictatorship. It is telling—and terrifying—that in both countries the intellectuals were totally under the thrall of one or another variant of socialism, which extols and indeed requires “central planning” of all social life. Thus they wholeheartedly endorsed what happened. Socialism provided the “enlightened” intellectuals with a rationale for taking control of scientific progress in order to achieve specific goals. This is because under socialism science is nothing but an instrument. Instruments are mere tools, made and shaped to do the bidding of the rulers. This idea captivated the intelligentsia of Europe, and amazingly of England and the United States as well. After all, as John Dewey had said, we have learned from Francis Bacon that knowledge is power, and if we control that power for our purposes and ends we will be only one step lower than the gods in our achievements. We should remember that

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there is no objective truth, said Dewey, there is only pragmatic instrumentalism in which science is just an instrument that we use for our particular purposes. Similarly in England, Russell and the progressivists hated property to such an extent that they willingly sacrificed their own ability to do whatever research they wanted to do in favor of agreeing to work for what their clear Cartesian common sense said was “the greater good for the greatest number.” Fortunately at the time, Michael Polanyi and John Baker saw the folly of the central planning movement and managed to convince many of the self-styled British intelligentsia that the whole framework of socialism and planning of science was indeed a form of intellectual suicide comparable to what had happened in Germany and Russia. Polanyi’s overly neglected The Logic of Liberty (1951) detailed a series of case studies in why socialist planning and control of science never worked, and why it can never work. Today the progressivists dismiss those examples as out of date, claiming that they have corrected all the problems that Polanyi and other liberals pointed out (we are, of course, still waiting to hear what those corrections consist of ). And superficially, if one examines the nature of scientific research in the Western world after World War II it becomes obvious that we entered an era of “Big Government” in which a centralized control structure of unelected bureaucrats has planned the nature of science and its research for longer than most of those who read this today have been alive. Thus most of you have grown up with absolutely no idea that it could be any other way. You work for a de facto dictatorship with no qualms. These individuals even applauded U. S. President Obama when he claimed that the government was responsible for scientific progress and achievement rather than individual creativity or initiative, because the government funded and “directed” all those helpless and clueless individual researchers.7 So if this is so, and we are still making “progress,” achieving new results, who cares? The answer is that we should all care, because both the direction of scientific research and the contents which it is allowed to provide are now completely under the control of unelected “career” bureaucrats who happen to hold the purse strings for the funding of scientific research. Since the 1960s especially, the academic marketplace in the U.S. has steadily given way to centrally planned and directed

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goals that are determined entirely by momentary political correctness instead of scientists themselves. We now, through legislation and an entrenched bureaucracy, find momentarily politically correct “quotas” specifying who should do science, and, since the power of the purse is now politically correctly controlled, determining exactly what that science should consist of (through control of funding grants) and indeed what results can be accepted as “scientific.” The desires of the progressivist “liberal” intelligentsia have been combined with the power of the purse held by bureaucrats and administrators to direct science into whatever is of pressing political concern to that unelected group of “the elite”.8 Science is now diverted from free inquiry into whatever its practitioners would choose on their own to regard as worthy of scrutiny into what “sounds good” to the “well-meaning” politicians intent upon changing all aspects of society to match their expectations of what will buy them votes. Usually this is directed to forcing society to change in order to match what the bureaucrats’ and politicians’ expectations of “equality,” social “justice,” and “the greatest good” consists of. At this point, several generations of younger science graduates, especially those in the social domains, have been trained that since the demise of “modernism” we live in a “post-rational” world in which there are no standards which good research must meet. Thus they have no idea of equality as it was originally intended, as being equality of opportunity, and, following Dewey and others, denigrate that conception as old-fashioned and outmoded, in order to favor the idea that equality requires equality of outcome. They are not concerned at all with a race for knowledge as requiring a level course favoring no lane and with a common starting line for all participants. They want a “race” which starts from many locations but which has all participants crossing the finish line together so there are no winners, but only non-losers. Thus there is no need to consider actual academic standards at all, since the breakdown of justificationist rationality has shown they are merely “opinions” of those who propose them, and it is therefore correct to teach students what they want to hear instead of what they ought to hear. So we now are told that black students should be “taught” black science instead of “white” science, or that elementary schools are correct to say that there are as many sexes as one wants to propose, and that anthropogenic “climate change” is a

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“proven” fact (which it simply is not—see Alcorn, 2019; Koonin, 2021) and is due to our greed and the use of fossil fuels. And this contention of “these are the actual facts” is put forth despite the simple “fact” that there is no such thing as “proof ” anywhere in empirical science and that actual experts can be found on both sides of each and every contention. But that is no problem to the constructivists who now greatly outnumber those who remember what science was and still should be, and it is only a matter of time before academic appointments and funding (which are constrained by the bureaucratic “elite” so that whatever is momentarily correct is all that is allowed to be funded or taught) will guarantee that anyone who dares to oppose the prescribed orthodoxy will be denied further funding and loudly labeled as having “sold out” to capitalist special interest groups and reactionary (or, as Hillary Clinton described them, deplorable) individuals. It will only be a matter of time before those “deplorables” will openly be labeled as enemies of the socialist state. That is, after all, the intent of cancel culture. History has seen exactly this type of “education” before, and the banishment or imprisonment of such deplorables. It was prominent in the last century in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Chavez’s Venezuela, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, Kim’s North Korea, indeed in almost all totalitarian regimes. What is unexpected is to see it happening in and enthusiastically supported by the supposedly “democratic republics” that were to be the last and best hope for freedom against totalitarianism. But when Big Government takes over funding there is no possibility of avoiding governmentally imposed or “politically correct” results. In the end the results achieved will parallel those of the economic “planning” regimes attempted by the Soviet Union in the period between World War I and World War II. But in the meantime it will be a slow slide away from seeking truth no matter where that process leads into the idea that truth is always relative to a class status or a skin color, or the abject conventionalism of “they are all the same, so it doesn’t matter anyway.” The bureaucrats, the unelected but inevitable totalitarians, along with the popular press, will tell us what to do and the politicians will parcel out our “just” rewards if (and only if ) we have voted for them.

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But isn’t the position I have just stated just a matter of my (fill in the blank with) class status, gender, age, skin color, and the whole lot of “objective criteria” that the disenchanted youth find so abhorrent? Why should anyone listen to me instead of what the young and the instantly famous progressivist rock stars and beautiful and sexy news “presenters” are preaching? Because there are consequences for all in letting Big Government run not only our social lives but also our intellectual ones. Government has the power of coercion—it can decide to increase our taxes, conscript us for “military” service, prevent us from selling our real property, and countless other things. As such it has absolute power over us, and as Lord Acton so accurately said, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Science in a free state should only be constrained by evidence and persuasion in the form of coherent argumentation, not by coercion from fear of losing funding and appointments, and then ostracism. We have been able to coast for a while because, as Kirzner6 indicated, even constrained and directed research will eventually uncover novelty in the “lucky” bits that are unanticipated but still seen by researchers at the edge of the old and familiar praxis. But revolutions (as opposed to fortuitous novel results) and new directions will be harder and harder to fund with increasing government control.

You Cannot Legislate Scientific Results Perhaps even more insidious than governmental control of the purse strings for research is the blatant interference with the results of inquiry when carried out by elected representatives. This shows up most clearly in how allegations of fraud in scientific practice are handled when the government becomes involved. Science is already in the business of detecting error. It does so when researchers attempt to build on results that are already available. In the normal course of things something that is erroneous—a result that is wrong and cannot be replicated—will be detected and corrected when other members of the research community attempt to take those results and modify them slightly in order to build upon them. When they fail to replicate the original results, that research will be discarded from the accepted body of science, and accepted as

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an error. Since science is in the business of constructive replication, in which accepted results become the basis for future research that builds upon and elaborates those results, it is not possible for scientific error to go undetected for very long. Is there any other way in which error can propagate through the body of accepted scientific knowledge? No, there is not. If that is so, we can ask why there is occasionally a report of fraudulent activity in the news. If science is a self-correcting enterprise, capable of detecting error—regardless of its cause—why do we hear reports about fraud in science in newscasts? There is really only one reason: the purported fraud episode is newsworthy because it is an instance of the violation of some momentarily politically correct position. If a minority researcher—a female researcher, or someone with dark skin, or a foreign accent, etc.—claims that someone in power has deliberately misrepresented results, or claimed results actually belonging to another person, or a similar situation arises, one can be sure that the news broadcasts will devote inordinate coverage to the claim, and an earnest and concerned TV reporter will ask “When will the government step in and do something about fraud in science?” Soon the media event will be picked up by an elected representative, and the circus will become a traveling roadshow in a state government or eventually in the US Congress. At this point, the media circus becomes a political one in which one or another politician uses the incident for their personal political aggrandizement. It plays well back home for the voters to feel that their representatives are doing something to eliminate fraud and waste in something “important” such as science. Occasionally it will get to the point where a congressman or woman will demand investigations of the researchers involved, the funding agencies who gave the money, the other agencies and scientists who allegedly failed to detect or report the fraud, etc. So should we not establish the equivalent of a “Consumer Protection Bureau” to oversee science? I said that this was a circus, and that is literally all that it is. There is no need whatever for the concerned reporter, the self-aggrandizing representative, or any worry on the part of the poor taxpayer. How can I be so sure? The answer is because science is a self-correcting enterprise, a far more efficient version of its own Consumer Protection Bureau (even

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though there is one, the Office of Scientific Integrity), and it is the scientific research community who detects any fraud if it exists. All the OSI or another consumer “protection” bureau could do is investigate a charge of fraud after it was discovered by the scientific community. This is because no matter how concerned the news reporter or the representative, they are not capable of detecting fraud in science. They are not experts in science or its practice. In fact, it is axiomatic that no reporter (or other outsider such as a member of Congress, etc.) has ever detected fraud in science. They do not have the knowledge and they are not there, with boots on the ground in the science labs or research settings. The media and political circus will go on as long as there is an audience, and in the meantime it is a foregone conclusion that a career or two will be ruined as a result.9 Science itself is quite efficient in punishing fraud by detecting and bypassing it, just as the market order rewards only those who don’t make what Kirzner called “regrettable” choices. No additional oversight or bureaucratic agency could be as efficient as science itself is in doing so. It should be equally clear that just as no politician can detect fraud in science, no politician can specify what the results of scientific inquiry must be. While it would not presuppose complete omniscience on the part of the politician it would definitely presuppose that the politician was a full-time working scientist doing research in the particular area in question. If that were the case they would not be in politics, but only in science. But the politicians want to constrain results only to the extent that they will produce more votes so that they can retain their offices. This is why momentary political correctness has become a cancer that is debilitating our contemporary society. The problem in such cases centers around the economy of knowledge in complex orders. Normal science research practitioners need to worry about little more than how to explore and elaborate upon a small number of exemplary puzzle solutions. Any fraud is perfectly controlled by the relevant scientific research community in its regular activity, and it could neither be discovered nor corrected by outsiders. For exactly the same reason no outside influence can better organize or “control” the practice of science than can the relevant research communities themselves. In any spontaneous complex order, the order itself functions to maximize

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the amount of information available within it. Complex orders are “in the business” of advantageously distributing resources of knowledge to all participants in the order. In no case is it possible to find an external intelligence or control system that is capable of more efficient management of such an order. Such orders have evolved without conscious planning and function quite well in spite of our well-meaning attempts to consciously “plan” better systems. Their functioning shows how we can do so much with so little knowledge on the part of any given individual. Indeed what we have found is that it is not social institutions such as the market order or science that need to be “controlled,” it is rather the would-be controllers. But that does not sit well with the most successful: the movers and shakers of society and politics (or even science, as Baltimore briefly was) who have, for a brief moment at least, seemed to be in command in their field. Like the rock stars who are used to having adoring fans and the media hang on their every word, look, and gesture, the constructivist politicians and dictators of the world do not want to hear that they are not in fact mentally and morally superior beings with greater knowledge than others, and they remain quite convinced that they can, “for all the right reasons,” meddle with the results of systems that work pretty well on their own. They have not achieved the wisdom of the classic liberal thinkers—if it is not broken do not attempt to fix it. These systems have their own built in anticipatory models and corrective mechanisms. What we need to realize is that, although efficient, none of these corrective mechanisms can ever be perfect. There will always be cases that slip by the built-in corrections in the system. When that happens we sometimes, but not often, detect them from an outside perspective. But it does not follow that we can somehow impose an “outside” system that we can construct upon either science or society and achieve better results. We will always miss some errors no matter what we do. The liberals knew very well that all we can do is what Popper called “piecemeal engineering,” which is to make minor changes in the details of a complex system and then wait to make sure that the unintended consequences of those changes are not more harmful than helpful. We need to realize that in science and in overall society the spontaneous ordering of events in those abstract systems does indeed function as well as anything we have planned for

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the tasks of producing knowledge and increasing wealth and well-being. Because of the inevitable limitations of knowledge production, transmission, and utilization within spontaneously arisen complex orders, no taxis oriented approach can ever be more efficient. We cannot make the fatal error of rationalist constructivism, of thinking that because the liberal approach to the framework of order works well that it can be replaced by a better one that we design to supplant it. We have no more efficient “anticipatory systems” for our expectations than those which are already built into the systems involved.

Corruption of Language Inevitably Corrupts Our Knowledge In human society language functions as a feedforward mechanism. As such it is part of a bias system that arose, through our neoteny, to help us anticipate the events in our environment. So the language you employ to describe the events you see and what you feel is tremendously important. Recall that Kenneth Craik said that what is an implication in the model (the feedforward bias system) is intended to correspond with reality—it should correspond to causality of environmental events. In the absence of a framework provided by an intelligible linguistic context, we can’t interpret things. Consider an example: the simple sentence “The notes were sour because the seams split.” This causes the normal English speakerhearer to be taken aback, because there is no obviously meaningful context. Normally we test whether or not that causal correspondence exists simply by looking at what occurs in our environment. Here we do not know what the environment actually consists of. But when I provide you with one single word—bagpipes—the context snaps into place and we understand. There was no change in the meanings, only a lack of context. But what would happen if someone or some group deliberately changes the meanings of words we use to describe reality? If instead of using words in their accepted meanings and contexts one were to decide to deliberately camouflage or obscure what was going on in reality by employing words which usually meant something else? In some cases, the effects would be disastrous: describing a charging lion as a playful kitty

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cat would immediately be detected (at least by the survivors) and would lead others to immediately distrust you. Less problematic is a quarrel between individuals who know each other well, as when one says it’s a beautiful sunny day and another with whom that person momentarily disagrees says that it is cold and likely to rain. We all know how to ignore those “cross purposes” descriptions and go on about our business. But what if one were to adopt the Marcuse-Gramsci approach of “cultural” Marxism warfare and deliberately mislabel words of social and emotional significance so that the words employed actually mean something other than what had heretofore been intended? Especially if one were to pretend that it was tremendously socially important to do so, and not to do so was to be demeaning and discriminating and aggressive against some group of people? The answer is obvious: the more the terms were employed in a new fashion the more their original connotations would be diluted and transferred to other situations, or perhaps forgotten entirely. This has been a common practice of the rhetorical strategy of Marxism from the beginning (as when Marx took the perfectly neutral term “class” and turned it into a meaningless term of causal organization in society), and it is what underlies momentary political correctness. Thus one can make wildly ludicrous claims that cannot be supported by any evidence whatsoever (such as that all white people have a “privilege” in virtue of their skin color, or that defending the free market order is “nothing but” an exhibition of one’s class and race status, etc.). All these claims are presented as haunted universe doctrines. They are presented as and taken to be confirmable, and as such are very influential of others’ behavior—but there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that could ever refute the claims in question. A clear example is the strident claim: “You are a racist!” Even if you never exhibited any behavior of that sort (whatever one specifies that that could be) in the past and did not for the next thousand years, it would not refute the claim. An attribution of discrimination or racism can be taken as plausible without any evidence, but a denial of discrimination or racism can never be “demonstrated” (since neither definitive falsification nor induction works) in any social situation. The haunted universe approach is the basis for the prototypical “gotcha” or guilt by association argument of the Marxist. This is how

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the socialist removes reality—actual factual situations—from consideration within our anticipatory models. Instead of either empirical (factual, scientific) or logical, the appeal is to emotionality and guilt through rhetorical and suasory techniques alone. Emotionality and asserted guilt are substituted for reality as shown by facts in the environment. This is how, if the intellectuals remain confused, the masses can be kept entirely in the dark. This is not new. In the 1946 edition of Brave New World , Aldous Huxley noted that the greatest triumphs of propaganda have always been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. So by simply not mentioning certain subjects, by putting Churchill’s “iron curtain” between the masses and facts or arguments that local and national political bosses regard as undesirable, there becomes no “knowledge” at all. The triumph of “critical” race theory is that of propaganda over reality. The rhetorical strategy the Marxist employs is to use an emotional feeling that is created in the audience instead of facts. Should one point this out to the audience—as by showing that there is no logical or empirical basis to the Marxist position—the Marxist reply is always to appeal to the propagandized purported “causal status” of the response as due to attempting the preservation of one’s class status. Any response to the rhetorical strategy of damnation due to alleged privilege in class is now called a “proof of guilt.” It is insinuated that that must be the cause of denial, since it is further asserted that the “factual” description provided by the cultural Marxist is so self-evidently a true axiom of clear Cartesian common sense that only the guilty could deny it (therefore it needs no “proof ” at all). So the Marxist appeals to his or her emotions and those instilled in the audience as new, redefined “facts” to cement his or her case, but no facts are ever allowed as refuting instances. Not surprisingly, this is the strategy of “heads I win, tails you lose.” To the gullible it is a universally effective strategy for inducing sympathetic limping before the allegedly lame. This is why our not too bright but quite willing to be guilty “educators” are now almost universally cultural Marxists. They have given up critical thought in favor of “critical” guilt.

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This is how it works: Critical race theorists have constructed their argument like a mousetrap. This agreement with their program becomes irrefutable evidence of a dissenter’s “white fragility,” “unconscious bias,” or “internalized white supremacy.” I’ve seen this projection of false consciousness onto their opponents play out dozens of times in my reporting. Diversity trainers will make an outrageous claim–such as “all whites are intrinsically oppressors” or “white teachers are guilty of spirit murdering black children”–and then when confronted with disagreement they adopt a patronizing tone and explain that participants who feel “defensiveness” or “anger” are reacting out of guilt and shame. Dissenters are instructed to remain silent, “lean into the discomfort,” and accept their “complicity in white supremacy.” (Rufo, 2021, p. 4)

Refuting such a non-intellectual and deliberately nonrational strategy cannot be done simply by employing the methods of common sense and scientific (or any sort of critical) inquiry that produces actual knowledge. This is not about knowledge—this is about control by any means possible, with the sole intent and purpose of destroying the abstract society based upon market orders and instituting in its place the totalitarian dictatorship of socialism. It is a war of words deliberately meant to destroy the abstract society by returning to tribal dictatorship under “cultural” Marxist dictators. Exactly this process of using guilt and ignorance as a defense for breaking down all traditional roles and rules has, with the advent of scientific advances in surgery and drug administration, now been extended to the province of gender “identity” and the so-called choice thereof. As Shrier notes, the progressivist-Marxist push to break down traditional sexual identity is an exact intellectual sibling of critical race theory: While critical race activists are teaching kids that they are largely defined by their skin color, gender activists are teaching kids that there are a great many genders, and that only they know their true gender. And just as families who object to racial indoctrination in schools are told that their denials of racism are proof of racism, young women who object to

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biological males participating in girls’ sports are told that their objections are proof of transphobic bigotry. (Shrier, 2021, pp. 5–6)

Guilt and ignorance combine to say “Gotcha!” on the basis of emotion alone. When examined from the perspective of actual critical assessment this flim-flam evaporates immediately. Parenthetically, we should emphasize that post-Marcuse the Marxists no longer claim to be scientific, since they recognize that science (which destroys their position) would have to be destroyed as well as everything else in present society, since it must be only another instance of “class” structure. This poses a problem for its obvious conflict with classical or “economic” Marxism, which, even though it is a paradigm exemplar of pseudoscience (like astrology or numerology), always was trumpeted as a “scientific” theory in the past. Now the cultural Marxists actively disparage science and are admitting that they have proposed a new secular form of religion, which they force upon all with the fervor of the religious zealot. Thus the proponents of anthropogenic causes of “global warming” (now shortened to just “climate change”), the new “green deal” environmentalism, etc., as well as “critical race” propaganda are all on a religious crusade against the heathen, who are now called deplorables. There is no reason or attitude of rationality in such positions, as one can see by their instant response of raw emotionality when their positions are actually criticized.

Notes 1. Downward causation refers to higher order constraints shaping physical or lower order biological processes by imposing functional control upon them. It transcends individuals and “jumps” from generation to generation in its effect. As Campbell said “all processes at the lower levels of a hierarchy are restrained by and act in conformity to the laws of the higher levels” (1974a, p. 180). Furthermore, this causation violates the usual billiard ball conception of determinism because it requires “substantial extents of time, covering several reproductive

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generations,… lumped as one instant for purposes of analysis” (ibid., p. 180). The causation involved can indeed seem to be backward instead of forward. If we now consider the jaw of a soldier termite or ant, a still more striking case of emergence and downward causation is encountered. In many of the highly dimorphic or polymorphic species, the soldier jaws are so specialized for piercing enemy ants and termites, huge multipronged antler-pincers, that the soldier cannot feed itself and has to be fed by workers. The soldier’s jaws and the distribution of protein therein (and the particular ribonucleic acid chains that provide the templates for the proteins) require for their explanation certain laws of sociology centering around division-of-labor social organization. The syndrome of division of labor, storable non-spoiling foodstuff, such as honey or seeds, apartment house living, and professional soldiers who do no food gathering, has been repeatedly independently discovered many times among the proto-termites, as well as independently by the ants, and by six or seven separate seats of human civilization.… This repeated convergent evolution testifies to the great selective advantage of division of labor social organization, economies of cognition, mutual defense, and production being some of its selective advantages. (ibid., pp. 181–182)

Here we have an example of a higher order functional regularity, the division of labor, determining lower level or physical processes in evolution. This is a mechanism to transcend particular individuals and generations of organisms, and superficially it seems as if the causality involved must somehow go backward toward an earlier functional specification of what evolution is to do. Realizing that the division of labor arose spontaneously, and not through planning, shows that this need not violate causality going “forward.” But for the purposes of this chapter we need to note only that this sort of adaptation is purely biological and need not involve any cognitive or highly developed brain structures at all. 2. In the late 1960s and 1970s I generalized results from psychology, including the work of Hayek on classification, mapping, and modeling, the TOTE unit, Pribram’s emerging model of two-process

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neural function (involving the traditional all or none spike potential and the slow or graded pre- and post-synaptic potentials), with results long available in philosophy (such as the neo-Kantian work of Cassirer on symbolism and thought, and conceptual abstraction) with then more recent developments (such as Hanson’s work on theories in science as abstract structural representations of reality) into an evolutionary framework (emerging from the work of Mayr in biology, Popper in philosophy, and Campbell and others of us in psychology) into a single conceptual framework: the organism as a theory of its environment. This is a shorthand formulation of a key tenant of evolutionary epistemology—that evolution has produced organisms whose species embody more and more adequate theories of their environments (where environment means both the physical specification and the internal conceptions of the biologicalpsychological environment, variously called the econiche or umwelt). Those theories are built in through the evolutionary history of a species, and without them individuals would have no experience at all. The survival of the species depends upon the adequacy of the theory which that species represents, in conjunction with the effector or response capabilities available to it. Human beings appear to be unique in evolutionary development because we possess the cognitive (symbolic) capacity to support language, and as a result can now formulate theories explicitly in language about the abilities that have hitherto existed only implicitly, being exhibited solely through the behavior of individual organisms. This theory is in sharp distinction to the original Umwelt proposal of von Uexküll, who did not (actually was conceptually unable to) distinguish between the epistemic subject, the knower, and that which the subject comes to know, the known. It is an evolutionary realism in distinction to the primitive solipsistic phenomenalism as endorsed by Mach and von Uexküll (as noted in Note 3). 3. There are epistemological problems with the concept of umwelt, and the more recent replacement concept in psychology, the perception– action cycle. Interpreted in its usual form the umwelt conception leads straight to naive phenomenalism. As von Uexküll said in 1920 (see page xv), All reality is subjective appearance. He thought,

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following Bohr, that this must be the great “fundamental admission” even in biology. We always come up against “objects” that owe their appearance to construction by the subject. From this naïve or Machian phenomenalist approach he developed the concept of the umwelt (1934, 1937) as the world of the organism according to its construction by repeated perception–action cycles in moving about its econiche. Copying Bohr’s phenomenalistic approach to quantum theory Von Uexküll did not recognize an independent reality at all . He criticized his rival Konrad Lorenz for holding that action schemata from those perception–action cycles were the result of trial and error learning on the part of the organism as an attempt to adapt to an independent or external reality. Karl Popper noted that von Uexküll felt that Lorenz: “Fails to grasp the new attitude which is the result of the discovery” (due partly to Lorenz himself ) “that the world around us, as it is given to our senses, is only the sum total of the biological release signals, and that it exists therefore only as a factor of the schemata of our biological actions” (p. 202). Uexküll asserts that Lorenz’s circular argument is due to his failure “to rid himself of the objectivist assumptions upon which the picture of the universe of classical physics rests.” (p. 203)

Having fallen for the then new picture of physics portrayed by the Copenhagen interpretation, Uexküll attempted to “relativize” biology (mistakenly thinking that this was the message of Einstein) by abandoning any reality that could be independently known (exactly as the Copenhagen school did under Bohr) in favor of “egocentric” or, properly, “organism-centric” reality. The organism’s perception–action cycles thus create not only an organism’s relevant environment or econiche, but all of reality. Later psychologists influenced by Gibson (1966, 1979) have adopted the idea of organismic perception–action cycles (e.g., see Turvey & Fitzpatrick, 1993) without realizing that this phenomenalistic approach is completely incompatible with the realism they profess to endorse. They will have to give up the purely functional analysis Gibson proposed (which was disdainful of neurophysiology and physical specification of input “information,”) in

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order to make a tenable organism-environment distinction. Unless they do so there is no possible distinction between the knower and the known, and no sense to proposing that organisms can know their econiche by acting within it. To repeat, the problem with this approach (phenomenalism) is that it cannot separate the knower from the known. The problem is presented by the act of perception. Perception makes a record— the same thing as a physicist making a measurement. A record, once made, is fixed and frozen forever—it is rate independent. As such no record or measure of the dynamical flow of the universe can ever be complete or capture all there is in that array. Any record is at best a fallible and incomplete representation, since it cannot include the information provided about an event from all points of view and from all temporal perspectives. Records or measures are always statistical, probabilistic, finite, and hence subject to error. Phenomenalism cannot allow the existence of error—if what the organism perceives is what it “knows” and all that exists, then ex hypothesis there is no possibility of error (even the usual excuse of “incorrect” perception is incompatible with phenomenalism). Since a finite and momentary record (or measurement, or perception) is never going to be complete or totally representative, the record is not, and can never be, the thing itself. The knower is never identical to the known. No record of events such as a perception can ever do more than represent those events—the essential activity of the nervous system, classification as effected in even its simplest form in the orienting response to novelty, is always a fallible, statistical and probabilistic record, an approximation of what it represents. Any interpretation of an environment or econiche—especially one created by an organism’s perception–action cycles—is going to be a representation of that econiche. This is the only tenable way that an organism’s umwelt can be constructed: as a model, i.e., as a construction in the nervous system of an organism which is inherently and intrinsically a representation of what is external to the nervous system of that organism. We can keep the conception of the umwelt only if we divorce it from the naïve phenomenalism of von Uexküll (and the neo-Gibsonians). Lorenz was a pioneer of evolutionary epistemology; von Uexküll was not. It is not possible to resuscitate von

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Uexküll’s conception in any evolutionary approach that recognizes less than perfect adaptation and hence less than exact description. Hence it is not possible to resuscitate that phenomenalistic approach at all . Hayek and Lorenz, both students of Karl Bühler, were realists instead of phenomenalists (Hayek remarking in The Sensory Order that Ernst Mach’s phenomenalistic constructions were “otiose” when fully understood), and both men figure prominently in the history of evolutionary epistemology. Not surprisingly, Mach and the Uexkülls (father, and son Thure) do not. 4. What are externalized models and maps and control structures? They are functional rather than physical phenomena. In 1968 Polanyi (1969) pointed out that these phenomena have functionality in the same sense that machines, which are artifacts we construct to perform purposeful activity, are functional. We as agents impart to the physical structures of machines the “derived” functionality they possess. They are externalizations of our individual agency and our internal functionality. In contrast, the anticipatory structures of our nervous activity are our internal functionality. 5. Hayek (1967) warned us to be careful here. He said it is clear that “society is not a brain and must not be represented as a sort of superbrain, because in it the acting parts and those between which the relations determining the structure are established are the same, and the ordering task is not deputized to any part in which a model is preformed” (p. 74). From this McQuade and Butos (2006) went on to say it is difficult to see why it “should imply that the maintenance of a map and the support of a model cannot occur in social orders in ways that are similar, in principle, to the processes generating the sensory order” (p. 340). It is, however, not clear how the market order is or provides a map or a model in the sense in which Hayek described CNS function. But McQuade and Butos feel they do map and model, arguing that those components “have their counterparts in adaptive social orders, implemented differently, of course, but very similar in principle.… The interactions between their components implement a classifying process on stimuli both external and internal to the system, and this generated “knowledge” of the environment has effects on component behavior that constitute adaptive

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reactions of the system to changes in its environment” (p. 341). This can be true only because the whole “system” consists of agents who anticipate, not because some entity, the “market,” is conscious and anticipates. 6. Luck and the unanticipated are crucial to the acquisition of knowledge that depends upon being in the right place at the right time. Consider how Kirzner put this point by noting that it is our knowledge of what we can do with things that determines their worth to us. Value has nothing to do with the intrinsic properties of objects themselves, only with what we can do with them. This leads to a seeming paradox with respect to knowledge as something we wish to acquire. In considering explanations of knowledge: a subjectivist approach would emphasize not knowledge itself, but rather what people know about knowledge.… however, a subjectivist approach leads to recognition of precisely that kind of knowledge about which men know nothing at all . Or the paradox may be put in somewhat different terms. Subjectivism suggests that things about which men are completely ignorant are things that, in the sense relevant to economic theory, simply do not exist (Kirzner, 1979, p. 138).

Perhaps this is clearer if we consider Kuhn’s (1970) account of normal science puzzle solving. If you are at point A in a research program, your task is to get to a presently unknown point B, but B will be recognized when you in fact get to it. We know what we don’t know (but wish to know), and we know that when we do in fact encounter it we will know that we have done so. So from an economic point of view, as scientists we buy something for future delivery which we have no idea about in the present. As researchers we are buying only a futures contract, with something that is unknown to us to be dumped out of that proverbial poke when we find it in the future. All such activity occurs in the context of a framework that is already available to us—in science it is in terms of Kuhn’s available theory and exemplary puzzles—and it is sufficiently fleshed out so that it is just the

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details that are as yet unknown to us. This is the only sense in which science praxis is an anticipatory system. But what about knowledge of which nothing is known? What happens at the edge of science, at the edge of our knowledge where our total ignorance is what we are attempting to penetrate or push back? Here we have a realm of the ignorance of knowledge that can be spontaneously or un-deliberately absorbed or encountered. Someone who is lucky might see something that turns out to be tremendously important. As Kirzner said “Constant change constantly turns omniscience into ignorance; but, as we have seen, this continually renewed ignorance is subject to its own relentless erosion through spontaneous discovery” (ibid., p. 146). For an entrepreneur participating in the market (or normal science researcher engaging in research) this knowledge that is “un—deliberately” discoverable presents a dilemma. If he or she discovers it, it is a matter of luck. But if someone else discovers it instead of an entrepreneur who was in the same situation but simply inattentive in comparison, the lack of their having discovered it is, as Kirzner says, considered “regrettable.” We seem to have all “conveniently forgotten” those who finished second in the chase— Quick! Do you remember who Watson and Crick beat out to reach the structure of DNA? Probably not. But for luck, you would know Pauling’s name and not Watson’s and Crick’s. 7. This claim is accepted as factual by most commentators. A recent book by Gruber and Johnson entitled Jumpstarting America, written by professors who want to defend the private sector, has thrown in the towel, admitting that the Defense Department built the Internet, that government research and development led to transistors, silicon chips, radar, jet airplanes, satellites, artificial limbs, cortisone, flat screens, and more. They attribute this to the tremendous expense involved in basic research in combination with the uncertainty of any pay off. As an example, no kitchen appliance company would ever have bothered to do the research (which the military did for defense purposes) just to develop the microwave oven. Accordingly, they argue that the best we can hope for is a public–private alliance in which there is collaboration between private companies and the federal government. Such a position leaves out discussion of who “directs” the research

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in such a “collaboration” and why. It would always be the purse strings, and it would always be focused upon technological benefit. Technology is one thing, science another. The bureaucrats won’t fund what they don’t understand, and there is little provision here for the scientists who do understand to have any autonomy to do anything with their knowledge. And while the DOD may have funded (with someone else’s money—that of the taxpayers) the actual implementation of the DARPA net (predecessor of the internet), it most certainly has not “funded” the present internet, which is a competitive result of “internet company providers” at many different levels vying for commercial advantage with one another. The taxpayer did not “build” companies like Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Qualcomm, or the myriad others who supply and maintain the present form of the net universe. Clearly government funding of basic research is sometimes a major factor, but the research and knowledge came from individual scientists and academics. No government bureaucrat, least of all Al Gore, ever made any contribution to science beyond signing a piece of paper allocating funds in a particular direction. 8. As an example of the effect of controlled funding upon what should be “neutral” scientific research we should note the results of Butos and McQuade (Butos, 2019; Butos & McQuade, 2006, 2015). They have noted (McQuade & Butos, 2009) that concentrated politicized funding tends to erode the “corrective action” of the basic scientific institutions by introducing new, nonscientific, incentives, which add political considerations to the reputation-assessing mechanisms for researchers, while generating short-term research enthusiasms in a way analogous to boom and bust in markets (see pp. 92–93). They studied three effects: the direction of science in terms of favored research and development projects and research questions; the destabilization of science in terms of effects on inputs used in science induced by the patterns of funding; and the distortion of the procedures of science by promoting a knowledge-generating and certification process not consistent with the evolved mechanisms of science. Recently they have studied “big players,” such as the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose pronouncements on climate science carry enormous clout within the scientific community

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and the media, and governmental agencies which dominate climate science research and related funding of technologies: “Our research points to massive increases in government funding of climate science over the past 20 years and to the rise in IPCC-induced ‘crony science’ and claims of putative ‘scientific consensus’ that have been used to quell, if not suppress, the normal process of climate science” (Butos, 2019, p. 115). Looked at objectively, there simply is no “undeniable scientific consensus” on whether or not there are anthropogenic factors in climate change. There is research and opinion by actual experts in the field on both sides of the issue (see Alcorn, 2019; Koonin, 2021). This presents a genuine dilemma for the consumer of scientific research—both the general population of nonscientists, the news media, and scientists themselves—about who to believe. Do we uncritically assume that what the leftist administrations tell us about how and why they are going to control our behavior, as usual “for our own good,” is to be accepted at face value, or do we risk being ostracized as “conservatives” and obvious pawns of special industry interest groups if anyone questions the official propaganda? 9. A case of a career nearly ruined for political aggrandizement was that of Nobel laureate David Baltimore (see Kevles, 1998; Judson, 2004, The Wikipedia article, David Baltimore). Still hard to decipher entirely, despite an enormous secondary literature and millions of dollars spent on governmental investigations, it appears that Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and widely applauded and admired researcher, was “guilty” of no more than being a famous target to investigate in a case involving a researcher with whom he had coauthored a research paper that was challenged as having fabricated data. After a years’ long and enormously costly series of investigations, both authors were exonerated. While the initial charges were front-page news, the exonerations were relegated to filler on back pages. Truth is no longer as important as sensationalism and ratings increase in the popular press. Indeed one can wonder if its occurrence is found at a higher than statistical chance level.

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4 Markets and Morals

Under competitive capitalism morality operates largely through consumption and demand, whereas in collectivist societies it operates to a much greater extent on production through a morally committed government.…The time when “we are all socialists” is the very time to reconsider the morality of the free market. H. B. Acton Emotionally, ninety-nine percent of the population of the world are socialists; but if they had their way, they would destroy the spontaneous order of the market and thereby the mechanism to which we owe the capacity of keeping alive the present population of the world. F. A. Hayek In a society where competitive markets prevail, it is not only trade, but also thoughts and men that are free. H. B. Acton

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume II, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95477-2_4

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A people averse to the institution of private property is without the first element of freedom. Lord Acton

Morality has to do with human conduct that is judged by the community (and, ipso facto most individuals within it) as right or wrong. This conception of right and wrong does not correspond directly to objectively specifiable physical criteria (such as whether you were driving over the speed limit or not) but rather to “moral judgment” as to whether the conduct was deemed to be according to the “rules of conduct” of the community (in certain cases, as in getting an injured person to the hospital, it is acceptable to break the law and drive over the speed limit). The assessment standards are functional and conceptual, and their categories are usually called “good” or “bad” (moral or immoral) or accepted by the community or deemed to be unacceptable. These standards are ingrained into the community by tuition from adults to offspring, and tacitly by interactions among the various individuals themselves, and evolve over generations. The resulting moral rules may be explicitly represented within a community (often in law, which codifies “legal” or acceptable conduct in many areas) or simply passed on implicitly, as in generalized expectations with vague, often contradictory rationalizations or interpretations (as when the “primitive” rationalizes a taboo as an attempt not to offend a “god”). Moral rules are thus higher order constraints that direct physicality exactly the way Polanyi showed that life “harnesses” physicality, or as D. T. Campbell showed the way that downward causation in evolution changes physical structure over generations (see Note 1 in Chapter 3; also Polanyi, 1969; Weimer, 2020). These inculcated changes become tacit constraints upon behavior and even evolved physical structure. And when coupled with the immense history of autonomic nervous system development, they cause strong gut reactions to occur in the situations involved. This is why there is such a strong visceral-emotional component to genuine moral quandaries or instances of “breaking” a moral imperative—such situations are literally physically traumatic to us, literally “gut wrenching.” This involves the same autonomic and enteric level responsivity that underlies the

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alienation and malaise of being thrust into the abstract and impersonal society. Morality is totally different in the abstract society based upon a market economy than it is in the original face-to-face society of an extended family based upon the dictates of a tribal leader. The morality of a consumer-based society is not that of a producer- or dictatorbased society. The morality of the market is abstract and impersonal, based upon an implicit conception of cooperation between individuals who need never have met one another. In the collectivist order of the tribe, morality is based upon authority,1 face-to-face contact, and explicit cooperation and benevolence that results from such contact. In the faceto-face situation, morality is based upon the producer (production), whereas in the abstract society morality is based upon the consumer (a consumption function). Most of our tacit feelings and understanding of morality stem from the many millions of years that mammals have spent in small groups operating upon direct benevolence as a result of personal or individual interaction. From that perspective, based upon our mammalian history of raising neotenized (in comparison with most species) children in the context of a family (often including extended family members) and small groups, our emotionality and those tacit feelings are “warm and fuzzy” when we are in relatively direct contact with members of our particular tribe and we see (and hear) directly that they also benefit from that contact as we benefit from it. After all, small bands are as large an organization as tribal organization can sustain. The leader (tribal chief, dominant mare, largest wolf, dominant monkey) must be able to see the members of the band almost all the time in order to enforce their control. Out of sight is out of mind, and conducive to mischief and bad things for group cohesion and safety. Parenthetically, we note here that this is very likely why the idea of omniscient (meaning all seeing) gods was created—because they were “all” seeing, these gods could keep track of everyone at once, and that threat of oversight was intended to keep everyone in line. This was effected by claiming that the tribal chieftain or king was specially related to the God, and it was their job as leader to tell the people what the “God wants.” What do these groups do when they encounter another band? They fight for control of the

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same territory. That is why we instinctively fear the “other” who is seemingly so different from ourselves. Unaware of the long history behind the rules of conduct governing our behavior, we take it for granted that our morals and values, those internalized and tacit rules, are the result of our “collective Cartesian common sense” resulting from that direct contact. It is “obvious” to us that we should not kill others in our group, or steal from them, or should not produce children with our siblings, and many other rules. It is perhaps most obvious that we should be kind to others in the group and treat them as we would wish them to treat us. But where did such would-be “categorical imperatives” (as Kant called them) actually come from, and can they be reconciled with the impersonal requirements of market orders in the abstract society into which we are emerging? Indeed, the primitive has no idea why one obeys the incest taboo of his tribe, but he (or she) does do so. What is this constructivist conception of morality, and can it be reconciled with abstract and negative rules that keep the peace of the order? How does it relate to the development of our autonomic nervous system as opposed to our consciousness? What if it turns out that our tribal morality was actually due to gradually operating in accordance with more and more abstract rules? Why does morality seem to always pit our gut against our explicit CNS activity?

It All Starts with Means Versus Ends and Property Neglecting the issue of whether or not other animals exhibit moral behavior (apparently they do not, unless one defines such adaptive behaviors as altruism as intrinsically moral), we need to remind ourselves that morality, as a higher order constraint upon behavior, begins from the inevitability of our ignorance when facing the unknowns we live in. We need to have a stable framework of expectation, an adequate theory of our environment, in order to be able to deal with new situations when they arise. When it comes to behavior—that of ourselves and others— that theory of expectation is in large part expressed in what we have come to call morality, which is the socially accepted rules of conduct

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to which we adhere. Chapters 8 and 12 in Volume 1 discussed means versus ends in society, noting that in complex orders such as the market, market participation is simply a means to an infinite number of ends that different individuals may have. Since there are an indefinite number of individual goals or ends, the market order provides a means by which individuals may attempt to realize them. Participation in such an order leads to a relatively stable framework of expectation (this is the “organization” in spontaneously organized phenomena). Because of that stability, we “know” that certain results or expectations will be met, while other classes of behaviors will be ruled out. We have come to expect (which is to say, to be reasonably sure) that certain rules govern our behavior and prohibit the occurrence of other behaviors. Since we cannot keep track of all possible particular directives, our morality, our moral judgment, has come to be summarized to us in a series of negative prohibitions to action—rationalized as a series of “taboos” or “don’t do’s”—about which we really have no idea where they came from or why we obey them. The rules are negative in character because that type of rule is maximally efficient in summarizing to us an indefinitely large class of things, all of which can be summarized as “Don’t do this type of thing.” In that regard, we are exactly like the primitive who has no idea why he obeys some taboo (such as do not eat rotten meat or kill your cousin) yet continues to obey anyway. The reason why we do this is obvious only in hindsight—it is because, as Hayek repeatedly said, groups of individuals who followed these rules in the past have displaced earlier groups who did not follow them. This is the constraint of downward causation, of higher order functional principles operating upon lower order physical and behavioral ones. Operating in such a context of constraint, we did not choose the rules, they chose us. But when we label them in some fashion, it is only “natural” that we would think they were the result of earlier conscious decision on the part of those before us instead of what they actually are—the result of human action but not design. The inevitability of our ignorance forces us to behave according to general rules of order not because we have selected them but because they have selected us. The concept of morality requires as a presupposition the concepts of causality and responsibility: that as individual actors, we are responsible for our own individual conduct and must live with the

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consequences thereof. The basis of our concept of responsibility, surprisingly enough, is private property. Individual property and our ability to transfer it freely by our consent are indispensable as a basis to our moral behavior. Individuals must be free to choose what they can do with their own property (broadly construed, and including their own bodies and actions as their property) or there can be no conception of morality.2 If the tribal chief has total control, so that no one has responsibility for their own behavior and does nothing except when directed to by the chief, their individual behavior is neither moral nor immoral. It might be efficient or inefficient, helpful to the tribe or harmful, based upon the benevolence of caring and sharing, or whatever. But it would not in that situation be moral behavior. In that situation, there is no private property,3 as everything is “owned” by the chief, and he or she in fact holds it only collectively or distributively, but not individually. All knowledge, as well as all progress, presupposes that an individual can say “This is mine,” and “I can do what I want with it.” And it all depends upon the division of labor (which depends upon property and the distinction between mine and yours), due to the fact that different individuals value the same scarce resources differently because of their different individual ends, and the resulting division of knowledge in a group structure. This difference, being able to choose freely what one wants to do with given resources, explains the huge difference in the total amount of property that one could “own” in the hunter-gatherer tribes in comparison with settled agricultural tribes in opposition to today’s modern society. Hunters can own little more than their bodies and their hunting capabilities and whatever they can carry with them. Constantly moving around prohibits the accumulation of property and therefore prohibits vast inequalities of property. In the agricultural revolution, foodstuffs could be stored, making for greater differences in the amount of owned property. In the abstract society of today, where we can keep track of wealth in terms of electrons dancing around on a computer screen, the potential for differences in owned property is vastly greater than at any time in the past. One problem to be overcome in the understanding of the centrality of property is that the majority of people today seem to be stuck thinking about property in hunter-gatherer or agricultural society terms rather than in terms of the very different, more

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rarefied concept found in the abstract society. Returning to the difference in knowledge and value for individuals, behavior in that situation will evolve according to slowly developed and tacitly internalized rules that enable the individuals involved to coexist without destroying each other (because of being in that resultant stable framework of expectation) and to achieve at least some of their different ends. Those rules will be learned in the vast majority of cases in the family framework, when one or another parent says “Don’t do that” or “No!” until they are blue in the face. No society on earth has arisen by inculcating rules of morality that specify particular actions that must be achieved in all situations encountered. The effect of all moral rules is to impose restraint upon our individual (animal) impulses and desires, so that we do not infringe upon other persons or their property. The result is an order of human cooperation that far exceeds the limits of individual knowledge and known other individuals in any group. Here, we are being led, as Adam Smith saw, by what can be rationalized as an “invisible” hand which allows us to cooperate with individuals we do not know (and need not ever meet) instead of restricting us to interactions with only those we are already acquainted with and have cooperated with. It was the misleading belief of most of the last generation, and even most of the classical economists, that man, by his supreme intelligence, understood that it was better to adopt these different rules. But that is not true. Man never understood why he accepted these morals. The morals of property and the family were spread, and came to dominate a large part of the world, because those groups who by accident accepted them prospered and multiplied more than others. We do not owe our morals to our intelligence: we owe them to the fact that some groups uncomprehendingly accepted certain rules of conduct—the rules of private property, of honesty, and of the family— that enabled the groups practicing them to prosper, multiply, and gradually displace the others. (Hayek, 1983, pp. 46–47)

The rules of morality are group selected (by downward causation over generations) consequences of many individual behaviors that are often at cross purposes. There was never any intelligent design in any of this. This is embarrassing and infuriating to the rationalist constructivist, who

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wants to throw out all “grown” or spontaneously arisen rules and replace them with “rationally thought out” directives designed to achieve ends specified in advance. Everything should be planned and directed to bring about common goals specified in advance by the anointed dictators, who will “obviously” use their Cartesian common sense to produce clear and distinct ideas for the future development of society. This is why totalitarianism is the inevitable result of constructivist programs such a socialism, which are the programs of the “morally committed” governors H. B. Acton noted. What is utterly amazing is that the advocates of socialism all feel that they will be the one ultimately chosen as the dictator. With tongue in cheek, one could say that perhaps that was to be the appeal of Marx’s proposed dictatorship “of the masses.” What would be the consequences for society if the constructivists had their way and replaced all tacit and evolved moral rules with explicit directives that they perceived to be improvements upon merely “grown” customs and institutions? The result has been obvious to those who have studied how spontaneously organized complex phenomena actually evolve and continue to work. The abstract society in which we presently find ourselves would be reduced or eliminated in favor of competing taxis plans or directed forms of order. The self-styled dictators discussed in Volume 1—Skinner’s grand conditioners in the sky or Russell’s ultimate “organization” men or women or Chomsky’s libertarian anarchists or Dewey’s and Marx’s “scientific” socialist elite—would be at war with each other because they would be competing for control of the same scarce resources. As usual, innocent blood would be shed, and the population reduced in consequence. Eventually, one or another warlord would emerge with more power and banish the others to exile in some form. We would simultaneously lose our liberty and our property. We have seen it all before many times in world history. If the constructivists could understand this, they would abandon their views. However, they simply cannot comprehend that they are not smart enough to correct things, so the cycle of advocacy continues anew with each succeeding generation reinventing the same broken wheel of socialism and tribalism as the obvious cure for all our ills. Let me conclude this section by relating property back to the concept of liberty. It should be obvious that there is an intrinsic relationship

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between liberty and freedom on the one hand and property on the other. They are co-occurrence relationships, and when one comes into existence, the others must also. One could look at this from a more economic perspective—as involving both the freedom to supply and to receive. In that case: Without the freedoms to supply and receive, there can be no such thing as private property. The freedoms to supply and receive do not “supplant” private property; they enable it. When one adds up, when one counts, the present constraints on the freedoms to supply and receive, one finds that it is in an increasingly attenuated sense that we any longer have private property, and privacy of any kind, in this country. (Bartley, 1990, p. 20)

Liberty, economic freedom, property, and morality have all arisen together. And they can die together—if we lose any one of them, we will inevitably lose them all.

Individual Freedom Requires Responsibility, Which Comes at a Price And most of us do not want to pay that price. We want the degrees of freedom (as the physicists would call it), but we do not want to pay the price in terms of living “on our own” according to abstract rules and constraints. Our emotions and our gut would prefer the face-toface tribalism in which human beings (as mammals) have arisen during hundreds of millions of years. We are perfectly happy to have a place in society and a determinate role to play, because that feels so much better than living alone even though surrounded by great numbers of unknown individuals. And that is exactly what life is when the newly fledged move out there to make their own living—being all alone in an ocean of other people. When Hobbes gave us one free choice—of which dictator to submit to—he was being an astute psychologist or ethologist or microbiologist if not a very competent social theorist. Most human beings, as good pack animals, do not want to be either the leader or left alone. Most are perfectly content to be told what to do in exchange for

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a parceled out allotment of food or other economic goods. Eric Fromm (1941) published Escape from Freedom (changed one year later to The Fear of Freedom) to document exactly this tendency in the good people of Germany when they chose to submit to totalitarianism. Fromm noted that a common substitute for freedom from coercion (which is really freedom to do) is to choose to submit to authority. These individuals do not want to have to make the decisions—and face the inevitable uncertainty and often present losses—that must be made in order to parcel out those goods—better that they leave such decisions to “those who know better” or who have “more power” or are stronger or some such qualifier. Like the submissive wolf exposing their throat to the dominant one, they will trust that eventually, after it has eaten its fill, there will be enough left over for them. Having evolved to pay attention and respond to the cues provided by the pack leader’s behavior, they will be careful to see that they fit in as part of the herd (sharing that behavior with their herd-based prey) while the alpha figures tell them what to do and when to do it. Automatic submission to social authority is part of our mammalian evolutionary history. Despite the lack of freedom in that situation, we are accustomed to it from millions of years of mammalian evolution, hundreds of thousands of years of hominid evolution, and many thousands of Homo sapiens evolution. We have survived because we have done so by following tacit rules of order. And this is what the socialist thinkers—the would-be alpha leaders—prey upon. Since their clear Cartesian common sense tells them that they are destined to be the alpha wolves, it is “obvious” that the others would (and should) submit and obey them. What this ignores is that with the arrival of markets (allowing the equivalent of implicit cooperation not only within packs but between rival packs who are “enemies” in other respects)—with impersonal trade between individuals who have different economic goods that others want—a far higher standard of living and expectations for the future have arisen in the last several millennia. For perhaps 10,000 years, we have been able to achieve vastly greater and increasing freedoms and benefits than we could ever hope to achieve from the benevolence of any sort of tribal dictator or trade within the small group. And if we give it up for any “new” form of tribalism, we will accept that reduction

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in freedom and benefits only upon the imposition of force and violence (ask the Kulaks how beneficial Stalin was to them, and at what cost). The actual cost of turning back the clock to one or another form of primitivism is far greater than our sense of malaise and alienation posed by an unknown future in the abstract society. But we do not yet recognize that. The problem that now faces liberalism is at least twofold—first, one of education—of showing how that return to tribalism is not an answer— and second (and actually far more important overall), creating conditions in which our gut microbiome and autonomic nervous functioning adapt to impersonal cooperation.

The Morality of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood Contemporary education is not able to deal with the demands imposed by the abstract society. Indeed, progressive education shows virtually no understanding that the abstract society exists at all. An easy way to see this is to look at modern progressivist education programs. Consider the actual impact of Fred Rogers’ program on North American PBS television. Designed to appeal to young children who were about to be thrown into the public education system, it was a pioneering attempt to provide an entertaining and nonthreatening introduction of educational concepts at a level that was appropriate to such children. And Fred Rogers himself was an ideal candidate to get such information across to children in such an environment—he was calm, gentle, slow and deliberate, and about as nonthreatening and lovable as any human being could be. With a cast of supporting characters who shared those traits and their genuine concern for helping children, he would alternate studio lesson scripts and situations with occasional field trips to, for example, explain how ice cream was made or how a roller coaster ride worked or how the mail was delivered. His personality and dedication made him ideally suited to calm the fears and overcome the insecurities and reluctance of young children when confronted with the frightening speed and chaos of the world of older kids and adults. How could there be anything wrong with such an obviously well-intended program directed by genuinely concerned individuals who understood children very well? Anyone who would criticize

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Fred Rogers must be an absolutely heartless monster who, like the villains of the Grimms brothers’ fairytales, would love to boil children and eat them for dinner. How could anyone be so callous and cruel? But we need to ask what it was that Mr. Rogers and his Neighborhood taught to these children. We can acknowledge both the noble intent and the genuine devotion and noble character of Fred Rogers himself while criticizing what he indoctrinated into his audience. Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood extolled the virtues of tribalism and taught the lessons and morals of socialism. And in so doing he fitted right in to the form of “progressivist” tribal education stemming from Dewey that has increasingly dominated the Western world since the 1950s. Recently, there has been a spate of criticism of “the Neighborhood” and similar programs on the grounds that its educational approach overemphasizes “feelings” and “self-esteem” in children, to the detriment of their normal development (Diller, 2006; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018); for making mothers feel guilty for not constantly attending to their children (Warner, 2005); for overemphasis on sharing and self-esteem (Sommers & Satel, 2005); or for the corrosive effect of “helicopter” parenting on both parents and the local law establishment’s interpretation of child abuse. While those criticisms of the unintended consequences of progressivist education are accurate and necessary, I wish to focus more directly on the socialist underpinnings of the Neighborhood. It comes out clearly in the constant theme that “you are special” and everyone “gets a prize for participation” (and not for achievement) and for cooperating and not competing or being selfish. Children constantly received noncontingent reinforcement—Skinnerian pellets from the sky—“just for being” and regardless of the consequences of their behavior. There were never any rewards for “doing well” because everyone was told they were “special,” and that was all they learned. There was never any indication that life is competitive, and that not only is that not a bad thing, but one should try to do as well as one could, because everyone was told they had, just by being there, “done well.” This is the only meaning of “competition” in socialism—no matter where you start you will wind up at the finish line a winner, at exactly the same time as all the others who are equally winners. What do you mean, “property rights” (such as prizes and praise and knowledge) accrue to winners

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in the real world?” Here in the Neighborhood we parcel out the “just desserts” according to everyone’s undeniably equal merit. How dare you say that anyone is different? Here in the Neighborhood we make them all the same. This is exactly the same approach that a campaign video of then vice presidential candidate Harris used in 2020 to tell Hispanics and other California “minorities” that they would all be brought up to be “equal” and reach the finish line at the same time when her party had eliminated all forms of “discrimination.” This “woke” message of communism took over that entire administration. Whereas before they spoke of the “equality” that they would bring, they then substituted the term “equity,” as a replacement, with the implicit meaning of equity implying ownership. That is literally the intent of communism—the proletariat was to “own” the means of production. Is it any wonder that when faced with the uncertainty of the real world when they are teenagers or young adults that children brought up in this fashion are paralyzed and clueless as soon as the adults are not “helicoptering” there to feed them ego biscuits and working behind the scenes to rig the results? Never having learned to own (i.e., take responsibility for) their own behavior, they are as frightened and paralyzed as adult chicks left in the nest when it is time for them to fledge. But the birds have an evolutionary history built into them that forces them to eventually fly off and fend for themselves. Humans do not, at least when they have been “educated” otherwise. Fred Rogers meant well, but the unintended consequences of his (and similar) teachings have caused far greater harm than good. Programs such as these have created an increasing population of neotenized would-be adults (like the chicks, fully grown but not yet fully functional) who are increasingly dependent upon the generic tribal leader of Big Government, and not just to become adults, but throughout their neotenized lives. Such children have now come to expect, to feel that they are entitled, to be taken care of, throughout their lives—from cradle to grave—in the socialist paradise.4

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Is Tribalism and Totalitarianism Inevitable? Given the predicament outlined above, it might appear so. Economist Walter Williams often noted that when one examines history the vast majority of humanity has lived under totalitarian rule (and thus a morality based ultimately upon authority, and thus oppression and coercion), and that in only a few instances have populations increased to where they have enjoyed the freedoms that are necessary to enable a market order to continue producing increasing amounts of wealth and knowledge. When considering whether or not this meant that totalitarianism was inevitable in human society, Williams pointed out that, in terms of the only available historical records, most of humanity has indeed lived and died in a totalitarian framework. It is in fact a purely empirical issue whether we can cease to do so, and thus as to whether or not liberalism can survive. But the thing to note is that there is certainly no guarantee whatever that just because the spontaneously arisen order has brought us all our present wealth and knowledge that it will not be supplanted by a less efficient system for non-market-oriented reasons. Over 100 years ago, H. L. Mencken noted that “Socialism is the theory that the desire of one man to get something he hasn’t got is more pleasing to a just God than the desire of some other man to keep what he has got” (1916, p. 51). It—the politics of greed and envy called socialism—is becoming enshrined as the new secular version of religion. Faced with this retreat to commitment in the politics of greed and envy, the empirical question is whether or not the liberal organization of society is survival worthy. This cannot be decided a priori. As H. B. Acton noted in an epigram to this chapter, in the competitive market order the consumer is the driving force—he or she determines whether or not goods will sell and hence continue to be produced. In contrast, collectivism and totalitarianism put the producer in the driver’s seat—those who manufacture or produce goods tell others what they are allowed to have, and at what cost. In such a system, there are no consumers—the end-users do not determine what they want and then purchase it, but rather are told what is available and how it will be parceled out and at what time and price. Thus, there is no information input from consumer preferences to change producer behavior.

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The taxis—the dictator, monopolistic producer, government bureau, or whatever—makes those decisions because the consumer as a source of information (to help guide the producer) does not exist in a collectivist society. So the question really comes down to a simple issue: will the majority of human beings continue to be consumers, or will they surrender (as Fromm, 1941, documented that some are so willing to do) that right of present society (which only exists as a concomitant of market economies), and as a result be ignored in favor of a cabal of producers? Totalitarianism does not acknowledge the existence of something called a consumer. The market order arose when and because consumers came into existence. More correctly, markets and consumers came into existence together. Prior to its existence, everyone had to be their own producer, because there was no possibility of “consuming” anything that you or your immediate family or group had not produced, and which was distributed to you by whoever was the leader. In short, because there was no private property, there was no possibility of consumption as we now know it, in any tribal organization. The market “revolution” was the creation of the consumer. The existence of consumers neutralizes the dictatorial powers of the taxis dictator. Consumers are a source of information—of knowledge—that is unavailable to an actual dictatorship or tribal order. It is a source of information that renders the role of the dictator totally unnecessary. The market order does the job the dictator did but in a more efficient and totally impersonal and much less intrusive manner. When individuals choose what to do, they do not need to be told to do it by the dictator. With that change from dictatorial power over the individual to the choice of all individuals came the original concept of equality as equality of opportunity for all consumers—instead of the equal enslavement of all recipients under the tribal authority. That is how true equality—equality of opportunity—supplanted the tribalistic and dictatorial conception of equality of outcome to which the socialists would have us return in the name of the morality of care and fairness. And please keep in mind that that care and fairness are to be forced upon us by the hierarchical nature of tribalism, not through our free choice. Perhaps the most effective argument in favor of “capitalism” or market-oriented production is the fact that in the abstract society

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consumers have choices and rarely have shortages of supply. In a collectivist society, one takes what is on the shelf, if there is anything on the shelf at all. Thus, it is not surprising that when given any choice at all everyone prefers to live in a capitalist society. In that sense, the choice between freedom and socialism is no choice at all, because everyone chooses the free market as being better at supplying what they want. But note that this requires a free market to be available in order for individuals to choose between capitalism and collectivism. If we slide back to tribalism and taxis direction that choice will not be available. If our emotional pain and gut reactions triumph, then we will very likely lose the mechanism that has produced our present standards of living and has kept alive an ever-increasing population. We will then slide back into a society controlled by producers and dictators who parcel out what little is produced, a society in which scarcity and lack of innovation will rapidly decrease the world’s population and the standard of living. One must also factor in the fact that development of market orders is very recent in our history and had to arise because it aided our evolutionary survival in comparison with the status quo of the time. If it did that once in the past, it is quite likely that it would do so again in the future unless totalitarian powers—non-market powers—are strong enough to prevent its occurrence. This again is an empirical issue. Since democracies are free to commit suicide that may indeed happen.

The Immorality of Tribalism Despite the fact that our primitive gut prefers it, there is little reason to credit tribalism with any well-developed sense of morality, at least according to what we would recognize as morality today. When the rules of conduct are determined entirely by the whim of an authority, there is no check upon unrestrained power. We began the discussion in the early chapters by looking at law—as an attempt at codification of rules of conduct that had become accepted by a society—and made the distinction between laws that result from the will of an individual or governing body being imposed upon others and laws that result when a law finder or codifier looks to see what already governs conduct. Found

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law is not consciously made law. As noted in Chapter 10 of Volume 1, this led to the distinction between law with a capital L as the system of abstract and fundamentally prohibitory rules of conduct which the law finder attempts to discern, from law as legislation, which is that which is decreed by a law maker or legislature. Legislation is deliberately made to effect particular purposes which are stated as what one must do: as actions you must perform. Legislation or made law is always conscious coercion, and it is enforced by one individual (or group of individuals) upon all others. That is all the “morality” that there is in a dictatorship. There is no equality of individuals as citizens in such a society. There is no “equity” whatever for any but the leader. The tribal leaders have all power and, because they hold ultimate power, have ultimate ownership, and simply parcel bits out according to their momentary decision as to which individual “deserves” to have it. With no conception of law as abstract principles binding equally upon all individuals, including the leaders, there is little that would pass for modern morality. Strength and power are possessed by the rulers and are at best only temporarily loaned to others. What is moral is defined by the momentary whim of the dictatorship. It is only when the populations of the groups exceed the control of the tribal leader (whether alpha male or alpha female) and their designated subordinate authorities that any possibility of a transpersonal morality can arise. And that impersonal and abstract morality did not magically arise only once and then take over. It was a gradual evolutionary development. Found in the Tao teachings of Lao Tze in opposition to the bureaucratic sayings of Confucius in the East, and the mythic figure of Solon in Athens in opposition to Lycurgus and Sparta, it has taken many generations to begin to develop. That is why it still feels foreign and frightening to us in the present era.

Rawls and Kohlberg on Socialist Values and Justice What if there are different, recently emergent, conceptions of justice and values that are “more advanced” than the “primitive” tacit values of the market order and justice of classical liberalism? What if there are new

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and emergent socialist conceptions that will “replace” the old fashioned and outmoded ideals with “scientific” conceptions of justice and morality that will vindicate totalitarianism in the name of the greatest good for the greatest number? Two popular attempts, first to resurrect egalitarianism and the distributive conception of justice (Rawls, 1971, 2001), and another to provide a “scientific” (psychologically researched) conception of moral development (Kohlberg, 1981, 1984; see also Muson, 1979 for a popularization), modeled on Piaget’s stage-dependent theory of development of cognition and reasoning, have seemed to promise to do that (or rather have been taken to do that by progressivists). Consider some of their presuppositions and premises. Then, we can ask whether they are more advanced and “scientific” than the “outmoded” position of classic liberalism. Rawls wanted to reconcile a conception of distributive justice with central aspects of liberalism and the Kantian approach to moral rule. He proposed a conception of justice as fairness as a means of reconciling what is “right” for the individual (which we commonly call what is “fair” for them to do or receive) with how to distribute goods (in this case, a “good” called justice) among many individuals in a “fair” manner. If successful, he would marry Hume’s conception of justice as equality of opportunity, as modified by Kant’s categorical imperative approach, with the socialist conception of equality of result found in Dewey, Chomsky, Russell, and myriad others. This would provide a framework to “enrich” liberalism with distributive justice and pave the way for socialism to supplant classical liberalism. Rawls proposed his final form of the principles of justice as fairness as requiring: 1. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all; 2. Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both a. to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle; and

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b. attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity (see Rawls, 1971/1999, pp. 266ff. for discussion). Principle 1, the greatest equal liberty principle, takes pride of place, followed by 2b, called the equal opportunity principle, which must be satisfied before the difference principle of 2a can be applied. Principle (1) is an attempt at a restatement of justice as equal opportunity under the rule of law, familiar since the time of Hume and the Moralists. The variations of principle (2) are the attempt to graft distributive justice onto that principle of justice. Rawls’ book was extensive (over 500 pages) and occasioned much critical commentary, the majority of which was laudatory (not surprising, when one considers that the majority of individuals do, as Hayek noted in the epigram, think and act as socialists). There is no space to consider that in detail.5 What we need to do is show that there is no solution to the distribution problem that is possible in the real world. Since that is so, one cannot graft any distribution principle onto the principle of justice.6 In a world in which resources and abilities are not found to be equally “distributed” in the environment, the concept of a fair distribution is a contradiction in terms, analogous to saying “square circle” or “colorless green idea.” The distribution problem is insoluble because of the empirical fact that no two human beings (or any other living creatures) are ever identical in all respects, and thus can never be treated “equally” no matter how carefully one attempts to do so. Attempting to do so confuses the physical with the functional. Any attempt at literally equal distribution of anything—an economic good or service, moral praise or blame, money or a generalized conditioned reinforcer, anything one wants to specify— can succeed only if the recipients are absolutely identical in all respects. The problem is that they never are equal. Living creatures (subjects) are never identical objects of the sort studied by the physical sciences. There are no proper names in physics—there can never be a Paula proton in distinction to Paul proton. The basic entities of physics are postulated to be absolutely identical, any electron can substitute in an experiment for any other one and give the same results, but nothing living is identical to anything else that is living. Living creatures all have distinct and

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unique histories that prevent them from being identical. Only if subjects were identical physical objects would what is received constitute an equal increment in the ontological status of all individuals. But that can never occur in the real world, because no two individual subjects can ever be defined as equal physically. They can only be defined functionally, and even so-called identical twins are never equal on an indefinite number of dimensions. Such twins have different ages (one had to have been born first, the other second), numbers of and distribution of brain cells, developmental histories (they cannot occupy the same physical space, so must have different perspectives of and within the world), learning histories (because they do not have the same histories, their “life experiences” are not identical no matter how similar), and ipso facto do not have the “same” needs or desires, or uses for even “identical” quantities of physical goods. Thus, even accurately measured “amounts” of what is distributed will inevitably have different functional effects upon any and all individuals. The problem is that “equality” cannot be measured in terms of what is physically “distributed” but only in terms of what is received by an individual and put to their unique use, and that is inevitably different from individual to individual. That is the key message of the individualist theory of value—often misleadingly called the “subjectivist” theory of value. And it is precisely because no two individuals ever value the same identically physically specified “good” in the same manner that the divisions of knowledge and labor arose, and with that all that the market order of society has provided for us. There is no possibility of providing an adequate conception of distributive justice for all individuals beyond the abstract and nonspecific principle that all must be treated equally under the rule of law. The only thing that distributes justice is the abstract law—nomos. This is why justice must be blind to the particular—any attempt at a “fair” distribution for a given individual would not be blind to the particulars, but would require an absolutely exhaustive specification of all the particulars pertaining to not only the individual in question but also all other human beings. No finite creature, not even a mortal God endowed with perfect Cartesian common sense, can possess enough knowledge of the particular to do that. Lawrence Kohlberg (Crain, 1985; Kohlberg, 1981; Kohlberg et al., 1983) set out to study moral development in individuals, analogously

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to how Jean Piaget had studied intellectual development in children and adolescents. How could empirical research into stages of moral development possibly favor progressivism over liberalism? The answer is obvious: restrict the classic liberalism approach by definition to a “lower order” stage of moral “development” and allow more rationalist constructivist stages to occur “above” the lower order liberalism. In that way, one can support constructivist utilitarian and “social contract” doctrines as superior “additions” to the earlier and less adequate conceptions. One can admit that the majority of adults function at a level compatible with liberalism, but show that the “most developed” intellectuals and leaders function as constructivist socialists. If one has empirical data to support such claims, then it is only a matter of time before the enlightened common-sense doctrines of the intelligencia will supplant the lower order ones. As Dewey (whom Kohlberg cited approvingly) said, knowledge is power, and now the power would be in the hands of the enlightened constructivist-progressivist camp. Literature discussion of Kohlberg’s stages and the empirical research it has generated is enormous, and largely as irrelevant as it is beyond our focus. I wish only to emphasize that he, like Rawls, assumes utilitarianism, again defined as the greatest good for the greatest number, to mark the “highest” reliably supported by data level of development (at his stage 5, it is above liberal views at level 4) and far more likely to exist in populations than the proposed stage 6 of abstract reasoning based on universal ethical principles (that seems to apply only to the saints but not us sinners). The lowly stage 4 is concerned with obeying laws, standards, and social conventions because they are necessary to the maintenance of the ongoing functional order of society, rather than because of the individual intentions of agents or to get respect from others (as found in stage 3 moral development). So neglecting the possible empirical relevance of the body of research it has generated (especially since it is often contradictory and mired in momentary political correctness issues of the sort raised by feminists (Gilligan, 1982) and “race” writers [see Puka, 1994]), we can note that like Rawls it uses an outmoded conception of ethics that cannot be applied to the spontaneous order of society, and that it is concerned only with conscious reasoning and explicit rationality, with no understanding whatsoever of the direction of the causal arrow leading from

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tacit moral rules of conduct to the development of “advanced” society and not vice versa.7 Both Rawls and Kohlberg assume that justice and morality are deliberate constructions that we impose upon our behavior and cognition. Neither considers the possibility that they are instead, as Ferguson pointed out centuries ago, the result of human action but not design. As such, neither conception is compatible with an evolutionary approach to human development. Morality is the product of evolutionary downward causation—it is not something constructed by conscious reason to fulfill specified particulars. Like prior atemporal and non-evolutionary constructivist conceptions such as Descartes’s idea that human reason somehow stands outside the natural order in order to judge and correct it, these and similar thinkers simply assume that what is found in “mere tradition” and “found or grown orders” can be dismissed entirely as nothing more than earlier, inadequate formulations due to less advanced conscious reason. Standing outside the natural order with such illustrious companions as Laplace’s demon (and later, Maxwell’s demon) and Fred Skinner, they simply assume that Cartesian common sense based upon its indubitable foundation of clear and distinct ideas (and experimenter controlled reinforcement contingencies) is what is necessary and sufficient to understand and to correct simple concepts such as justice and morality. As such, they are only slightly more charitable to us than Skinner in his attempt to move “beyond” freedom and dignity in that great Skinner box of Walden Two.

The Contradictory Nature of Utilitarianism and Similar Maximization Hypotheses Utilitarianism was proposed by Bentham as an improvement over the selfish approach of the Scottish moralists. The general framework of the position proposes as a moral or ethical maxim that we ought to maximize the (XYZ) of the greatest number. Thus, it is a simple maximization hypothesis designed to achieve a particular result. The variables are filled in with whatever one wants: “good” or “benefit” or “distribution” or “equity” or whatever concept one prefers as the “new, enlightened,

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and superior” form of the moment. The decisive argument against the greatest number formulation is posed by the problem of individuality: since all individuals are totally different and have different needs and wants and desires and hence “goods” at all times, it is not possible to maximize a single, or unitary, generic entity that could possibly constitute the greatest good for the greatest number. So the maximization formula fails because all individuals are different, with different and momentarily changing greatest goods, and with that failure is entailed the failure of the just or equal distribution hypothesis, because no matter what is distributed it will fulfill a different functional specification, and hence a different “good” for all the different individuals. This is not rocket science: the failure of the utilitarian approach is clear to anyone who looks at its consequences. What is remarkable is that so few thinkers have looked at those consequences, and instead of seeing a structural failure in the approach, those who have looked have simply assumed that they can propose a better XYZ and that the formula will work when everyone accepts their “improvement.” They have not seen that no maximization formula can ever work unless it is restricted to specified individuals instead of general populations and further, to individuals in very specific situations for very brief time periods. It has been argued that if we could confine people to adequately constructed Skinner boxes that it is at least theoretically possible that for a given individual, say Joe Smith or Joan Jones, one could with (immense) effort begin to discern what would be “best” for them in some situation completely delimited in advance. But still that never can occur, because nothing— least of all the individual—is static long enough to make the necessary decisions or calculations. Their best “good” changes with time. It could not be otherwise with living subjects. What would happen if we were to restrict the concept of utility from its “greatest” formulation to the behavior of a given individual in a given situation? The answer is that the doctrine of utilitarianism would vanish, replaced by the only tenable conception. The correct answer to the problem of utility was first articulated in the methodological individualism of Adam Smith’s doctrine of the invisible hand. Smith showed us how the selfless in the social arises from the selfish in the

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individual as a direct consequence of pursuit of individual and therefore “selfish” ends, without the need of any ethical-moral maxim added by the constructivists or apriorists. This again shows the contradictory nature of utilitarianism: it aims to achieve a situation in which it is not in fact necessary anymore. That situation already exists. There is already a mechanism available to solve both the utility and the distribution problems, and in the most efficient manner possible. It is found in the operation of the market order in which individuals, when pursuing their own “selfish” and individual aims, bring about an order (almost entirely independent of their particular actions) that benefits the greatest number of possible other individuals as a result of their own individualistic and selfish behavior. The competitive market order is the most effective mechanism for cooperation on our planet.8 We are now in a position to answer a question that is sometimes raised with respect to a related issue: how does participating in the market order result in something beneficial to society as a whole? This does not mean that every single individual benefits to an equal degree from some other individual’s actions. So if that is so, what can any given individual do that would have an impact upon the common good or upon “society as a whole?” The answer is that merely participating in the market order increases the possibility of benefit to the greatest number of (to the given participant, unknown) diverse individuals. The reason why this benefit occurs is that the market order provides them all—and equally, simply because of their participation—with a means to their unique individual ends at any given time and place. Only something that is a common means, and hence available to all, could benefit the indefinitely extended members of a society. And that, once again, is the superior power of the market order: it is because it is “merely” a means and not an end in itself that it is maximally efficient in providing for the diverse ends of all those who participate.

Back to the Inevitability of Our Ignorance The problems stem from the seemingly simple fact that we are finite creatures in a universe of unknown and unforeseen consequences to our

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behavior. Having always been found in populations (because populations—not individuals—are the fundamental variable upon which all evolutionary development occurs), we have had to adapt our behavior as a result of that harsh environment. As a species, we have had to learn what mistakes to avoid in order to stay alive and thrive. Because of the superior competences and skills that have been “built in” (to our behavioral genetics and our society) by our immense developmental history our populations have increased far beyond the limits and controls imposed by the face-to-face capabilities of family and tribal society. Without knowing how or why, we have been developed by functional and dynamical structures that arose when those population increases occurred. The rules of our behavior, having arisen as a result of that milieu, have in turn shaped us to be what we are and to possess the individual consciousness and reason that we presently possess. We no longer require face-to-face contact or explicit cooperation between individuals based upon benevolence. We have come to be “governed” by complex (more than just market) orders that replace benevolence with implicit cooperation coordinated by market participation among individuals who do not need to interact with each other directly. As a result, our knowledge and wealth have increased immensely. Our conscious reason, as well as all our scientific knowledge and technological sophistication, has been shaped by factors that have not been and can never be fully conscious to us. We can never know what is controlling our behavior while it is in control. Without knowing why, we stumbled upon the institution of private property as a result of the empirical fact that all subjects are different from all other subjects with respect to what they can do with what are physically the “same” scarce resources. We are functional creatures (as are all living things) who value even the same exact things at different values at different times, depending upon our unique circumstances. As a result of the phenomenon of downward causation in our evolutionary history, higher order functional concepts (purposes, intentions, wishes, wants, and desires) have come to control our behavior and, in turn, have come to shape the physical universe we inhabit. Such higher order functional concepts have come to shape us and our external reality, in the form of determinately specifiable rules of behavior that can harness (as Polanyi noted) the physical world in which we live through our behavior.

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Understanding the power of those rules that constrain our behavior from their position in a tacit realm within our cognition and society has only just begun to occur.

A Psychological Approach to Individual Moral Judgment Does Not Address the Differences Between Progressivism and Liberalism A popular recent approach to the study of moral judgments is found in the voluminous literature of Haidt and his associates (beginning with Haidt & Joseph, 2004). Under the umbrella of moral foundations theory (MFT), a large literature has evolved around “empirically identified” factors that appear to underlie moral judgment and behavior. Emphasizing pluralistic foundations, MFT draws upon cultural and evolutionary psychology to supplement traditional accounts. At this point, this group has recognized several dimensions along which moral judgment seems to vary: care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation; and finally, liberty/oppression. As Graham et al. (2013) put it, these are foundational dimensions and not the “finished buildings” that are erected upon them. Rather, it is the case that the foundations constrain the kinds of buildings that can be built. As such, the foundations are not finished morals, just dimensions that are constraints upon the kinds of moral orders that can be built. Tellingly, they are also intuitionists, denying that conscious intentions and deliberate choices cause judgments so much as follow from judgments that have been made in the tacit dimension. As these authors state “Moral evaluation, on this view, is more a product of the gut than the head, bearing a closer resemblance to aesthetic judgment than principle-based reasoning.… It is shaped and directed by intuitive, often affective processes that tip the scales in support of desired conclusions. Reasoning is more like arguing than like rational, dispassionate deliberation…” (ibid., p. 11). While I am in complete agreement with this latter point about the primacy of the ANS and gut (see Chapter 5

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below), there are two problems with the MFT approach that render it nearly irrelevant to the distinctions between liberalism and progressivism. First, there is no understanding in this research of the fact that the conventional realm, the results of human action but not design, is not a province for individual psychology but rather for sociology or anthropology. As we noted in Chapter 13 of Volume 1, the social can never be reduced to the psychological. Thus, it is not clear how purely psychological studies and scales based upon explicit reasoning and conscious reflection alone (in “experimental” research settings in which participants are controlled into answering experimenters’ questions, thus providing what have been called “views in principle”—what we want our reputations to reflect—rather than “views in fact” [as Ichheiser (1970) said in Appearances and Realities]), could be relevant to differences between liberal and progressivist thought. An analogy may help make this point. Historians of science constantly draw attention to the discrepancy between preachment and practice in the description of the behavior of scientists. If we ask the scientists, they will always tell us what they think is required (for their reputation)—which is always whatever the theory of the moment says is involved in the practice of “good” science. If the historians or psychologists (Mahoney, 1976) instead look at the actual behavior of the scientists involved, there is an enormous discrepancy between what they actually did (often for personal and usually petty reasons) and what they said they did. An obvious case of this was Isaac Newton, with his famous “hypotheses non fingo.” Here was the greatest theorist, or hypothesis conjecturor of his era, calmly telling his audience that “I do not make hypotheses.” Mathematicians are equally famous for rewriting their own histories, presenting their thought as if it had been a logical derivation from premises clearly articulated and stated in advance (see Lakatos, 1976). You must observe actual behavior as well as interview individuals about their reflections upon it. So it is not clear a priori that this sort of research sheds light on what the subjects would do or how they would think (and rationalize) about their behavior in the complexity of real-world situations. Research into the tacit or intuitive dimensions of social behavior requires more than just individual psychology as determined by an interview situation.

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Second, and far more important, is the fact that despite their having studied political judgment or ideology with MFT (Haidt & Graham, 2007), the questions asked and results obtained are geared to the (if not false) then misleading and irrelevant distinction of “liberal” as meaning constructivist progressivism, on the one hand, versus “conservative” on the other. (Haidt admitted he went into political psychology in order to help Democrats win more elections.) Since the true or classic liberal finds actual conservatism to be nothing more than the opposition to change, and the contemporary “liberal progressive” to advocate an actually reactionary and totalitarian tribalism, it should not be surprising that the results these authors present are somewhat “messy,” and vary depending upon factors these researchers cannot identify. It is worth noting that the literature the MFT group cites does not include any reference to classical liberal thinkers at all, nor to the founders of evolutionary epistemology, nor any of the recent philosophers of classical liberalism. Indeed, the entire literature and position that this book represents seem to be foreign to them, with no mention either to advocate, reject, or just acknowledge the presence of. (They do mention the libertarian position and find it somewhat confusing because it does not fit along the lines of their liberal-conservative split, as we note in a moment.) It is not surprising that conclusions such as the following don’t seem to “make much sense” to them on the traditional conservative-liberal interpretations. They said evidence suggests that conservatism is associated with personality characteristics that incline individuals to generally resist novelty and change. When compared to progressivist liberals, conservatives have higher “needs” for order, structure, and closure, thus reporting lower levels of openness to new experience. Together this constellation of tendencies “may provide” the emotional infrastructure underlying conservative respect for long-established institutions and highly structured systems of social hierarchy and sexual propriety. In contrast, they feel individuals with lower needs for structure, greater openness to experience, and dampened sensitivity should be less anxious about challenging traditional authority structures, lifestyle, and sexual practices. So liberal policy positions would in contrast seek to “reform” traditional values and institutions to reflect greater equality for historically oppressed social groups.

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But for those who want “reform” to point us forward to the impersonal morality of the abstract order instead of backward toward tribalism, there is no mention or discussion at all. The closest these researchers come is to the libertarian position, which forced them to acknowledge the 6th dimension of liberty/oppression in their foundations approach—interesting, since the position has been represented for over two and a half millennia: The original conception of MFT (Haidt & Joseph, 2004) took Shweder’s ethic of autonomy and created “foundations” that represented the liberal vision of, as they say, positive liberty, where individual freedom is defined by positive opportunity, rather than what they called the libertarian vision of negative liberty, where individual freedom is defined by a lack of obstruction (here they cite Berlin, 1969, for a broader discussion of negative versus positive liberty). But this interpretation is nonsensical, since the original conception of liberty during that two and a half millennia period has been the negative one of freedom of opportunity (equality of opportunity), which is exactly the same thing as freedom from obstruction under the rule of law. What they refer to as “negative liberty” is exactly opposed to the utilitarians and “positive” freedom from want. There is no one more in favor of “novelty and change” and openness to change than the classical liberal, but those individuals are well aware of the indispensability of the need for traditional structure—as defined by traditional forms of social organization and a respect for traditional values which result from human action but not design, while simultaneously being well aware that there is no “positive liberty” as freedom from want. Such distinctions remain beyond the constructivist MFT theory as it has as yet been developed. Against this whole approach, one should note that if you do not have the necessary theory to tell you what dimensions to look for you are unlikely to be able to “daisy pick” much that will be informative (here or in any scientific study in any area). The morality of the abstract order is not that of the tribe or the individual in isolation. And it will not be found in explicit psychological studies that cannot manage to distinguish liberalism from progressivism.

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Heroes’ Journeys and the Joan of Arc Syndrome Joseph Campbell made the concept of the hero’s journey part of our common culture in the last century. But what have we taken the hero to be, and what impact must he or she have upon others? By tradition, Campbell’s hero is a classic taxis figure—tasked by the circumstances which they are thrown into, they are to undertake daring and dangerous endeavors (the journey) in order to save the world from something potentially disastrous (usually by the direction of some supernatural figure or some mysterious writing), they reluctantly embark upon their appointed task, often aided by supernatural (i.e., greater than individual) powers usually given to them for the specific work ahead. Their journey is a cycle from the call to adventure through some supernatural threshold into the journey itself and then into an abyss where some sort of revelation occurs which somehow allows accomplishment of the task, and then a transformed return to the normal world from which they began. Often when they return to the mundane real world, they are no longer capable of fitting in, and having managed to survive to that point, their new found enlightenment is a prelude to early death, which they choose to embrace because they have now conquered both the normal and spiritual worlds. Campbell used this framework to analyze the world’s classic religions. However, its main impact upon us has been through entertainment myths (our new secular style of religion) built upon the hero’s journey. His themes and the devices Campbell analyzed are found throughout popular writing and mythic movie productions such as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings series, and perhaps most prominently in George Lucas’s (seemingly never-ending!) Star Wars series. Lucas studied Campbell’s work intensively, and Bill Moyers’ series of Campbell interviews that became The Power of Myth (1988) were conducted at Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. So in terms of “modern” entertainment, the hero’s journey has delighted a large percentage of the population of the world. But what happens when a would-be hero undertakes such a task in the real world? Most often it does not go very well. What we get is an instance of the Joan of Arc syndrome. The individual is remembered as

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a martyr to a cause more often than as one who succeeded. Joan did not fare well. Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi die without completing their appointed tasks and are remembered for sacrifice instead of accomplishment. They gave it “the old college try” and came up a few yards short of the goal line. Real life is usually no less forgiving. We remember heroes for having sacrificed (their lives, assets, goals, whatever) for the greater good in some sense (i.e., for us), and the names of World War II battles and individuals are still familiar as eponymous instances. Constructivists want us all to make sacrifices for their favorite causes— economic equality (any and every democrat or socialist politician), social “justice” (often demeaning any Western “privileged” white housewife— now deliberately disrespectfully called a “Karen”—or advocated by a teenager with little experience beyond social media), climate amelioration and “restitution” (most Hollywood entertainment figures), animal “rights” and Russell’s votes for oysters advocates (again, any random entertainment figure), and dozens more. The idea is that if we all would just be willing to “make a personal sacrifice,” we can deliberately cooperate and cure whatever the “ill” is. All it will take is “conscious” effort and sacrifice on all our parts.9

The Abstract Society Does Not Ask for Sacrifice It is based upon choice, not sacrifice. Playing the game of catallaxy requires one to choose—to allocate one’s resources and make a purchase, or to forgo doing so. But that does not require sacrifice. An individual is, of course, free to choose to make a “sacrifice” of some of his or her resources (private property), but the sacrifice in such a situation is only the choice of resource allocation—of forgoing the pursuit of some aim or goal in favor of pursuing another. That is what choice entails: picking one over another. Private charity is a choice, not a coercion. The market order is never coercive—it is a situation in which if-then consequences are laid out in front of the participant-consumer: if you want to achieve this, then do that. But neither the choice of goal nor the requirement of its pursuit is part of the market order. Markets are not zero-sum games—it is not

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the case that if you make this choice, then you must inevitably “sacrifice” someone else’s gain or opportunity in order to have your gain. The idea of sacrifice is not found in the morality of the market. The market is based entirely upon the efficiency of the allocation of knowledge and resources. There is no necessity to be a hero who makes sacrifices when participating in the market order.

Morality in an Abstract Society: Going Beyond Our Childhood From the perspective of familiar rationalist constructivist ideals, a life guided by abstract moral principles is not worthy of the effort. They find no heroes, no sacrifices, no transcendental values or goals. According to progressivism, a truly rational and moral individual is one who is arrested at a “lower” stage of development, one that the Cartesian intellect of the enlightened constructivist sees as merely a preliminary step, ancient history on the way to the new enlightened morality of the progressivist engineer. It is stuck back at the level of the Stoics (from Russell’s perspective), or perhaps from the Taoism of the Tao Te Ching. Beginning with roots in Dewey, Rawls and Kohlberg represented this disparaging attitude in the last half-century. They ask us to “rise above” our merely individual (and therefore selfish) and immature interests in following rules that allow the abstract order to continue, and to enter into the Valhalla of progressivist enlightenment based upon the new freedom of equality of result and the ethics of fairness and brotherly love as happiness. In similar fashion, Skinner’s utopian vision echoed the theme that we must be educated to the new freedom and the new morality, but what Skinner had in mind as “beyond” freedom and dignity is so obviously the Sparta of Descartes’s admiration that other progressivists are careful to claim that their utopia is far more “humane” than Skinner’s. (Skinner was perceptive enough to see that the sugarcoated pill offered by the “humanists” and Marxists is the same placebo that he offered, but which he offered honestly, without any saccharin, and chided them accordingly.) No doubt humanity is, as a product of evolved open endedness (but not open ended evolution—see Pattee & Sayama, 2019), a very malleable

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lot, as our adaptability to a wide range of environments and lifestyles has documented. Thus, we can probably learn to conform to the progressivist doctrines. We can indeed treat a cosmos as if it is a taxis, just as we can rote memorize strings of nonsense syllables as Ebbinghaus had us do. We are perfectly capable of reducing ourselves and our society to fit into a Skinner box, of arresting our development at the stage of the Incas (see Note 2 in Chapter 5). And as Fromm indicated, there is little doubt that such a dictatorship, whether benevolent or coerced, would be satisfying to many of the values of tribal society. Many people would be relatively happy with the society of Walden Two, as also are surprisingly large numbers whenever a dictator gives them a concrete sense of identity and purpose—witness Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in World War II. For the constructivists limited to conscious reason, it is an agonizing problem to explain how thousands of “good” Germans could have tolerated Hitler and the Nazis, and willingly gone along with policies that had obviously horrifying consequences, even for themselves. Part of that problem is explained by the fact that the dictators as rhetoricians were highly skilled manipulators of the values of tribalism, and turned the tribal tendency toward pseudo-speciation into nationalism and racism. By following the progressivist ideals of greed and envy in conjunction with psychological fear and distrust of “the other” into new ideals of Fatherhood and tribal or racial purity, one can easily circumvent the market order. It is thus not only informative but crucial to understand that the market order absolutely forbids pseudo-speciation and collectivism in the guise of national or racial or class, etc., interests. The market order, instead of recent pathetic façades of world government such as the League of Nations or more recent United Nations, is the only truly global unifying order in society on this planet. And it is both impersonal and noncoercive. The “information” made available by the price mechanism tells any individual all that he or she needs to know to play the game of catallaxy. One need not know, and indeed could be prevented from acting, if one knew the other individuals (and their beliefs and goals, skin colors, sexes or whatever) that were participating in the market. Leonard Read’s (originally 1958, see Friedman, 1980) example of the pencil is an illustration. It does not matter either to the manufacture of a pencil

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or to its ultimate consumers whether the miner who extracted the raw brass for the ferrule was black or white, an anarchist or a monarchist, a Catholic or a Hindu. Similarly, in buying goods or selling goods, the personal characteristics or beliefs of the individuals are as irrelevant to the price mechanism and the overall market order as is the labor expended in producing goods in the determination of their market price. There is no difference in the market “value” or price of a diamond found deep in a mine after hours of backbreaking labor and a similar sized, equal clarity diamond found while walking on the shore of the beach. An atheist buys a pencil made by a religious group as cheerfully as a racist resells them to individuals of some other color. The market order is wealth increasing precisely because it ignores individual beliefs, values, motives, characteristics, and so forth. Since it is only means connected, it is compatible with indefinitely varied goals, values, moral beliefs, etc. This debilitating weakness, from the standpoint of constructivist rationality, is precisely what gives the market order its superior strength, resilience, capacity, and worldwide capabilities. If there is anywhere on this planet that personal values, whether “good” or “bad,” play absolutely no part in either helping or obstructing our behavior it is only in the spontaneous order of the market. Market orders are the one and only unifying factor of all individuals throughout the world. Let me repeat this—no political order less than a total worldwide dictatorship could even begin to force our behaviors into concordance. The abstract and impersonal order of the market—precisely because it has no such dictatorial powers or aims—is the only unifying factor of all individuals. The market does not operate for the values of any individual any more than it operates against those of any individual: there are no favorites in the game of catallaxy, for there are and can be no exceptions to its impersonal and cooperative operation. The morality of the abstract and impersonal order is completely removed from the values of tribal society.10 It is difficult to see the benefits of following abstract rules of determination that are “rational” and moral only if observed in the long run, and seem to be invisible to us in the present. We are often puzzled when we encounter someone who does behave consistently according to abstract principles, since they seem to be reserved and withdrawn, almost incapable of total or “passionate”

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involvement in the particulars of any situation. Lord Acton captured this puzzlement in describing his fellow historian Adrian. As Acton (1907) observed, There was something in his best qualities themselves that baffled observation, and fell short of decided excellence. He looked absent and preoccupied, as if thinking of things he cared not to speak of, and seemed but little interested in the cases and events of the day. Often it was hard to decide whether he had an opinion, and when he showed it, he would defend it with more eagerness and obstinacy than we liked. (p. xxxviii)

From the standpoint of the family or the tribe, Adrian’s attitude is puzzling, perhaps contradictory, likely to be regarded as insincere and shallow, as incapable of becoming personally engaged in the events around him. This will make it appear that he is incapable, for whatever reason, of exhibiting the depth of character necessary to judge the events around him. As Acton continued: “As he never spoke harshly of persons, so he seldom praised them warmly, and there was some apparent indifference and want of feeling. Ill success did not depress, but happy prospects did not elate him, and though never impatient, he was not actively hopeful” (ibid.). To explicit rationalists schooled in hedonism of the moment (or indeed any form of hedonism) as the ultimate end of conduct, there is simply something defective about a character that does not do whatever is immediately perceived to be necessary to achieve happiness, not only for himself but for the greatest number. Thus, Russell would look down on Adrian as he looked down upon the Stoics and Kant. Stoicism and the acceptance of fate, of an order of events beyond the control and comprehension of individuals, are incomprehensible to the engineering mentality of the rationalist constructivist. The same must hold for an attempt to formulate the morality of such a situation in a positive categorical imperative, so the Kohlbergs of the world look “above” that lowly view for their approach. But from the standpoint of an individualist morality that recognizes the abstract cosmos in which all human action is embedded, such behavior is far from puzzling. It is the mark of someone who studies every

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contingency which life presents from the standpoint of abstract rules of conduct that he or she tries never to disobey. Adrian saw the events around him in terms of abstract categories of thought and action that covered the whole history of society, and caused him to temper interest in their unique particularity because they were, in both the first and the last analysis, of significance only as representatives of general categories. Now let Lord Acton finish his account: The events and ideas of his own day lost much of their importance in comparison, were old friends with new faces, and impressed him less than the multitude of those that went before. This caused him to seem absent and indifferent, rarely given to admire, or to expect. He respected other men’s opinions, fearing to give pain, or to tempt with anger by contradiction, and when forced to defend his own he felt bound to assume that everyone would look sincerely for the truth, and would gladly recognize it. But he could not easily enter into their motives when they were mixed, and finding them generally mixed, he avoided contention by holding much aloof. Being quite sincere, he was quite impartial, and pleaded with equal zeal for what seemed true, whether it was on one side or on the other. He would have felt dishonest if he had unduly favored people of his own country, his own religion, or his own party, or if he had entertained the shadow of a prejudice against those who were against them, and when he was asked why he did not try to clear himself from misrepresentation, he said that he was silent both from humility and pride. At last I understood that what we had disliked in him was his virtue itself. (p. xxxix)

If we are to survive in the abstract society in which we are increasingly found, we will have to recognize that its virtues, based upon implicit cooperation, are not those of the tribal order, and that the moral rules of conduct governing behavior are qualitatively different from the commands of the tribal chief and the primitive emotions of benevolence. We will have to learn that the hedonism of our infancy in the faceto-face society has no counterpart in the impending adulthood of the Great Society. The immaturity of hedonism and equality of outcome, no matter how gracefully and forcefully presented by a Mill, a Russell,

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a Feyerabend, a Skinner, a Rawls, Kohlberg, or Haidt, have no place in the morality of the spontaneous order. One thing can help us in this regard. We can study history and try to learn something from it—to discern the longer-term principles of order rather than merely recording it. Let me close this chapter by reminding you of the words Wilhelm Wundt, who after turning from the psychology of the “lower mental processes” to the problems of cognition and ethics, used for this point: The human mind is always inclined to judge the unknown by the known. As regards the past, this error is being slowly corrected--though far more slowly than one is apt to think--by the growth of historical knowledge. As regards the future, its refutation is impossible; and so the vast majority of mankind imagine that the future will in all essential respects be a copy of the present. Only the chosen few who have gained from history more than a mere knowledge of the facts are sensible that the changes to be brought forth by the future will not be less--nay, that they will in all probability be far greater--than those of the past, seeing that it is of the very nature of mental evolution continually to multiply the germs from which proceed new moral and intellectual developments. (Wundt, 1902, p. 276)

The title of Wundt’s book, I should remind you, is The Facts of the Moral Life. Wundt felt that the primary object of study for the Volkerpsychologie was morality.11 In a previous chapter, I quoted him as saying “we may not relegate the ends of morality at large to the narrow circle of our personal hopes and wishes.… We must rather consider it as a becoming, as an infinite problem, parts of which we come to know by solving them” (ibid., p. 331). This is the attitude we must have to survive in the abstract society. That was what Acton found to be Adrian’s attitude.

Notes 1. It is interesting to note the role of authority here. After the beginning of the last century a generation whose malaise centered on thorough disenchantment with and repudiation of the last vestiges

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of Victorian optimism and sensibility took over the intelligentsia in England. Convinced that they saw through the follies and failing of their elders, and repulsed by a world war that they felt should never have been fought, these intellectuals determined to take things into their own hands and set the world aright. In a few instances, such as the famous Bloomsbury group, a handful of would-be reformers did indeed become immensely influential and powerful. But the paradox of the influence of writers such as the Webbs, G. B. Shaw, Russell, Keynes, Virginia Woolf, and others is that their rebellion against all authority, custom and tradition was based upon authority. They repudiated traditional authority as irrational and harmful on the basis of their faith in the purported new authority, the positive power of science, and the “proving power” of conscious reason. These writers simply assumed that the problem of the malaise of “modern” times was due to having lost the paradise of the correct organization of society. Their paradise was socialist collectivism organized and directed by benevolent despots that were to be the successors of Plato’s philosopher-kings. The problem they wished to overcome was precisely the lack of tribalism and fellow feeling that Plato deplored some 2300 years earlier. The novelist Aldous Huxley was explicit about this problem in a letter to a friend (in Bedford, 1974): there he said humanity is more solitary now than before, that all authority has disappeared, the “tribe of man” has disappeared, and any “at all conscious man” now stands alone, surrounded only by other solitary individuals, for which he no longer has any respect. Huxley had no idea what to do about this alienation. If he found some sort of answer, he promised to write a “mature” book about it (see Bedford, around p. 159). So Huxley, at least, was never sure how to portray a solution because he was uncertain who should lead the new tribal order. That was a difficulty that others, such as Russell and Keynes, never faced, since they just knew in their hearts and minds that they were really kings. 2. We should note that property is essentially a matter of contrast enhancement or bordering. Property is a listing or boundary delimiting principle of order: it sharpens the boundaries between yours and mine. Private property is that which shows the borders of what

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is within the individual’s sphere of command. The aim of the law is to prevent, whenever possible, the actions of individuals from interfering with one another. It does this by drawing boundaries, thus enhancing the contrast, between an individual’s protected sphere and that of all other individuals. Law provides a stable framework of expectation against which the individual may frame his or her anticipations of the conduct of others. The law (as nomos) does this because it is negative in character, regulating what one must not infringe upon (and which, from others’ perspective, they may not infringe upon of yours). This is the way in which individuals take advantage of the unforeseen opportunities in a cosmos: our creativity of conduct depends upon opponent process contrast enhancement—sharpening the boundaries between mine and all others—and the negative character of the concept of justice. 3. Recall that socialists and constructivists such as Russell rave against the “evils” of private property. They assert that property arose as a perversion of early capitalism that should be superseded in a peaceful and noncompetitive order. They think that goods can be distributed “justly” by rational planning and central organization, but that the market order is, in contrast, somehow “unjust” and hindered by the existence of, say, intellectual property. That position is absurd when one understands the problem posed by scarcity. Goods are considered economic in contrast to those for which we have no necessity of economizing. Whenever our requirements are larger than an available quantity of goods, we must regulate conduct according to a principal clearly stated by Carl Menger in 1871: No part of the available quantity, in any way practically significant, may lose its useful properties or be removed from human control without causing some concrete human needs, previously provided for, to remain unsatisfied, or without causing those needs now to be satisfied less completely than before. (Menger, 1950, p. 95)

Thus, no matter how such scarce or economic goods are divided, some requirements will be met not at all or only incompletely. Those

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individuals in that situation will have self-interests opposed to those in possession of economic goods. Thus, if brute force or chaos is not to reign, society must protect individuals in possession of goods from force. As Menger said: human economy and property have a joint economic origin since both have, as the ultimate reason for their existence, the fact that goods exist whose available quantities are smaller than the requirements of men. Property, therefore, like human economy, is not an arbitrary invention but rather the only practically possible solution of the problem that is, in the nature of things, imposed upon us by the disparity between requirements for, and available quantities of, all economic goods. It is impossible to abolish the institution of property without removing the causes that of necessity bring it about—that is, without simultaneously increasing the available quantities of all economic goods to such an extent that the requirements of all members of society can be met completely, or without reducing the needs of men far enough to make the available goods suffice for the complete satisfaction of their needs. (Ibid., p. 97)

Since no one can foresee what goods may become economic, it is impossible to plan and allocate, even if, per impossible, one could eliminate scarcity in a particular given good. Thus, Menger refuted Russell’s argument against property the year before Russell was born. 4. This can be noted in relation to the analysis of morality into “modules” recently popularized by Haidt and his associates (in what is called Moral Foundations Theory or MFT) in a series of books (Haidt, 2006, 2012, 2018). These modules refer to dimensions along which behavior can be analyzed, and are modular only in the sense that the individual nodes in a hierarchical or polycentric structure have similar structures under them, and thus create a modular structure. Haidt distinguished six dimensions (called, unfortunately, foundations) along which morality varies. The first two of these dimensions are care/harm and fairness/cheating. When one looks at what was instilled in children in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, these two dimensions exhaust most of topics, and the didactic training

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is always to instill mutual care and fairness. In discussions of our present “culture wars,” Haidt et al. identified these with the current progressivist or socialist “liberal” position, in contrast to the “conservative” position that emphasizes their more recently tacked on afterthought, the liberty/oppression module, and includes most of the others he and his colleagues discuss. 5. Most people now think and act as socialists because of the immense expansion of the scope and role of government in our lives since World War I. We have returned to a tribal dictatorship in order to wage war, whether against a common enemy group or a perceived injustice. As the bureaucracy has expanded (often as a result of legislation that initially specified programs were to be “temporary” and were to cease to exist when their initial task had been completed), the governments of Western world countries are now invariably the largest “employer” in the country, often by orders of magnitude over the nearest “private” or market order competitor. Since such programs were designed to purchase votes, politicians (there is little warrant for calling them our “representatives” anymore, they are instead our Skinnerian controllers) continue to reauthorize them and to extend them farther and farther. With the inevitability of gradualness, we have come to depend upon such programs more and more, and the majority of people alive today have never known a time when private enterprise provided our “basic services.” They have not the faintest idea that the sovereignty of government, its coercive power through the exercise of force, can be replaced by proprietary contractual regulation based upon private property and voluntary contract (see Chapter 8 below). Today, everyone assumes unquestioningly that government in its wonderful benevolence is what provides for us. After all, we no longer have such things as private refuse collectors (whom we could contractually select on the basis of competitive bids for the service), or even our own doctors anymore (managed-care now forces you to go to whomever they specify instead of whom you choose), etc. So now it is not surprising that the majority of people clamor for “the government” to take over our medical care entirely—after all, they do everything else, so why not? People no longer can comprehend that the increasing costs

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and inefficiency of services such as health care are caused by government and its bureaucracy and not ameliorated by them, because they have never known any other provider. Now, we have a permanent bureaucratic class of large benefits “providers,” who have no incentive whatever to do anything actually beneficial to us, but who have total control of what used to be within the sphere of our individual responsibility and choice to provide. There does not appear to be any way to stop this cancer from growing larger without a newer Constitution prohibiting these unanticipated intrusions into the sphere of private property and individual liberty. And since the voters now perceive big government and politicians as necessary for their basic needs, that is unlikely to happen. The issue they fail to see is simple: do you want your freedom? Then you have to destroy its greatest oppressor—bureaucratic big government. 6. This means that a recent trend in “compassionate conservatism,” often called the “bleeding heart” libertarian approach, which attempts to graft on the principle of distributive justice to liberalism, is bound to fail. It is not possible to solve the distribution problem in any cosmos. It can be “solved” only in a taxis structure (ultimately, a dictatorship in which someone or some group assumes the role of tribal leader or central planning board) in which chosen particular ends and goals prevent others from being satisfied. There is no possibility of having a distributive approach within liberalism except within the confines of individual or “private” charity: an individual or voluntary group may choose to benefit particular individuals or groups outside the market order, but the order cannot be perverted to favor such groups without supplanting the market itself and the ethics and morality of liberalism and the abstract society by the morality of tribal benevolence. That would inevitably be one or another form of socialism, and as Sowell has often said, socialism is the substitution of something that sounds good for what already works fairly well. 7. There was a research program which argued against the constructivist interpretation Kohlberg initially started from, in the work of Hogan and his associates (Hogan, 1973, 1975a, 1975b; Hogan and Emler 1978; Hogan et al., 1978). These authors pointed out that

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measures such as Kohlberg’s “Defining Issues Test” actually provide Ichheiser’s “views in principle” instead of what people in fact do. A critique of biases from a point similar to that of this book is Hogan and Emler (1978). Research from this perspective refuted a common assumption of constructivists, evidenced in the 2016 U.S. election campaign in which Hillary Clinton referred to conservatives or Trump supporters as “deplorables.” That description was based upon a commonly accepted interpretation in the psychological literature. But reality turns out to be more complicated than that. Consider this comment by researchers in Hogan’s group, after noting that a long tradition in personality psychology maintains that persons with positive attitudes toward authority (e.g., police, Marines, FBI agents) are poorly adjusted, morally obtuse, intolerant, fascistic, and supposedly not very bright. After noting that research with the SEA (Hogan’s Survey of Ethical Attitudes) presents a rather different picture, they say “High scores on the SEA have positive attitudes toward authority,… They are also conforming and politically conservative” (Hogan, 1970; Lorr & Zea, 1977). On the other hand, there is no evidence that they are intellectually dull; they are as bright as their nonconforming counterparts (Hogan, 1970; Johnson et al, 1981. p. 372). In addition, relative to nonconformers, their data indicated that they were “better adjusted, use fewer drugs (Laufer et al., 1981), and have an internal as opposed to an external locus of control” (Gutkin & Suls, 1979). Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, their positive attitudes toward authority are related, not to love of parents, but to an abiding distrust of other people’s motives (Hogan & Dickstein, 1972). This latter point shows that like the classic liberals, they assume that everyone is selfish, and that therefore it is necessary to apply the rule of law equally to all. So in sum the “deplorables” exhibit many of the traits one would expect to find in classic liberalism, and do not actually appear to show the negative traits attributed to them by rationalist constructivists. Unfortunately, this research, only 35 years before Clinton’s remark, has not yet filtered into the constructivist field of psychology, or presently entrenched political positions.

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8. The selfless really does arise from the selfish. Look at another way of arriving at this conclusion. Consider the fact that our bodies are not a unitary “self ” from the standpoint of their origin and much of their functioning. This is how biologist Lewis Thomas put the point that we are the result of competitive cooperation: A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryotes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought. (Thomas, 1974, pp. 1–2)

All organisms, from single cellular through to the most advanced, consist of a congeries of earlier, more primitive components. At one time, those components existed independently on their own. As a result of their own individual and selfish behavior, they have become part of a larger structure (or structures) as a result of their actions but not as a result of any design. These earlier, initially separate, and independently living components have come together to function as the parts of the body. We are living condominiums of cells. And then these bodies have, in their own turn, evolved. It is the evolution of bodies that leads to speciation. In our almost exclusive focus upon the evolution of species, we have tended to forget the earlier evolution of individual bodies that Thomas emphasized. But from the standpoint of psychology and social and political philosophy, we cannot afford to do so (see also the discussion of MacCallum [1970] later in Note 9, and in Chapter 8).

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Our biological evolution provides us with a parallel to Adam Smith’s invisible hand. It is crucial to emphasize that the behavior of the “parts” of the biological wholes (individuals) we have just discussed is always selfish in the sense that no consideration has ever been given to the resultant whole. It is the case that the whole has arisen as a “frozen accident” result from competition. The mitochondria Thomas discusses were initially competing to survive in a livable but harsh econiche. The result of that competition is that they survived—and very well—as parts or components within a larger cell. And as a result of their output within the cell, it in turn was enabled to do things that it could not have done “on its own.” But it was never the case that the mitochondria formed something resembling a “socialist planning committee,” and somehow decided to cooperate. Cooperation was the result, the unintended consequence, of their action rather than the cause of it. It is only from the advantage of hindsight that the outcome of such a “frozen accident” in evolution ever appears to be purposive or planned. In the case of cellular or other primitive biological phenomena, it is clear that no possible cognitive apparatus could have existed to do any deliberate selecting in the first place. So against the constructivist interpretation stands the factual and theoretical basis of biological evolution. From the standpoint of evolution, everything results from the incorporation of frozen accidents that resulted from blind variation and their selective retention due to the winnowing effects of the econiche. Even when evolution becomes Lamarckian (stemming from individual learning history), or exosomatic (recorded outside the organism in physical records such as books and the internet) in the social realm, it is blind variation and selective retention that provides its ongoing mechanism. There is no designer or purposive agency or greatest good behind the development of complex social orders. No one ever designed organisms such as horses or chickens or cows (and here one should recall the old chestnut that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee). No one ever designed human languages. No one ever designed our cognitive capacities. No one ever designed the abstract ideals or regulatory rules of conduct that guide human behavior. All

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such organized social complexity is a result of human action but not human design. Our highest and most abstract behavior, our morality, has arisen from following rules of conduct that no one ever designed and most individuals have never comprehended or been able to articulate. The selfless has evolved from the selfish. It is going to be evolutionary theory and evolutionary epistemology that will explain how and why this is so. That explanation will not be compatible with rationalist constructivism. 9. The idea of sacrifice is characteristic of organization that is under sovereignty (government) as opposed to under proprietary control. The sovereign has to administer the property of others (even though he or she will claim ownership of all). The sovereign is a non-owner who has to finance by taxation, while the proprietary community is run by rents derived from voluntary ownership cooperation. Rents follow after property is improved, and can finance continued improvement. Taxes precede any hoped-for improvement. Taxation cannot produce any recompensation from the market order. This leads to the obvious: the sovereign order “is without funds except for what it can collect by force. It runs continuously at a deficit which can only be made up by more taxation, instead of being a selfsustaining enterprise as is the administration of a capital property by its owners” (MacCallum, 1970, p. 90). This produces a disincentive to beneficial administration: “Self-interest dictates that the public administrator spend tax funds in ways calculated to continue him in office….Successful innovation holds no reward, and failure is worse than merely financial loss; if discovered, the administrator is considered guilty of malfeasance” (ibid., p. 90). Small wonder then that sovereignty is “a reluctant machinery of public administration that in serving the public tends always to move from crisis to crisis, rather than from opportunity to opportunity as in proprietary enterprise” (ibid., p. 90). This all too familiar pattern leads to the prominence of the ethos of self-sacrifice in Western society (and religion). Why? Because it functions for public good in those situations where personal interests of both the private and public sectors alike are alleged to be at stake:

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the demand for sacrificial behavior is apparent on every hand where public problems are discussed. Professional men and women are continually importuned to donate their time and skill to the community. A single example concerns the plight of downtown business districts. Virtually everything that has been written on the subject urging a “solution” either calls for sacrificial behavior or else deplores its lack as uncooperative, selfish, opportunistic, unreasonable, unsocial , and so forth. On the other hand, civic-mindedness, public spirit, and social conscience are frequent euphemisms for self-sacrifice in the interest of the collective welfare. (Ibid., p. 91)

It should not be surprising that MacCallum’s conclusion is that states or countries, as a form of social organization that is recent in comparison with earlier tribal organizations based primarily on kinship, are not an advance in community structure but rather “ a condition of relative community disorganization” (ibid., p. 95). 10. I cannot emphasize this point strongly enough. The morality of the market, which is evidenced in impersonal cooperation within the order based upon private property and voluntary contractual obligation, is fundamentally different from, and opposed to, aspects of the morality of the tribe that is part and parcel of our evolutionary history. There is competition between these two types of morality in our present existence. Previous morality was based upon the benevolence of face-to-face cooperation and its extension into larger and larger forms of tribal organization, all of which must still be a topdown control system. The morality of spontaneous orders requires that we suspend the morality of the taxis. Implicit cooperation through the competitive market order unites, at least potentially, all the individuals in the world (if they join the market order). Implicit cooperation requires that we overcome or suspend the concept of direct cooperation based upon benevolence and face-to-face reciprocity. It requires that we now come to see the beneficial effect of what we have seen in benevolence in the taxis past within the functioning of the cosmos or abstract society. This is why abstract morality is literally gut wrenching. We are in conflict at present. Our alienation and malaise are the direct result of pitting our long evolutionary history and its expectations and value judgments against the

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emerging morality of impersonal competitive cooperation. The next chapter explores that in more detail. 11. Wundt was well aware of the centrality of property to the rules of morality: “The earliest of all conditions of civilization is the development of an ordered system of ownership. The regulation of property meets us everywhere among the oldest rules of custom, and sets the most important problem to incipient legislation” (Wundt, 1902, p. 310). Likewise on the duality of law and government: “as the state gradually arose from the original tribal union, so did the norms of law arise from those of custom. State and law are, therefore, closelyrelated products of the common life, and neither of them can, logically or chronologically, precede the other” (ibid. p. 265). And in another location: “for a long time the rules alike of custom and of law are wholly dependent for their validity upon customary usage. The expressly formulated law—the law that is read to the people (Lex ), or, still more, the written law (Vorschrift, prescription)—is of much later origin. And even after it has come into being, it can but imperfectly represent the living law that governs a community,…” (ibid., p. 153).

References Acton, Lord J. (1907). The history of freedom and other essays. Macmillan (Now in the public domain). Bartley, W. W., III. (1990). Unfathomed knowledge, unmeasured wealth. Open Court (Now Cricket Media). Bedford, S. (1974). Aldous Huxley: A biography. A. A. Knopf. Campbell, J. (1988). The power of myth. Doubleday. Crain, W. C. (1985). Theories of development: Concepts and applications. Prentice-Hall. Diller, L. H. (2006). The last normal child: Essays on the intersection of kids, culture, and psychiatric drugs. Praeger. Friedman, M. (1980). Free to choose. Harcourt. Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. Farrar and Rinehart. Republished in 1942 as The fear of freedom, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Harvard University Press. Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S., & Ditto, P. (2013). Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 47 , 55–130. Gutkin, D. C., & Suls, J. (1979). The relation between the ethics of personal conscience—social responsibility and principled moral reasoning. Journal of youth and adolescence, 8(4), 433–441. Haidt, J. (2006). The happiness hypothesis: Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. Basic Books. Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why Good people are divided by politics and religion. Pantheon Books. Haidt, J. (2018). Why do they vote that way? Penguin Random House. Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20, 98–116. Haidt, J., & Joseph, C. (2004). Intuitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues. Daedalus, 133(4), 55–66. Hayek, F. A. (1983). Knowledge, evolution and society. Adam Smith Institute. Hogan, R. (1970). A dimension of moral judgment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 35, 205–212. Hogan, R. (1973). Moral conduct and moral character: A psychological perspective. Psychological Bulletin, 79, 217–232. Hogan, R. (1975a). The structure of moral character and the explanation of moral action. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 4, 1–15. Hogan, R. (1975b). Theoretical egocentrism and the problem of compliance. American Psychologist, 30, 533–540. Hogan, J., & Dickstein, E. (1972). Moral judgment and perceptions of injustice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23(3), 409–413. Hogan, R., & Emler, N. P. (1978). The Biases in contemporary social psychology. Social Research, 45, 478–534. Hogan, R., Johnson, J. A., & Emler, N. P. (1978). A socioanalytic theory of moral development. In W. Damon (Ed.), New directions for child development: Vol. 2. Moral development (pp. 1–18). Jossey-Bass. Ichheiser, G. (1970). Appearances and realities. Jossey-Bass. Johnson, J. A., Hogan, R., Zonderman, A. B., Callens, C., & Rogolsky, S. (1981). Moral judgment, personality, and attitudes toward authority. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40 (2), 370–373. Kohlberg, L. (1981). The philosophy of moral development: Stages and the idea of justice. Harper & Row.

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Kohlberg, L. (1984). The psychology of moral development: The nature and validity of moral stages. Harper & Row. Kohlberg, L., Levine, C., & Hewer, A. (1983). Moral stages: A Current formulation and a response to critics. In J. A. Meacham (Ed.), Contributions to human development (pp. 1–179). Karger. Lakatos, I. (1976). Proofs and refutations: The logic of mathematical discovery. Cambridge University Press. Laufer, W. S., Johnson, J. A., & Hogan, R. (1981). Ego control and criminal behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(1), 179–184. Lorr, M., & Zea, R. L. (1977). Moral judgment and liberal-conservative attitude. Psychological Reports, 40 (2), 627–629. Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. (2018). The coddling of the American mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. Penguin Press. MacCallum, S. H. (1970). The art of community. Institute for Humane Studies. Mahoney, M. J. (1976). Scientist as subject: The psychological imperative. Ballinger. Mencken, H. L. (1916). A little book in C major. John Lane Company. Menger, C. (1950/1981). Principles of economics (J. Dingwall & B. F. Hoselitz, Trans.). The Free Press, 1950; New York University Press, 1981 (Now Mises Institute). Muson, H. (1979). Moral thinking: Can it be taught? Psychology Today, 337– 346. Pattee, H. H., & Sayama, H. (2019). Evolved open-endedness, not open-ended evolution. Artificial Life, 25 (1), 4–8. Polanyi, M. (1969). Knowing and being. University of Chicago Press. Puka, B. (Ed.). (1994). Kohlberg’s original study of moral development. Routledge. Rawls, J. (1971/1999). A theory of justice. Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (2001). Justice as fairness: A restatement. Harvard University Press. Sommers, C., & Satel, S. (2005). One nation under therapy: How the helping culture is eroding self-reliance. St. Martin’s Press. Thomas, L. (1974). The lives of a cell . Penguin Random House (Viking Books). Warner, M. (2005). Publics and counterpublics. Zone Books. Weimer, W. B. (2020). Complex phenomena and the superior power of negative rules of order. Cosmos + Taxis, 8, 39–59. Wundt, W. (1902). Ethics: The facts of the moral life (E. B. Titchener, J. H. Gulliver, & M. F. Washburn, Trans.). Swan Sonnenschein & Co.

5 Alienation, Malaise, and the Abstract Society

The small society, as the mileau in which man is first found, retains for him an infinite attraction; he undoubtedly goes to it to renew his strength; but… any attempt to graft the same features on a large society is utopian and leads to tyranny. With that admitted, it is clear that as social relations become wider and more various, the common good conceived as reciprocal trustfullness cannot be sought in methods which the model of the small, closed society inspires; such a model is, on the contrary, entirely misleading. B. de Juvenel The more laws and restrictions there are, The poorer people become. The sharper men’s weapons, The more trouble in the land The more ingenious and clever men are, The more strange things happen.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume II, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95477-2_5

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The more rules and regulations, The more thieves and robbers. Tao Te Ching, Chapter 57 This strain, this uneasiness, is a consequence of the breakdown of the closed society… It is the strain created by the effort which life in an open and partially abstract society continually demands from us—by the endeavor to be rational, to forgo at least some of our emotional social needs, to look after ourselves, and to accept responsibilities. We must, I believe, bear this strain as the price to be paid for every increase in knowledge, and reasonableness, in cooperation and in mutual help, and consequently in our chances of survival, and in the size of the population. Karl R. Popper The great thing, then, in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. William James

A major motivation underlying contemporary social and political philosophy (and thus efforts to reform or reshape society) is the alienation and lack of a sense of self so characteristic of contemporary humanity. At least since the industrial age it would appear that this existential predicament, or crisis in integrity and identity as philosophers call it, has replaced the quest for freedom as the prime motivation for social change. It is likely what underlies the prominence of the quest for the vague notion of “happiness” from the utilitarians through Russell to today’s disaffected youth (discussed extensively in Volume 1). More and more we hear the call for collectivist and totalitarian solutions because the psychological problem of alienation and its accompanying malaise (lack of sense of self or individual purpose and meaningful existence) is more immediate, now that we have supposedly “solved” the earlier problems of freedom that concerned the liberals, and seemingly more intolerable, than the problems of oppression and exploitation that result from the lack of freedom. Whether in the quest in religion for a “tenable” faith to combat the horrors of science and communism (the latter, of course, taken “on faith” to have been the atheistic product of the former), or philosophical, for a new “rational” foundation upon which to

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reconstruct our knowledge, the swing from an initially permissive tolerance of diversity has turned back upon us in the form of one or another intolerant absolutism that insists upon the adoption of some unifying creed (often admitted to be arbitrary, but somehow still proposed as highly desirable) at all costs in order to prevent ultimate relativism and chaos. The leaders of the new movements are less often social theorists or economists than those dealing with individuals: psychiatrists, educators, theologians, some philosophers, even disgruntled politicians. And this is a telling change in leadership—it leaves out the original students of society. The quest now seems to be for a “simpleminded” or unifying philosophy of life and social programs that, although arbitrary and without foundations, is to be at least practical. The cry is for a benevolent dictator, a Platonic philosopher-king or Rousseau’s tutor-educator, to lead the flock through these troubled times. In psychology, the cry is to remove the child from the family structure and institute directed self-help therapies to control the individual until the rationally planned society of Walden Two can be forced, for our own good, upon us all. In politics, it is usually the smiling, shiny face of a voluble but vacuous defender of the “scientific” answer to everything, the bright and shiny hope of well-planned socialism. Against this overswing backward to reactionary positions, we must come to realize that the mutual or reciprocal “trustfulness” to which de Jouvenel’s epigrammatic remarks referred is already provided by the implicit form of cooperation found in the market order and is not found in the benevolence of the tribal dictator’s allotment of goods to his dependents. And complementary to the sentiment in Popper’s epigram, the cost is what we pay for being humans who are being thrust, for the first time, into the abstract social environment. We have yet to come to grips with Hume’s fundamental insight that reason (especially conscious reason) is the slave of the passions. It is the emotionality and hormonal regulation of the mammalian body—the “other side” to our CNS as a control system—that is responsible for these problems, and our conscious “reason” is apparently powerless to deal with them. What is strange is that the constructivists—who have an unshakable faith in their own explicit reason—can’t see the problems are not going to be solved by more and more reliance on their proposed explicit “rational” solutions.

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The Malaise of Youth and the Inevitability of the Gap Between Generations It is a commonplace that during the entire recorded history of humanity, youth are disenchanted and rebellious against the authority, and thus the views, of their parents. We noted one recent manifestation of this in Chapter 9. In contrast, it is no less common than the realization that the sins of one’s parents, while perhaps never forgiven, are almost always understood better when one reaches their age. Somehow the older generation appears to have suddenly become a lot wiser when we ourselves attain their age. Should we regard these phenomena of restless disenchantment that inevitably leads to the generation gap as a problem of modern society that must be cured (eliminated), or if that is not possible, alleviated as far as possible? We have come to regard the tendency to rebel against authority, especially toward authoritarian educational programs, as a result of repression of youth by the older generation, and permissive educational policies have been instituted to counteract such authority. Will that approach alleviate the problem, or make it worse? What if the difference gap is characteristic of our evolution and has little to do with any “repression” or any particular alienation? We should note first that the tension has always existed in the past, and contrary to the pessimistic reports of parents (as were found in ancient Rome as well as modern Western countries) that they don’t know what’s wrong with the “younger generation,” the world has not ended with disobedience and change within their particular generation. In normal and “healthy” times the adolescent does not abandon all traditions and values, but tends to question the values of a society one by one. While the result is the abandonment of some and the modification of others, the final outcome is to eventually take back more and more traditions and values with increasing age. It is obvious that creativity and change in fundamental beliefs and values is a plastic property of (primarily) youth that is on average gradually lost with increasing age. This again is the essential tension between tradition and innovation, and it is little different in society than in science. Just as scientific “creativity” tends to

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peak in early adulthood, so “teen age rebellion” tends to decrease after that same age. But the tradition breaking or dismantling process can get out of hand and the cry of “revolutions in permanence” or ecrase l’infame can result. Pathology can occur if the rebellion of youth, no matter how critically or rationally it begins, breaks past the essential tension limits that had resulted in dynamic equilibrium, by swinging too far in one or the other extreme. The libertarian and socialist anarchist revolt against all tradition inevitably results in a revolt against the tradition of reason, and human knowledge and values are destroyed along with everything else. By swinging too far to the other pole, extreme authoritarianism results, and knowledge and progress are effectively prohibited from occurring, since the mutability of cultural norms will not exceed that of the instinctive (whether psychological or social) limits to behavior of our species. The problem is posed by a boomerang effect, or unregulated positive feedback loop, in which the rebellion of youth swings too far in one direction or the other, only to rebound too far in the opposite direction, until the balance of the equilibrating system is destroyed. Normal oscillation, as Wundt (1902) and more recently Prigogine and Stengers (1984) have emphasized, is a regulative or order enforcing mechanism that is ubiquitous in spontaneous orders. As such, limited oscillation has a dampening effect that simultaneously keeps the peace of the order and also allows gradual evolution. When the rules that regulate the order by dampening out extremes are removed, the system will swing more and more wildly, until the spontaneous order gives way to either authoritarianism or disintegrates into chaos or libertarian fancy. In either case reason, the result of the dampening effect of order regulation, will not be able to survive. Konrad Lorenz (especially 1971) argued that there are two independent tendencies, more or less antagonistic, found in youth when they are “iconoclastic.” First they take an intelligent, highly skeptical attitude toward all traditional truths. Then they totally embrace, with a notable lack of critical scrutiny, any new purported truth that happens to be offered. He noted these opposing tendencies form a regulating system. However, the young are impatient, and if the “critical” review of traditional “truth” shows too many of them as obsolete, they simply refuse

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to waste their precious intelligent thought on correcting and adapting extant tradition, and become uncritically ready to accept any new doctrine that some new prophet throws out to them (even thought the “prophet” is actually getting his inspired thought from some “academic scribbler” of the past, as Keynes noted). Lorenz noted that there is a strong urge (probably with instinctive components) to fight for a cause, so they willingly embrace any doctrine that is controversial, or in the minority, or for some other reason in need of enthusiastic support. Any fad will be dangerously attractive to the young. In the extreme case of paternal tradition becoming unacceptable, they will exhibit a completely uncritical, purely “religious acceptance” of a new doctrine, especially a haunted universe untestable one (such as Marxism). This eliminates intelligence and reason from taking part in the generational dismantling of traditional knowledge. It leaves the majority of that work to their elders, which guarantees that the youth will neither participate nor try to understand. Then youth shuts out critical thought entirely. This is why those who observed Western youth in the decades after World War II (especially the college populations) have encountered the increased retreat to fidistic commitment in the cause-of-the-moment that Lorenz saw even in the thirties. And the elimination of reason is equally obvious: how else could one explain the rise of neo-fascism, religious fundamentalism, the totally militant “peace” movements, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the Holocaust deniers, the vaccination deniers, the militance of the various Gay and female Liberation and anti-fascist movements, repressive political correctness policies, the woke generation, and dozens more, often all at the same time and on the same college campus? No wonder there is no time for actual learning during undergraduate studies. But can we “correct” such excesses by attempting to eliminate the generation gap in favor of the “now” generation? Continuing such attempts will only increase the problems. The generation gap is an indispensable component of a living and growing spontaneous cultural order, an indication that change, including creativity or productivity, is proceeding apace, but not too fast for survival. The unintended consequence of pursuing the permissive and “progressive” educational path is

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just as much the fossilization of society as the Platonic desire to arrest all change, and either would then lead to outright warfare between the young and old orders. Breaking down the generation gap by destroying the process by which traditions are passed on through slow modification (such as attacking the family as inadequate to provide early education or child care) leads to open rebellion. Lorenz (1966, 1970, 1971) noted this half a century ago and has been studiously ignored ever since. He argued that the sociological conditions for successful transference of cultural tradition are rapidly deteriorating. The father is not a figure to be revered and loved, and, since often absent due to divorce or abandonment, hardly to be identified with. On the other hand, all the youth, as a result of easy transportation and mass media, become more and more similar to each other (having all faced identical experiences), and thus identify with each other rather than with the parent generation of their own respective cultures. This literally leads to a form of tribal warfare between the generations. Lorenz, having gone through the Hitler period, likened the hate the generations bear each other to “national hate.” All one needs to do today to see this hatred is to listen to the current generation of activists (whether campus or political) when they express their feelings (all they have available, lacking in any factual knowledge) toward the abstract culture that has provided them with everything they have, including especially their means of protesting, and their means of communicating with those who agree with them (recall Chapter 9), as well as the means of censoring those who do not. The extreme irony is that, as tribalist thinkers, they do not blame the structure of society, but rather, since they assume there must somewhere be “the man” holding them down and preventing their success, blame one form of taxis leadership and clamor for another to grant their wishes. We cannot dispense with this generational gap merely because it is unpleasant, or even because it is counterproductive to actual progress. The “peace of the order” must be kept even at the inconvenience of the individual , so long as evolution is to occur. So long as we value progress we must value tradition equally—there is no middle road, no easy way out, we cannot replace one with the other. We can no more eliminate this generational divide than we can eliminate Ferguson’s realm of the conventional or “artifactual” between the conscious and the “natural.”

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Growing up with the discipline of knowledge is painful, and we can eliminate the pain only at the cost of eliminating growth and knowledge. Even Bertrand Russell (1956), reflecting on the excesses of progressive education and his own early exuberance, knew this: “I think that those who have rebelled against an unwise discipline have often gone too far in forgetting that some discipline is necessary. This applies more especially to the acquisition of knowledge” (p. 10). The acquisition of knowledge, like the acquisition of freedom, requires considerable discipline and plain old-fashioned hard work. We do society no favor in trying to remove or avoid either.

The Psychological Reality of Stress and Alienation The crisis of standards, the problem of rationalist identity, was solved by reformulating what constitutes rationality within an evolutionary approach to epistemology (1 and Chapter 7). A consistent conception of rationality requires that one step outside the traditional philosophical framework which entails justificationist conceptions of knowledge and criticism as defined by the attempt to prove by appeal to an ultimate epistemological authority. Ages ago I outlined how the abandonment of justificationism as a metatheory re-formulates the traditional problems of the methodology of scientific research (Weimer, 1979). But the psychological problems of adjustment to the abstract society cannot be removed just by the explicit adoption of the comprehensively critical approach to rationality and non-justificational philosophy within an evolutionary framework. No matter how adequate the explicit philosophical nonjustificational formulations may be, the tacit problems of our emotions and gut functioning remain. The price to be paid for the benefits of the abstract society, which is by definition an impersonal one, is the loss of the sense of interdependence and attachment to one’s fellows (as well as the amount of face-to-face contact that such intimate settings provide) that is an inevitable component of the tribal or taxis approach to society and organization. We need to implement an educational and psychological approach to adjustment for individuals within the abstract

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society that does not deny our cultural evolution and the effects that it has had upon our attempts to move more and more into the Great Society of classical liberalism. We need to retain the ability to satisfy our tribal and small group emotions and autonomic nervous system setpoints within and in addition to the various abstract orders in which we must now function. We must preserve and encourage the right of all individuals to associate with other individuals of their own choosing when they share common interests, abilities, and goals. We need to acknowledge the necessity of “special interest groups” that preserve the beneficial aspects of small group interaction based upon principles of benevolence and mutuality. This is a very different conception of freedom “of association” and “special interest” than that which has developed in politics as a response to big government, as the scaled up tribal leader, parceling out favors. Those special interest groups—based upon unimportant but easily specified criteria, such as skin color or sex or occupation—do not in fact provide the group cohesion and benevolence that our gut and autonomic nervous system long for. The mere fact that two individuals have the same skin color or occupational classification never implies that they have the same interests, abilities, goals, or anything else. This is entirely different from groups that are selected by voluntary participation—since they are based upon precisely those common interests, abilities, goals, etc. that are absent from the merely political specification of “interest groups.” One can see this in the differences between labor unions, which are responses to the political handout situation, and an actual voluntary interest group, say people who like antique or classic cars, or video games, or to ride horses, or something similar. All that the politically defined group— the labor union—has in common is the payment of dues in order for the leaders to purchase influence with government and with employers. In other respects, the group members are all kinds of different colors, sexes, ages, and interests. This explains why a large number of union members complain that their unions do not represent them at all, since their individual interests are opposed to those proposed by the union leaders. Unions have no cohesion—no commonality—from the standpoint of our gut and autonomic nervous system. In contrast, the “old car nuts,” gamers, etc. share the interests and desire for affiliation that our gut and autonomic nervous system crave. Those people regard (and most

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importantly, literally perceive) each other as friends and equals in their sharing of a common interest and framework. Thus they are together in a space that is, psychologically, safe and protective. The members of the labor union do not have such common interests, and are far less likely to perceive “friends” in the union that, for other interests, they have sought out. These union individuals are not in a psychological safe space, but rather in one forced upon them. While we have had an intellectual comprehension of the benefits of the decentralized market order since the writings of the Scottish moralists three centuries ago, neither our biological “givens” nor our cultural institutions (including our morality and our sense of self ) have evolved at a comparable pace.2 The physiological side (at least in negative effects) of this story has received increasing attention since Hans Selye’s (1956) pioneering research on stress. The anxiety and malaise resulting from the fast pace and the ambiguity of the game of catallaxy have turned out to be far more debilitating to our bodies and our minds than the seemingly more physically dangerous yet probably actually more peaceful and overall less stressful and less ambiguous existence of the hunter (or the tribal organization of the hunter-gatherer and primitive farmer). They faced hard physical labor and constant activity, but did not at the same time always face stress and anxiety. But in “modern” society stress diseases are increasingly accelerating. Contemporary students are shocked to hear that Dr. Paul Dudley White, the heart specialist who attended President Eisenhower in the 1950’s after his heart attacks, had not studied heart attacks thoroughly as a medical student because the incidence of thrombosis was so comparatively low. Coronary thrombosis and coronary artery or “heart disease” achieved their prominence as a cause of death only in the last half of the twentieth century, and apparently because they are stress related. What can be done about the pressures of modern life? The classic surgical response, to remove defective organs or tissue, is at best afterthe-fact treatment of symptoms. A malignancy developed, so just cut it out. We require strategies for coping rather than cutting, because what we would cut is essential to our existence. What is available besides rudimentary nutritional counseling and the doctor’s orders to “relax?” We need to find out what signals are going on in our milieu interieur, and how they

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are interacting with those aspects of the nervous system that underlie not only cognition but emotion and arousal. Determining the state of affairs of the milieu interieur would be equivalent to making available to our conscious awareness information comparable to the price signal in the market. Just as prices in the market are information, a signal to the individual that can be used to further one’s particular interests, the external representation of internal physiological processes or responses can be a signal to change the state of one’s body (usually by altering one’s behavior). The manner in which we can achieve that result is completely unavailable to our explicit awareness: typical biofeedback instructions are as apparently vacuous as “make that bell over there ring” or “lower that column of mercury.” But by trial and error, we can eventually learn to effect such “meaningless” results, because we have set up a situation in which an otherwise meaningless and entirely unconscious event becomes externalized as a signal in a tacit feedback mechanism. That “self-control” procedure provides us with an entrée to cope with stress when we learn to “relax” by thinking about “making the bell ring.” We are developing technology to enable us to utilize tacit processes to bring about explicitly desired results. We don’t know how to “relax” but we can learn to make the bell ring. What is important is that the bell ring does in fact correlate with relaxation. The control exercised in techniques such as biofeedback is in ourselves rather than in an external apparatus—which serves only as an externalized signal or cue that we must somehow learn to take advantage of. We need to look at therapy (traditionally construed in psychology as talking to a client and as a result explicitly and consciously controlling behavior) as involving processes similar to biofeedback—as utilizing all the tacit processes supporting bodily functioning instead of just our conscious or rational thought. We need to study everything from our gut microbiome and how it communicates with our nervous system through to our emotionality and arousal within the autonomic nervous system, and then study their relation to those aspects of the CNS underlying cognition and thought. In short, we need to treat the whole human being instead of looking at single, discrete chunks that probably cannot successfully be studied in isolation. We need a psychology of an integrated human being in order to even begin to understand what the actual effects of stress and alienation within modern society consist in. We

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cannot be satisfied with the totally inadequate conception of psychology as explicitly conscious social engineering according to a plan thought out in advance. All presently available attempts at social engineering propose that we reduce the complexly organized decentralized social and nervous systems to a taxis organization under explicit control. This is why the proposed social reconstructions (whether of society or the individual) have never equaled the spontaneously arisen system in efficiency, adequacy, or possibilities for growth. Progressivist reforms simply lead down the road to serfdom. Intervention, like surgery, may have a drastic effect, but that alone does not make it either desirable or effective, even when the shortterm results are apparently beneficial because they distract us from the problem. The best “intervention” technique for society is almost always to remove the constraints that our previous intervention had attempted to impose. But what of the poor individual confronted with anxiety and depression from competition and alienation? What should the nature of therapy in psychology be, a liberal attempt to create conditions favorable for the client to progress in, or a rationalist constructivist attempt to intervene with a specified plan (or plans) of particulars for progress? Given the engineering mentality of the discipline of psychology it is obvious that the usual approach is planned interventionism to reshape the individual to prescribed specifications: for the therapist, this requires talk about specific desired outcomes, and then providing coping strategies. We need to switch from this to a situation in which the therapist is more of a life coach helping a client than a behavioral engineer shaping one.

Therapy According to the Behavioral Engineer Behaviorism has always been so naïve as to be utterly unbelievable. Perhaps that is the reason for its great success (or what is perceived to be success in the popular press). First it was the braggadocio of John B Watson (1924): “The cry of the behaviorist is, ‘Give me the baby and my world to bring it up in and I’ll make it crawl and walk; I’ll make it a thief,

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a gunman, or a dope fiend. The possibility of shaping in any direction is almost endless’” (pp. 31–32). It soon became fashionable to snicker at Watson’s pomposity,3 but the same attitude was shown by Skinner when he made remarks such as “man is able, and now as never before, to lift himself up by his own bootstraps” (1955, 1956, p. 49). One need not have been a scientistic Skinnerian to call for similar constructivist planning. Consider black psychologist Kenneth B. Clark (1971) in a highly regarded APA presidential address, calling for psychology to live up to the ideal of constructivist rationalism by creating a crash program to develop that kind of scientific, biochemical intervention which, he said, could stabilize and make dominant the “moral and ethical propensities” of man and suppress, if not eliminate, negative and primitive behavioral tendencies. Clark’s motivation was in part the desire to implement “social justice” to undo our previous transgressions against minorities. Similarly, one could cite the impact of the women’s liberation movement in psychology, where the drive for “equality” introduced neologisms into the language (e.g., chairperson, and now just chair) in an effort to legislate rather than to educate an end to sexual discrimination. On a darker note, one could equally recall that this is exactly the mentality that led to the advocacy of “scientific” chemical castration (after all, Clark wanted scientific, biochemical intervention) of “undesirables”—remember Alan Turing. In point of fact neither of those positions is very far removed from the attitude of Josef Mengele (indeed, the contemporary extreme feminist movement seems to have little else on its mind than castrating (chemically and otherwise) all males). It should not be surprising that when Donald Campbell (1975) gave a presidential address to psychologists laying out why the roots of human nature are in biological and social evolution, and thus that rationalist constructivist wholesale intervention—such as proposed by both John B. Watson from the blank slate end of the spectrum over to Chisholm (noted below) and Clark on the other—does not work, the result was page after page of vitriolic denial of Campbell and his position in later American Psychologist commentary. This blatant denial of reality is a testimony to the success of cultural Marxism’s claim that opinions triumph over facts. The equality-in-sameness the social engineers champion has nothing to do with the concept of freedom as equal opportunity under the rule

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of law that has been emphasized by liberalism. In the constructivist formulation that form of equality, freedom of opportunity, is impossible, and thus we have been urged, always “for our own benefit,” to move beyond freedom and dignity into a “Brave New World” in which we sacrifice (note that requirement again) our autistic individual (and obviously therefore selfish) goals for the greater good of the “general welfare.” This creates the “equally restrained and constrained society,” usually held in place by (legal and increasingly illegal) psychoactive drugs. We are then promised the “new” freedom from want as a sort of consolation prize for the loss of actual freedom (the “outmoded” concepts of freedom and dignity, as Skinner put it). Should anyone protest, therapy (or another form of intervention) is in order, always under the guise of “re-”education. Welcome to the Brave New World of Fahrenheit 451, or perhaps 1984. All you need to become comfortable here is a prescription or two and you will quietly settle into your allotted small cubicle, and be content to be, with Pink Floyd, another brick in the wall (see Volume 1, Chapter 9). Psychology was not alone in its attempt to lobotomize society through reeducation and “therapy.” The psychiatrists were leading the charge as well. Consider the remarks of psychiatrist Brock Chisholm (1946), then Secretary-General of the World Health Organization and later a president of the World Federation of Mental Health, who wanted the eventual eradication of the concepts of right and wrong which has heretofore been the basis of child training, in favor of: the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy.… The pretense is made, as it has been made in relation to the finding of an extension of truth, that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized people, immorality, lawlessness, and social chaos. (pp. 9–10)

Chisholm was sure that most psychiatrists and psychologists and many other “respectable people” have escaped from these moral “chains” and now are able to observe and think “freely.” So if we are to be freed from the “crippling burden” of good and evil, it must be psychiatrists who take

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the lead: “psychiatry must now decide what is to be the immediate future of the human race” (p. 11). Despite having occurred over three quarters of a century ago, this remains not only one of the most blatant examples of self-serving scientism and constructivism that I have found, but it is indicative of the present widespread influence of progressivism in therapy and clinical practice, as well as the politicization of psychology and science. This collectivist interpretation, in which the therapist moves outside of humanity to assume the omniscient role of possessor of all relevant knowledge, of planning commission, Skinnerian token reinforcer, and indeed jailer, makes therapy a matter of legislation of particulars to restrain the client to a predetermined path—correct adjustment as specified by the all knowing therapist-as-social-engineer. For this interpretation neither the amoral Chisholm himself nor the naïveté of Watson and Skinner are primarily responsible. The blame rests on Sigmund Freud.

Civilization and its Discontents: The Freudian Attitude Toward Therapy It is well known that for Freud, the purpose of therapy was to free humanity from the burden of culture, i.e., from our culturally acquired repression, inhibition and guilt, and thus to release the culturally blocked “natural” drives. Freud unknowingly impressed upon all therapy an implicit rationalist constructivism that has been accepted as the raison d’être of therapy since his time: the idea is that our spontaneously developed models of adjustment, which incorporate cultural and social rules and wisdom learned through the rise of civilization, must be replaced, through therapy (in Freud’s case, talk therapy) by “rationally determined” patterns of behavior that the therapist, through his or her Cartesian common sense, sees that it is necessary to instill within the client through the therapeutic process. For the Freudian the preferred “rational” behavior consists in channeling the direct expression of innate needs and drives into culturally accepted behaviors—therapy is to allow the id to come to a standoff with the ego and superego. For the behavior

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modifier therapy it is to consist in shaping “bits of behavior” that are easily quantified on clipboards or by microswitch closures and are susceptible to available contingencies of reinforcement (ego biscuits) in order to return us to harmony with the “natural” reinforcement contingencies. For the literary mentality that writes utopian blueprints for the equally enslaved society, it lies in whatever fanciful notions he or she finds beyond freedom and dignity in the illumination provided by the central planner in the sky. In all such cases it is assumed that omniscient modern humankind (at least one—whichever author is writing the program) can rationally construct a new social order and individuals that are better adjusted to it than could ever be done by traditional means such as the family, or by following “old-fashioned” moral values, “outmoded” concepts like liberty, justice and property, etc., that require the actual discipline of cultural and social interaction. Therapy is done in isolation (in the appropriate Skinner box) so that society (to say nothing of family and friends) cannot intrude to contaminate the process. Therapy thus assumes that it is not necessary to pass the burden of culture to a client in order to render him or her well-adjusted, that one can consciously plan (perhaps here is the place to remind you that group therapist conferences devote much time to getting “the plan” laid out correctly in “one size fits all” fashion) in order to direct the attunement to the social milieu in which humanity has arisen. Civilization is thus the burden to be overcome rather than the source of human power and hope for the future. All such approaches to therapy are by definition backward looking— they wish to return to the mythic Golden Age in which everyone was once “normal” and well-adjusted, and to do so they propose removing the terrible burden that especially the abstract society we are now in has imposed upon us. Remove the abstract society with its burdens and the anxiety and malaise will magically drift away, replaced by whatever conception of “natural” or well-adjusted behavior the therapist has installed in its place.4 All we require are computer programmers who can isolate and remove all the virus and malware programs that now infect us. If you believe that, I have a bridge over to Brooklyn that I would like to sell you. As the epigram from Popper clearly states, the strain of civilization is the price we have to pay for being human. Better to get used to that,

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and construe the therapeutic encounter accordingly. What adjustment to the abstract society needs is more like a good coach in a sport— one who brings out the best in his or her players by aiding them in the task of creating conditions in which they can best practice, and thus can improve, the skills that they have.

What is Therapy for, if Not to “Relieve the Burden of Civilization?” Suppose we were to look at the therapeutic encounter as requiring us to do something other than follow the medical model of “excising” or cutting out the malignancy5 of our discontent and alienation? It should be obvious now that the “mother’s litle helper” mentality (so well expressed by the Rolling Stones, who had obviously used far too many of them) of drugging the populace into a soporific state, while it does momentarily calm people down, simply exacerbates the original problems through unintended consequences. Is there any practical way to help people adjust to the abstract society instead of that selfish hedonism? The answer depends upon whether one wants the equivalent of instant rational assessment in philosophy—an algorithm to follow that delivers a decisive result—or the much slower process of reeducation to teach a client coping mechanisms and strategies which may aid the client in learning how to adjust their body to live with and function within, and thus to adapt to, our impersonal society. From the standpoint of liberalism, it is this latter direction that should be followed: the purpose of therapy is to aid the client (whom we must remember is a consumer of our services and not our prisoner —we are not socialist “producers” of adjustment who then parcel it out to the grateful tribe—in coming to terms with the unavoidable constraints of living in the abstract society in which impersonal cooperation replaces explicit benevolence. This cannot be an algorithmic procedure in which a “cookie cutter” template is forced upon the client. It requires educating clients to the nature and presence of a never-ending task they face which, like application of the law of liberty, can never be known to be satisfied. No one in society can ever be relieved of the burden of civilization and the requirements of living within it. But

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chasing after “happiness” as a temporary state is never going to work as a long-term solution, because since it is inherently fleeting and transitory happiness can never be the long-term goal of either the individual or the society. The approach of Bertrand Russell (examined in Volume 1) was actually that of the Mad Hatter, his caricature in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (Carroll knew full well the Victorian drug culture, in which cocaine was the “Mother’s litle helper” of choice for the intelligentsia, and he knew the “intellectuals” such as Russell well).

The Biology and Psychology of Depression and Malaise We may be on the verge of being able to treat significant aspects of these issues in the twenty-first century, and without addictive drugs. Research into the microbiota of the gut has shown significant differences in the composition (population) of gut bacteria between depressed individuals and those who are healthy. Research directed by Licinio (e.g., Licinio & Wong, 2009), Gilbert (Sharma et al., 2019), Mayer (2016), and numerous others indicates that not only is the microbiome extremely influential in communicating with the nervous system in very direct fashion, but that its content is significantly different in those who are depressed from those who are not. This raises the possibility of relatively simple and direct treatments which, in altering the composition of the microbiome, have been shown to have effects upon mood and emotion. Some bacteria in the gut appear to produce the same substances used at present to treat depression and may naturally play a role in maintaining our emotional balance. In an interview Jack Gilbert said that the feeling of malaise (if you will) is often associated with gastrointestinal disorders, and also that the microbiota chemically alter nerve signals going into the brain, which then alter brain chemistry and therefore behavior, mood, and, Gilbert believes, depression and anxiety. Gilbert’s view is a considerable distance away from earlier years in which we treated the microbiome simply as a source of germs that cause infections and diseases, and therefore should be wiped out. Trying out that latter approach we managed to increase type II diabetes, increase

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liver disease, asthma, preterm birth problems, and many instances of antibiotic-associated side effects. Instead of that line of attack, we need to understand how gut bacteria manage to influence affect and emotional regulation. If we could find how to reliably make a healthy gut in people we could probably cut down the effects of depression and malaise to the point where more individuals could manage it successfully without blaming and shunning the abstract society. But in a free society individuals must be allowed to choose whether or not they want to follow that diet or pursue that form of treatment intervention. We must not give in to the Chisholm approach of assuming that we will have totalitarian control to force this upon everyone. This area of research is new and not surprisingly has both advocates and detractors. We need not enter into any of the pros and cons, but rather use it as an example of noninvasive and relatively noninterventionist approaches to increasing our ability to cope with the symptoms of malaise. If we can find appropriate means to deal with the symptoms that are manifestations of our alienation, we may then have the opportunity to deal with the cause of those symptoms. Studying the microbiome and the neurobiology of stress may provide us with an overall “wellness” approach to dealing with our anxiety and malaise (some of which may be symptoms, others causes). For that we will need to rely upon increases in our understanding of how the body as a whole, and not just our cognitive part of the CNS, responds to the hallmarks of the impersonal and abstract society. We do seem to have a considerable amount of ingenuity and agility available for this in the CNS and other bodily processes. Consider what is available in the more cognitive CNS first.

Utilizing an Agile Mind Koutstall (2012) used the book title, The Agile Mind, to summarize an immense amount of data relevant to how the CNS works in the process of thinking. She stated that agile thinking involves “ways of representing and processing [using] information and knowledge that is flexibly, creatively, and adaptively attuned to changing circumstances and

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goals. It is thinking that is able to promote and sustain both long-term and provisional plans and projects in the face of dynamic and more stable environments, in the midst of uncertainty and ambiguity, and for real-life risks and rewards” (p. 3). Assuming one has this sort of mental agility or flexibility it should be possible to utilize and to construct new and more adaptive coping strategies for dealing with the indefinite amount of ambiguity that we face in the abstract order. Although dull as dishwater due to its academic style, the information contained in this text (and similar sources) can provide a basis for understanding what sorts of coping strategies can be taught to those who have difficulty dealing with—are usually overwhelmed by—the seemingly kaleidoscopic changes and differences we face on a day-to-day basis. It can provide a framework of useful information for dealing with the conscious aspects of alienation. Having argued throughout for an incremental view of knowledge and competence, in opposition to an “all or none” conception, she proposed that taking an incremental view would be more likely to overcome shortcomings in knowledge and skills which individuals have, and thus to substantially extend their competencies. Persons with an incremental view might “set in motion an upward “broaden and build” cycle, rather than a downward spiral of increasing lack of motivation and involvement” (p. 607), such as would likely accompany a fixed-for-once-and-all view of intelligence and ability, with the accompanying tendency to avoid confronting and trying to improve their apparently “unalterable shortcomings or to downplay their importance (ibid., p. 607). In short, instructing people who do not show a tendency to adopt successful approaches to overcoming setbacks and failure can indeed be beneficial. The key here is perceived competence—people who feel that they are not competent in a task or are overwhelmed in a situation can be helped considerably by being shown how competence can be incrementally improved. Our competence is not all or none or rigidly fixed—it can be improved with practical advice and well coached training. Koutstaal notes that it is often of pivotal importance how we view intelligence and feedback on our efforts. Despite this, the ways we might imaginatively

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promote a more malleable, repetitive or iteratively acquired and externally or environmentally supported view of mental “agility” have been largely left untapped (see ibid., p. 608). So there are many strategies and coping behaviors that can be taught to individuals (or rather, that they can learn) that the behavior modifiers and most clinicians have yet to consider. When it comes to aiding the client it does not matter how you do it so much as that you do it—by taking a piecemeal or incremental approach to doing the job a little bit better in one or another regard, with the realization that whether you were successful is not always an all or none determination. The therapist can have a long-lasting beneficial effect with gains that are “by inches” since “by miles” just doesn’t happen in the real world. What I wish to emphasize here is that exactly the same situation holds for both therapist and client. The client can benefit by adopting the same approach and attitude toward life. Both those who help and those to be helped are in the situation aptly described by Samuel Beckett after a failure: No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. As Beckett knew, none of us will ever be perfectly adapted to an ever-changing environment. But that does not mean that we should not use all the strategies and coping mechanisms we have available to try again, because in the evolution of society every little bit adds up. But this description is all at a very cerebral and conscious level of analysis. We can’t expect this to deal with all the problems of alienation, because it leaves out the level at which they all begin: our emotionality and our passions.

The ANS is Not the CNS The autonomic nervous system functions as the control system for the regulation of bodily processes that are normally automatic but necessary to maintain life within acceptable limits. It is concerned with such things as heart rate, digestion, coughing, sneezing, swallowing, respiration, urination, arousal functions such as pupil size and sexual state, and the overall fight-or-flight response to stimulation. One of the cranial nerves, the vagus complex, is its main input to the brain for the parasympathetic side, while the splanchnic is the primary source for the sympathetic.

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Connected to motor output functions rather than sensory ones, the system is usually described as composed of three branches: sympathetic, its opponent process contrasting branch the parasympathetic, and the enteric (for the gastrointestinal tract). The ANS is the (non-cognitive or pre-cognitive) tacit dimension of bodily functioning that is so far in the background that it is all but invisible during normal cerebral functioning when we just do not notice our heart rate or breathing or digestion, etc. It is the locus of most of our malaise and fear of change and the unknown in the abstract society. To the ANS the unknown or unexpected is by definition threatening, and therefore tied to fear until the potential threat is recognized as actually nonthreatening. ANS and entric functioning and processes are ancient—and little changed during millions of years. We have to learn how to live with their control processes instead of trying to ignore them or suppressing them by our conscious will. We cannot dispense with processes that go back to the reptilian flight or fight situation. What we can do is try to understand them, and try to defuse their harmful consequences in modern society. This system is closer to the usual interpretation of the “passions” than to that of explicit reason, and therein lies a key to understanding our existential malaise in the abstract form of society. It is the tie-in to that vague and primitive flight from (or fight against) the fearful unknown that so many find debilitating (think of how you feel when forced to drive into an unfamiliar large city during rush hour), that we must now explore. Let me emphasize at the start that the key feature of this ANS system is that it is judgmental . It provides instant meaning to stimulation. It immediately assigns global meanings to stimulation, and those meanings have enormous consequences to the functioning of our gut and nervous system, which in turn have great impact upon our other nervous systems. Let us look at the work of Porges (2011) in that regard. Consider some remarks from Porges (2011) to set the stage. The evolutionary origins and neurobiology of sociality provide a contextual perspective for understanding both the causes and consequences of mammalian caregiving behaviors (see p. 296). Why do we need to be concerned about caregiving behavior? “Our capacity to heal ourselves is physically linked to our relationships with other people. When social bonds are absent or disrupted by the loss of a loved one, our health also

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is at risk” (p. 295). And the abstract society provides exactly that situation: by definition it disrupts the social bonding found in the tribal order, and in the case of many who have moved to the “big city” in order to survive, these bonds are entirely absent. In all cases, our nervous system constantly assesses the environment to determine if it is safe, dangerous, or life threatening. Neuroception (Porges’ term for distinguishing safety, threat, or danger) involves brain structures that include the amygdala and other mid-brain centers which can be modulated by neuropeptides including oxytocin and vasopressin. These are essential to vagal functioning. “Under optimal conditions, person-to-person interactions can be innate triggers within the human nervous system for adaptive biobehavioral systems that support health and healing” (p. 295). What if we were to employ this information to aid our dealing with the alienation of our abstract society? First, it would be obvious that the warm and fuzzy positive affect that is part of tribal society is a result of that person-to-person interaction, and, if that is a biochemical effect, we need to create conditions in which it (still) occurs in the abstract society. Since it is a characteristic of the family structure, that is a very important argument in favor of allowing education to occur in a family setting rather than assuming that an impersonal “village” is required instead. So what allows the prosocial or adaptive responses to occur, and what triggers defensive behaviors instead? How do we avoid the latter in favor of the former? Porges found that the vagus nerve complex seems to be bifurcated into two sections, one of which mediates the determination of a threatening from a nonthreatening voluntary motor behavior. He coined the term neuroception to cover how the nervous system determines whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life threatening. It involves not just the response to novelty found in the orienting response, but a response to that response. Consider what that means. Start with the social bonding situation, as found between an infant and parent. This is an obvious preliminary: If the creation of social bonds depended on voluntary motor behaviors, then the human newborn would be greatly disadvantaged. The neural regulation of the spinal motor pathways is immature at the time of birth

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and takes several years to develop fully. Fortunately, social engagement does not depend on how well we can regulate our limbs and move our bodies. Social engagement depends, rather, on how well we can regulate the muscles of our faces and heads via pathways linking the cortex with the brainstem (i.e., corticobulbar pathways). (2011, p. 14)

The neural pathways from the cortex to these nerves (corticobulbar pathways) are myelinated sufficiently at birth to allow the infant to signal a caregiver by vocalizing or grimacing. That is what it takes to engage the social and nutrient aspects of the world—by gazing, smiling, and sucking. The neural regulation of face and head muscles influences how someone perceives the social engagement behaviors of others (see Porges, 2011, p. 15). This is the neural basis of our face-to-face benevolence and caring and sharing. The interesting thing is that the system regulating the social bonding or attachment is also involved in the regulation of the heart and inner ear. That system is the ventral branch of the vagal nerve. The ventral vagal nerve dampens or inhibits the body’s regularly active state. It is an inhibitory (utilizing negative rules of order) system, taking only milliseconds to begin dampening out the long-lasting reptilian sympathetic fight-or-flight mechanism or the even evolutionarily earlier parasympathetic freeze or faint shutdown. In comparison, it can take up to 20 min for the body to calm down from sympathetic activation, much less but still far greater than milliseconds for the other (ventral vagal) side of the parasympathetic. Since the abstract society tends to mimic and constantly present the diffuse and nonspecific threat situation (perhaps for no more than because of the lack of face-to-face calming from ventral vagal functioning), thus continually activating mainly the sympathetic system (but sometimes, in extreme cases, also the enteric and other parasympathetic), it seems that if we could teach the upper ventral vagal branch to calm down the other systems it would be highly beneficial in dealing with problems posed by the impersonal nature of present society. To do this we have to understand that there is another sensory modality in addition to the five classic ones of vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch (neglecting speech

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perception, which in humans is somewhat different from regular audition). We would need to understand interoception as a sixth sense for internal states and bodily processes. Porges developed a hierarchical model of self-regulation that distinguished four levels: level I processes, dealing with physiological homeostasis; level II processes, dealing with the cost of doing business in the environment; level III processes, dealing with bodily movements and facial expressions; and level IV, coordinated (as a response to level III) motor behavior and emotional tone and bodily state in negotiating social interactions. The problems of life in society deal primarily with the upper three levels. That leads us to consider a new approach to emotion and the classical philosophical notion of the passions. Porges proposed that emotion is an evolutionary byproduct of ANS regulation. In mammals, the ANS strategy for responding is phylogenetically hierarchical—when challenged it first responds with the “highest” or evolutionarily newest structures, and, when all else fails, reverts back to the most primitive system (this is Darwinian-Jacksonian dissolution—see Hughlings Jackson, 1958). The three levels do not function in all or none fashion but instead exhibit gradations of control determined by both visceral feedback and higher brain structures. This phylogenetic strategy can be observed in our day-to-day interactions. Our social behavior follows a strategy that focuses initially on communication via facial expressions and vocalizations. This tact has low metabolic demands. If it is appropriately interpreted by others, it results in contingent (context dependent on the other’s responses) social interactions via verbal-facial mechanisms. This is often aided by hand gestures and head movements, which increase the mammalian repertoire of communication-related behaviors. A key evolutionary characteristic of these “prosocial” behaviors is their low metabolic demand coupled with the rapid contingent “switching” ability of transitory engagement. Porges noted this strategy in our rapid strategy of speaking then switching to listening and vice versa) (see ibid., p. 161). Porges did not discuss emotion in detail, and not at all from the conscious or phenomenological perspective (the next section will do so at least in passing). Here I want to conclude by emphasizing the therapeutic consequences of understanding the differences between the upper

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vagal system and the other components of the ANS. In the clinical situation, many clients experience emotions (felt or lived through meanings) that build to fight-or-flight intensity and often do so with great rapidity. Therapy should, to be effective, employ strategies that help people to find a sense of safety, and once having done so, aid them in understanding and utilizing their own social engagement system. This is going to require the therapist to become a coach, a sort of counselor, rather than just someone who pops pills into a pliant subject. What is required are coping strategies—cognitive and behavioral—that will allow individuals to gain more control of the social engagement-communication system and also understand the meanings it provides, and thus to ameliorate their extreme problems by helping them find that sense of safety that comes with ventral vagal dampening. As a start, there is one thing we can all do a lot more of in the abstract social realm—smile at other people. Both they and you will literally feel better. The average individual in the abstract society is subclinical rather than requiring all out supervised clinical intervention. What he or she needs is to learn to do the equivalent of Joseph Campbell’s (1988) directive to “follow your bliss.” Campbell had in mind the attempt to provide positive meaning and positive affect by doing what you in fact want to do and feel competent to do. This does not mean abandoning civilization in favor of some far off deserted desert island or joining Thoreau at Walden Pond. It does mean doing what is necessary to make your nervous system your friend instead of your enemy. William James got that right a hundred and thirty years ago. This might be possible to achieve if we take seriously the educational strategy for ourselves and for others of combining a knowledge of what a healthy microbiome requires, with an understanding of the fact that our cognitive apparatus and abilities are really very agile and adaptive, and thus include an approach to education and therapy that utilizes the realization that there is often a conflict between at least some of the three parts of neural control and integration of the ANS systems. Such a form of therapy or counseling (life coaching) will be as far away from the Skinnerian or Chisholmian approach as night is from day. It throws out “The Plan” that was rigidly specified in advance entirely. In its place is an emphasis on helping the client to “plan” their own unique engagement with life in such a fashion

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that he or she can take advantage of the abstract society while incorporating the beneficial aspects of face-to-face contact. So start by smiling and talking to others a bit more. It certainly can’t hurt, and will probably be really beneficial.

Reason Remains the Slave of the Passions Our generation needs to (re)learn this basic truth from David Hume. The consequences of Hume’s realization have usually been deliberately ignored instead of explored. The traditional justificationist approach to philosophy, in its death throes since Hume’s “whittling down” of the claims of a false conception of reason, has ignored the tacit dimension of the individual, knowledge, and of society in a valiant attempt to salvage some conception of rationality that is totally explicit, conscious, and capable of determination by an instant rational assessment procedure. This was exemplified first in the apodictic reasoning of the geometers with their quest for axiomatic foundations to make all knowledge comparable to the contentless deductive systems of mathematics, and then in the last two centuries, it is exemplified in the probabilistic attempt to do the same thing with some sort of confirmation theory that would “prove” that knowledge claims are probable according to some algorithmic procedure. This is the basic conception of rationality that underlies the rationalist constructivist approach, and this book is in that sense just an extended argument against that position in favor of the tenets of classical liberalism and non-justificational rationality. But if, as Hume showed us, our limited conscious rationality is an outgrowth of the “merely psychological” and also (following Ferguson) the conventional realm of human action but not design, then we need another conception of rationality. And the striking thing about the non-justificational and evolutionary conception of rationality we require is that rationality is not (and can never be) explicit or instantly specifiable, since like our society and our cognition, it emerges over time as part of a dynamic equilibrating process that will not end until we have ceased to exist. In this framework, it will turn out that there is no conflict between the passions and reason. There

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they interact and correct each other, but they are not intrinsically antagonistic unless we ignore one in favor of the other. And history shows that we simply cannot drop out or ignore either one. Both are indispensable to our bodily functioning. But what are we to make of terms like passion or sentiment or judgment? How far away from those concepts is reason? Are the prominent theories of morality simply mirroring the contrast between reason (as matters of principle and explicit judgment) and what the Scottish moralists referred to as sentiment or emotion? Why do we find moral codes, the rules of conduct, to be interpretable as one or the other? Why cling to the myth that the passions and reason must inevitably be in opposition? We certainly did usually make that opposition central throughout Western thought, as this passage from an existentialist-continental philosophical perspective makes clear: The wisdom of reason against the treachery and temptations of the passions has been the central theme of Western philosophy. It has defined ethical theories, from the “rationalist” theories of Aristotle and Kant to the antithetical “naturalist” and “emotivist” theories of David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and the logical positivists. But underlying that theme has been another, less often argued because so frequently assumed—the distinction between reason and passion, based upon an archaic “faculty” psychology of the human soul. Reason is that part of the soul that is most our own, the only part of the soul that is completely under our control. (Solomon, 1983, p. 10)

The passions, however, were considered to belong to that part of the soul that is inherited from the animals, which is, to Cartesian Reason, an “inferior” faculty that must be mastered. So philosophers have always thought that the main business of philosophy was to develop the powers of reason to enable us to control the raging cauldron of forces bubbling up from below (see Solomon, 1983, pp. 10–11). Note that constructivist thinkers have been in both of the camps noted in this quote: lumped together with Hume were Mill, Russell, and the positivists. And Solomon himself was very sympathetic to a socialist-distributive justice view.6 But what are passions? For Solomon, as nearly all others, they are the emotions and their longer-term extensions, the moods. And he

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argued that all emotions are intrinsically judgmental. Every emotion is a set of “constitutive judgment(s), conceptual in form and thus displaying… “logic”” (ibid., p. 280). This would mean that differences between or similarities among the emotions are with respect to their intuitive judgments. This requires a relational system. There are no individual emotions, only “a system of judgments from which we can abstract and simplify and identify certain dominant patterns of judgment by using individual emotion names” (ibid., p. 280). This means that there are no basic emotions: only the cluster of emotions that are prevalent in a given society. Solomon’s book includes a catalog, what he calls an emotional register, that extends to over 80 pages, of various emotions and their distinguishing characteristics. All have been learned in our evolutionary history. The theme that passions are judgments—evolutionarily early classificatory attempts on the part of the ANS and then CNS to give meaning to situations in a rapid fire manner—puts the sentiments in an epistemic framework from an evolutionary perspective. Emotionality is our primitive and evolutionarily basic judgmental and motivational system at work. Its roots are in the reptilian flight or fight response to stimuli that occupy the attention of the nervous system. It is likely that our basic meanings derive from such “confrontations with stimuli” that we have in the past (of our species, and of our individual learning history) come to classifiy as meaning one thing or another—friend or foe, threatening or harmless, tasty or obnoxious, and other “basic” responses that have as an intrinsic component a meaning shared in essentials with all the members of a species. That is one of the points I wish to emphasize in Solomon’s treatment and to retain as indispensable for an understanding of the judgmental nature of all nervous system activity. As Hayek noted, the fundamental activity of the CNS is judgmental—any classificatory activity must be a judgment, as is the most primitive and fundamental one of all: the orienting response to novelty, which must judge that this particular pattern is in fact significantly different from the ongoing level of background activity. Classifications, patterns, judgments—all have an emotional and thus intrinsically a meaningful content and they all arise in unison. And because these passions are so primitive, broad, and often

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nonspecific in their activation, they tie together a comparably broad range of meanings and behaviors. Parenthetically, we may ask what is the relationship between the passions, as both motivational and judgmental, and the development of morality? What is the relationship of moral rules of conduct to our passions—emotions—and to moods? One thing to note is that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between passionate judgment and the existence of a moral rule. Individual judgments as opposed to social ones do not seem to evolve into moral constraints. Just because one monkey gets a grape and another monkey (who performed a similar task) did not, does not mean that the show of emotion on the part of the monkey denied the grape is an expression of a moral rule. An expression of emotionality, very clearly—but an expression of morality? The answer is “No, not yet.” It would take a monkey “society” in which the situation (or similar one) occurred over many generations and to a substantial population of individuals before it could become inculcated into a “result of action but not design” convention that could become powerful enough to influence the monkey society as a whole. So emotions alone are not yet morals. Should they develop “moral” behaviors—such as not accepting the grape when the other fellow is denied one—then we would almost certainly be seeing a moral rule in place. Moral rules emerge from the effect of long-term emotional states in populations. The second theme I wish to emphasize and agree with is the role of the passions in the creation of reason. As Solomon said, all the passions have the same end—personal dignity and self-esteem (see ibid., p. 128). That may be the case for humans. In the case of a reptile or primitive mammal, that is too anthropomorphic a statement: there all that is involved is self-preservation, self-interest, and in an evolutionarily optimal fashion. As such the passions are strategies for survival . So is the business of rationality to eliminate or modify them, to organize the passions “in a coordinated effort, joining them together toward a common goal” (ibid.). Thus Solomon argued that rationality is the search of the passions for optimal strategy for achieving self-esteem. What is called wisdom is the attainment of this optimal strategy, the “harmony of the soul” that he

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noted was so celebrated by the Greeks. It is what Aristotle called eudaimonia (living well) and was not “devoid of passion, but not devoid of reason either.” Indeed, Solomon argues that it is only when this “insidious” distinction begins to disintegrate that the ideal of “self-esteem,” “wisdom,” and classical “harmony of the soul” will begin to make any sense for us (see ibid., p. 128). That is a statement by a philosopher who had no concern with or knowledge of evolutionary history. If one were to discuss how this conception could apply to our mammalian ancestors, it simply could not be in these totally “human” and essentially tenseless terms. Implicit in such a non-evolutionary or classical conception of rationality is the assumption that it must be explicitly and consciously specifiable. Justificationist rationality was to be restricted to deliberately effected individual actions and their extension in a delimited organization (a taxis structure) fulfilling deliberate aims. Nothing else could be considered rational, least of all the tacit dimensions of the cosmos, certainly not the results of human action but not design. One cannot argue that rationality is a conscious optimizing strategy if it emerges only over time, in after-the-fact fashion, for either the species or the individual. We must now note that limitation within justificationist rationality. I wish to emphasize that reason is an extension of, or arises from, the sentiments or passions as initial judgments. The ultimate source of its motivation is correct judgment. The raison d’être of rationality—of acting in accordance with reason—in any given situation is to be motivated to act to improve one’s position (by making correct judgments). And that selfish individual motivation, as we have seen in earlier chapters, is actually how the selfless arises in the abstract society. Reason is a recent evolutionary mechanism (like the separation of vagal innervation into two opponent process sides) that, like our consciousness (which has evolved to increase our memory span, so that we could “pay attention” to a wider slice of the environment and then remember it), has evolved to increase our knowledge, and hence also our survival in the face of the unknown and unforeseen. It is a reflection upon and attempt to correct the (in all probability, somewhat too hasty) initial judgments of the passions. Conscious reason has evolved as an attempt to differentiate and refine the broad based and inevitably not completely

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accurate picture and initial meanings given to us in our first emotional impressions. Reflection and reason are recent evolutionary differientation techniques—higher order constraints or failsafe techniques to apply over primitive ones—to refine the adequacy of our initial (or rapid fire) responses to an ever-changing econiche. The problem with all explicit rational and prescriptive accounts (as I have argued throughout both Volumes of this work) is that they fail to acknowledge the inevitability of our ignorance of particulars in a spontaneous order. Such accounts can work only if they are restricted to a taxis that, being limited to particular plans or possible results of action specified in advance, and thus they could never allow fundamental novelty or creativity to occur, let alone to be “rational.” The general rules regulating conduct in society cannot be directed toward particular ends with positive prescriptions of what must be done. We can never specify in advance in either the court of law or science lab or market order what particular results or ends must be achieved. We can only attempt to state general rules that must be followed. These general rules can be negative or prohibitory of certain classes of conduct, but will at the same time be positive or creative in the sense that, while they forbid certain classes of conduct they do not thereby tell us what we must do in every particular case. Thus they allow us to be free to choose, to utilize our creativity, to take advantage of our momentary knowledge of particular circumstances, in order to achieve our often diverse and conflicting ends. The only philosophical-methodological directives that are tenable (for any “rational” practice such as science or the law or morality) tell us not to commit certain types of error but not what positive results must be achieved. Rationality (the task of being rational) is merely a means, a never-ending or standing obligation, not an end. Rationality is a matter of following general principles in the constant flux of unanticipated occurrences—it is not a matter of specifying in advance any particular action or end to be achieved. Rationality is an emergent property like the market order. Rationality can never be determined according to some algorithmic assessment procedure. Three centuries ago David Hume argued against the existence of miracles by noting that in order to be able to ascertain that some event is in fact “miraculous” one must presuppose a complete

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knowledge of the natural order. To be taken seriously as a miracle, as a purported violation of the natural order, an event must be shown to be beyond ideal scientific knowledge. Thus detection of a miracle presupposes omniscience and the completed knowledge of Utopian science. But our knowledge varies with time and available theory and is never complete. A few centuries ago a rocket going to the moon or the 3-D laser printing of an object would have been considered “miraculous.” It would not have been “rational” for such things to happen. Today, with the ensuing increases in knowledge and technology, such things have become commonplace. Here rationality changed with our changing knowledge. It was rational 200 years ago to say that going to the moon or 3-D laser printing an object was “irrational.” Today it is clear that such an earlier judgment was itself “irrational.” So our judgment of whether or not some action or claim is rational depends entirely upon the state of our knowledge and our relative ignorance. But in any case our reason is, as Hume noted, the slave of the passions in the sense that it arises as a refinement of the judgments made by our first impressions.

Confusions About Planning and Rationality Liberalism makes a fundamental distinction between planning for an individual’s future and planning the future of society. It is perfectly “rational” and intelligent for an individual (or a small, cohesive group such as a family) to plan for their future. They become equivalent to a taxis, because they have in common a shared purpose or purposes and goals. However, it is neither rational nor intelligent to try to plan the future of all of society. For the constructivists this distinction appears to be irrational: they ask, “Why can you plan intelligently and consciously for your own future, but we cannot plan consciously and intelligently for the future of our country or society?” The answer is obvious: planning an individual’s future is not the same as planning everyone’s future. Society in toto has no goals or desires or plans or any similar notions because it is not an agent. Only subjects of conceptual activity—living agents—can plan.

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The progressivist then tries to increase planning by incremental degrees. What about planning for a group, such as a garden club, or the employees of a company? The answer is yes, since they can be said to have common goals and interests, it is all right to plan for what is held in common, such as for that company picnic or retirement fund or whatever. From this, they move to the small town or municipality and suggest planning at that level. But this is the limit, the point at which the individuals who comprise the municipality can no longer be said to have more than a tiny or more likely vanishingly small amount of interests or goals in common. If the planning were by and for those very limited interests (e.g., snow removal in winter or road maintenance or police protection) or goals it would be appropriate. But the planning is never for the limited range of actually shared interests and goals, it is for “the common good,” or for “municipal funding” (and thus is funded by a tax that generally becomes a slush fund for whatever the leaders want), or some similar “general-purpose.” But once one reaches the cut off point at which there are no longer common specifiable goals and common interests shared by all there can be no planning for the future of all. When the grouping reaches the point at which the equivalent of the face-to-face or small group interaction is lost, when common interests and goals can no longer be specified, one has reached the point at which “planning” has become nothing more than a euphemism for the will of a dictator. When individual agency disappears totalitarian dictatorship appears. As H. L. Mencken observed in 1919, “The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it is goodby to the Bill of Rights” (Mencken, 1956, p. 279). The “pistol” at his head has to be a Constitution and Bill of Rights specifying what this unelected would be dictator cannot be allowed to do. This is also why all therapy and medical intervention procedures must be limited to the individual. It is not possible to do bureaucratic “group therapy” for people taken at random. Even the small group approach is beneficial only when it is directed to quite delimited problems and situations. One cannot do group therapy for the general class of “drug addicts” or “obsessive-compulsives” or “bedwetters.” The therapeutic encounter, as with all education, must be tailored to the situations of the

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individuals involved. There is no such thing as “one-size-fits-all” intervention for any aspect of the human situation. I hope I do not have to remind you that freedom under the rule of law is not an intervention, but a precondition. This will be explored more fully in Chapter 7. And to this the liberal must add that individuals must be free to choose what interventions or programs (if any) they participate in. One must be free to refuse to purchase if one does not want to. To the extent that education is an intervention it falls under that category also. We can conclude this section by recalling and reemphasizing Solomon’s statement that all passions have the same end—personal dignity and self-esteem. The affective domain—which is where the passions are—consists of overall, diffuse responses to environmental situations that have been learned first in the history of the species and then in our own individual developmental histories. If they were learned once they can be modified by new learning. The role of the therapist is to be a life coach. This does not mean to “rationally” and consciously impose upon others new meanings to old ANS and enteric responses. It means to aid individuals to do that for themselves. The therapist cannot be considered to be Laplace’s demon—somehow standing outside the natural order to impose a new order upon the passive client. Fortunately, students of affect have begun to realize that we can indeed try to teach people how to reinterpret (rather than to suppress or reject or “control”) the interoceptive signals from that primitive judgmental system (as Barrett, 2017, emphasizes). If we can do that it will be possible to recognize that the cues (which presently send so many to socialism) can far more beneficially be reinterpreted within the framework of the abstract society and its in-comparison unlimited benefits.

Limping Before The Lame: Progressivism and its Guilt A peculiar but all too common phenomenon in the recent past of more affluent Western countries has been the response of the healthy when suddenly in the presence of the lame and infirm. Rounding a corner and seeing a lame beggar, many would all too often quickly begin to limp,

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before being looked at by the unfortunate individual who was begging. How should one look at this display? Most such actors would reply that it was done “out of sympathy.” But is limping before the lame sympathy or stupidity? Since no two human beings are ever equal on even the most commonly discussed dimensions, why should one so automatically assume that affecting a limp was somehow showing “sympathy” for someone who was different, and even if it was perceived as sympathy by the intended recipient of the performance, that it would be desired? What is “sympathy” in such as case? The answer is all too obvious—it is not sympathy at all, but guilt on the part of the healthy and therefore “better off ” individual. But why should one be guilty for “possessing” something which was not a gift or entitlement granted by some agency? No one has the power to grant perfect health (or youth, or anything similar) to anyone else. How is this misplaced “benevolence” from our face-to-face heritage so overpowering to us? While it is accurate to describe it as an aspect of ANS and visceral enteric functioning (sympathy as the Scottish moralists called it), that tells us nothing informative of the hows and whys of the common acceptance of this perceived guilt. This is an area where the therapist as a life coach can certainly help. We have to learn for ourselves that it is not a requirement of the abstract morality of the impersonal market that makes this guilt so devastating (like “sacrifice” it is not found in the morality of the market at all ). It is the “guilt” of tribalism alone. More important is the question of how and why this guilt of an individual became a collective phenomenon. Because what the Marxist progressivist turns it into is inevitably a collectivist interpretation—All who limp are guilty. And since they all share that guilt they all share responsibility for the lameness of the other, and share it equally, even though “all” did not “limp,” and none are cited as having had a hand in causing it. Cultural Marxists propose that all individuals are actually identical objects—like electrons in your hairdryer’s cord when it runs—so that some “class”-as-a-collective is guilty of some crime-as-acollective entity, as in the myth of “systemic” racism. So they conclude that the “class” of “white” people (an undefined primitive term associated with “capitalism”—also undefined) are all equally “guilty” of this alleged “crime,” and must therefore pay for it (reparations in some form) by

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having the government transfer money and privilege to the entire “class” of victims. This, of course, denies the existence of justice (which is meaningful only as an individual concept) in favor of “distributive justice,” now defined as “owed” to a class of individuals identified only by superficial and nonempirical attributes. And this constructivist conception of justice is no longer identified with the behavior of even groups of living individuals, but is now to include multiple generations thereof—indeed, for the rabid cultural Marxist, all “whites” who have ever lived. This slight of hand is accomplished by introducing the class concept of (inherited) “white privilege.” This “privilege” is also a purported “real” entity that is an intrinsic part of “Western” civilization (a result of “all” whites having oppressed “all” other skin colors), so even if someone does not possess (or denies possessing) it in point of observed fact, it is still presumed to be present. This situation results from the now well diffused perception of the alleged crisis in rationalist identity, which proposes that there are no defensible standards to assess the cultural socialist claims. That false theory of “rationality” has been refuted in other sections. But what of the feeling of guilt and “responsibility” for that which one could not possibly have caused or be responsible for? This is the “guilt of the progressivist,” because it is attributed to what they see as flaws inherent in “Western” civilization (in its collectivist failures). But why does the “limping” occur at all? That is the guilt of the tribal society carried over into impersonal interactions. And that guilt has no “collectivist” component at all . It stems from face-to-face interaction between individuals. In the tribe we did not want to help all the lame, only those we knew, or happened to personally encounter. We probably did not even realize the others’ existence. But we have transferred or generalized our face-to-face feelings for the known to illegitimate unknown abstract entities in the impersonal society. Just because the misguided progressivist feels a personal guilt does not mean that anyone else must also either feel or be guilty. That is something that therapy as coaching can help us understand. We need to learn that the demons of progressivism do not carry over into the abstract society. We could not then, and cannot now, help all the individuals and groups who could conceivably benefit from our efforts. Private charity is

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not able to be universal, just as no central dictatorship can provide for all at all times. But private charity is better than anything that can be provided by any dictatorial group, which would simultaneously create as many, if not more, harmed groups as those it would provide a windfall for.

Notes 1. As I have repeatedly indicated, the philosophical problem centering around the crisis of identity in what constitutes rational behavior was solved in the second half of the twentieth century with Bartley’s conception of a “comprehensively critical,” or as he later called it, pancritical rationalism. This position is fundamentally incompatible with any static or fixed conception of knowledge or rationality. The only possible framework for understanding how rationality emerges over time—as a result of the interplay of opponent processes such as conjectures and attempts at refutations—is an evolutionary one. That is the appeal, as well as the indispensable relationship between, non-justificational philosophy and evolutionary epistemology. Both positions are indispensable for an adequate formulation of liberalism in opposition to either progressivism or conservatism. 2. Proponents of the return to tribalism as a means of recapturing the values of the face-to-face society rarely comment on what actual tribal existence is like. Tribal organization is a throwback to life before the agricultural revolution that occurred in the Middle East more than 12,000 years ago. Once we embarked upon a settled life form based upon agriculture the rapid growth in population increasingly prevented the tribal mode of organization from adequately functioning. Cities are not capable of being organized along tribal lines except in their earliest and smallest stages: in addition to the increase in population within each (former) tribe, in the city there is also an influx of other tribes and wanderers into its structure. Thus even in the early stages of city life, the result is depersonalization: settled men and women know their own families in the face-to-face manner, but their intimacy does not extend to other newcomers and outliers in the

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community. The agricultural revolution was the beginning of the end of tribal society. The benefits of this first step in more fully utilizing the division of labor unlock a chain reaction that with ever accelerating rapidity created a more and more abstract society with all our increases in "ease of living" and the ensuing increase in population. Our present benefits cannot be grafted back onto a tribal state. The simplicity of tribal life may be less stressful, but it is definitely not romantic, like the mythical social contract notions, but rather a matter of sheer survival in a harsh environment. Bronowski (1973) captured that limitation in discussing the transhumance culture of the Bakhtiari in central Asia: The Bakhtiari life is too narrow to have time or skill for specialization. There is no room for innovation, because there is no time, on the move, between evening and morning, coming and going all their lives, to develop a new device or a new thought—not even a new tune. The only habits that survive are the old habits. The only ambition of the son is to be like the father. It is a life without features. Every night is the end of a day like the last, and every morning will be the beginning of a journey like the day before. (p. 62)

Tribalism is now a cultural relic, restricted to a few isolated groups. There is no evidence of change, of innovation, in any of these groups (except due to outside contact and influences) in the last 25,000 years. The organization of the tribe is now an artifact frozen out of time. And it is time that we stop attempting to glorify it or to return to it. But still the organization mentality captivates the thought of the reformer. If only society could be stabilized and organized along centrally controlled lines the distribution of goods and the allocation of resources could produce a “peaceful” society that would be very productive without being too stressful. Grafting in modern information processing it should be a snap to organize society from the top down and achieve the dream of rationalist constructivism. Not surprisingly, that organization has already been used, and once again Bronowski’s (ibid.) description was apt:

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The numbers that describe the life of a man in Peru were collected on a kind of punched card in reverse, a braille computer card laid out as a knotted piece of string. When he married, the piece of string was moved to another place in the kinship bundle. Everything that was stored in the Inca’s armies, granaries, and warehouses was noted on these quipus. The fact is that Peru was already the dreaded metropolis of the future, the memory story in which an empire lists the acts of every citizen, sustains him, assigned him his labors, and puts it all down impersonally as numbers. It was a remarkably tight social structure. Everyone had a place; everyone was provided for; and everyone—peasant, craftsman or soldier—worked for one man, the supreme Inca. (p. 101)

The Inca civilization short-circuited the development from settled agriculture to the organization society. It was transformed into a giant taxis in which everyone had an allotted place and particular actions to perform. This “ideal” society, from the standpoint of constructivist planning, was so thoroughly organized and set in its ways that it was conquered by a mere hundred odd soldiers of fortune led by the mercenary Pizarro in 1532. 3. With the passage of nearly 100 years it becomes increasingly hard to believe that Watson was ever taken seriously. Thus it is worth noting some then-contemporary comments on his influence. Here is Robert S. Woodworth, surveying the then new behaviorism in Contemporary Schools of Psychology (1931), commenting on the extraordinary public appeal of the movement. I have some notices of Watson’s book entitled Behaviorism, which is certainly not one of his most scientific books from the psychologist’s point of view. But it did make great claims…. The Nation of London says: His new book claims to put forward not only a new methodology, not even merely a body of psychological theory, but a system which will, in his opinion, revolutionize ethics, religion, psycho-analysis—in fact, all the mental and moral sciences. We find Watson saying that behaviorism is the natural science that takes as its field all of human behavior and adjustments, which it studies by experimental methods,

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with the object of controlling man’s behavior in accordance with the findings of science…. the growing success of this natural science approach to human problems is causing philosophy to disappear and become the history of science, that it envisages the development of an experimental ethics to take the place of the old authoritative and speculative ethics, based on religion, and that it will gradually do away with psycho-analysis and replace it by scientific studies of the child’s development and by such control of that development as will prevent the psychopathic breakdowns which now have to be treated in adult life. He states his system in about as many words as I have used in my paraphrase. It is a program rather than a system, and a hope rather than a program. But it is significant that a man who had won the public ear as a representative of science should give vigorous expression to this hope. The New York Times said of this book, “It marks an epoch in the intellectual history of man.” (pp. 96–97)

It was this baseless but shining hope from a positive pronouncement from a taxis engineer that the final blueprint for the rational reconstruction of society was now in hand which fired the “enlightened” layman who had survived the horror of the “war to end all wars.” Having seen traditional society shattered by war and technological innovation to a (then) unprecedented extent, it was as miraculous as it was necessary to find a new source of security for the present, and a hope for the future. In that sense\the vast proliferation of proposed substitutes for the traditional authorities made sense. This is the context in which logical positivism arose as a philosophy to end all philosophies, as a brash reaffirmation of faith in the face of the debilitating skeptical doubt of Hume. The quest for a positive program, a bill of particulars, for the conduct of life, was the dominant theme in the first half of the century. In philosophy the justificationist quest for positive foundations (certainty), when coupled with the rationalist constructivist’s dream of a reconstructed society, created a new positive religion that Comte would have been proud of. As Woodworth (ibid.) said of this second (after Freud) blueprint that psychology gave to a desperate public:

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It is the moral qualities of the behavioristic movement, rather than its scientific achievements, that give it its present public significance. It is its boldness, freedom, tough-mindedness, and unlimited faith in the ability of science to take charge of human affairs. As one of my students, representing the generation that has grown up since the War, has said to me, behaviorism means for many a new Hope and a new orientation when the old guide-posts have become hopelessly discredited. It is a religion to take the place of religion. (p. 98)

Note the emphasis upon moral qualities and religion. The only difference between Watson and his successor Skinner is that the latter claimed “experimental proof ” in favor of the religion (which he put beyond mere morality) of Walden Two. Twentieth-century popular polls (proudly pointed to by Skinner) told us that he was the “best-known” and “most popular” then-contemporary psychologist. Woodworth was correct when he said it was the “moral qualities” of the movement rather than its scientific achievements that had done this for Watson and Skinner. The question of how amoral scientism came to substitute for moral judgment is an historical question for the future researcher. Most likely it stems from the morality of the taxis, in which the tribal leader owns everything and parcels out the “just desserts” to the members of the tribe who just want to be included and do not want to take on individual responsibility for their behavior. 4. The idea that therapy is to make the unconscious conscious in the sense that “adjustment” will be automatic when the “cause” is brought to consciousness is a straightforward application of rationalist constructivism. Not only the classic depth psychologies but newer “experiential approaches” as well as classical behavior modification fall prey to it. Against all such approaches is the evidence for the tacit control of behavior and cognition, as well as the inevitable unconscious nature of all that is truly social. No therapist aware of that could allow for instant awareness cures. But as Landfield (1980) noted long ago, there is little comfort in a theory that questions the pervasive assumption that our lives are immediately knowable (see pp. 63–64). But insofar as all knowledge is a personal construct, as

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George Kelly’s (1955) theory held, life is not immediately knowable, and no instant transformation will result from simply bringing something to consciousness (in either science or therapy). Considerable involvement (as in learning from exemplars in science) is required for any change in perspective. In the same volume Bedrosian and Beck (1980) had a better conception than the instant enlightenment view. They noted that the didactic approach frequently fails to produce long-term improvements and functioning precisely because it excludes the patient as a participant observer and as an active problem solver within therapy. In contrast, their approach emphasized that a patient can indeed correct a maladaptive reaction patterns without any insight into the precise origin of the symptoms they were manifesting (see p. 129). The idea that a cure can be effected by rational enlightenment alone is characteristic of all approaches that confuse surface symptoms with their underlying causes, and are so immersed in the experiential here-and-now that long-term effects are not noticed. 5. For the present, the medical “cut it out and then drug them” model is about all we have for the severest problems, those we label as psychotic instead of neurotic. Discussion in the text above has presupposed we are dealing with neurotic problems (those of the vast majority of society). The most promising way to deal with the psychotic realm will probably involve changing the microbiome and chemical-hormonal balances of the individual, and then, when the person is more docile and amenable to therapy as cognitive intervention, combining those approaches with a milder form of drug therapy. Thus there will be a continuity of treatment between the two groups, because that knowledge and treatments derived from it will be indispensible for the neurotic as well. The difference from the past prescriptive approaches must be that the individual will have to be free to choose to accept or reject the interventions. Whether this will ever be possible with the severe psychoses is an empirical question. Certainly it is not possible at present. 6. In his introduction Solomon said a change in society might change the passions as well:

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In a society with equal distribution of goods and without social classes, such desperation and defensiveness would be unnecessary [fn].… It is not capitalism that teaches greed and alienation; it is our greedy and alienated conceptions of ourselves that lay the foundation for capitalist ideology. We must change ourselves before we change society; and we must understand ourselves in order to change (Solomon, 1983, p. 8). (The fn. in the text is to Marx, The German Ideology, p. 28)

So once again his proposed goal of therapy is to produce egalitarian distribution along with the desirable side effect of removal of alienation. Once again we must follow Russell in abandoning the hated concept of private property and its basis in the “evil” of greed. Solomon was also, like Popper, a justificationist who lapsed into commitment when necessary. As he said: “to have moral standards can never be reduced to personal criteria….Which is not to deny that the adoption of a moral standard is a personal commitment.” (Solomon, 1983, p. 386).

References Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Mariner Books. Bedrosian, R. C., & Beck, A. T. (1980). Principles of cognitive therapy. In M. J. Mahoney (Ed.), Psychotherapy process (pp. 127–152). Plenum Press. Bronowski, J. (1973/1974). The ascent of man. Hachette Book Group, Inc., Little, Brown. Campbell, D. T. (1975). On the conflict between biological and social evolution and between psychology and moral tradition. American Psychologist, 30 (12), 1103–1126. Campbell, J. (1988). The power of myth. Doubleday. Chisholm, G. B. (1946). The psychiatry of enduring peace and social progress. Psychiatry, 9 (1), 1. Clark, K. (1971). The pathos of power: A psychological perspective. American Psychologist, 26 (12), 1047–1057.

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Hughlings Jackson, J. (1958). Evolution and dissolution of the nervous system (Croonian lectures). In J. Taylor (Ed.), The selected writings of John Hughlings Jackson (Vol. 2, pp. 45–75). Basic Books. Kelly, G. A. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs. Routledge. Koutstall, W. (2012). The agile mind . Oxford University Press. Landfield, A. W. (1980). Personal construct psychology: A theory to be elaborated. In M. J. Mahoney (Ed.), Psychotherapy process: Current issues and future directions (pp. 61–83). Plenum Press. Licinio, J., & Wong, M.-L. (Eds.). (2009). Pharmacogenomics: The search for individualized therapies. Wiley-VCH Verlag. Lorenz, K. (1966). On aggression. Harcourt, Brace and World. Lorenz, K. (1970). Studies in animal and human behaviour (Vol. 1). Harvard University Press. Lorenz, K. (1971). Studies in animal and human behaviour (Vol. 2). Harvard University Press. Mayer, E. A. (2016). The mind-gut connection: How the hidden conversation within our bodies impacts our mood, our choices, and our overall health. Harper Collins. Mencken, H. L. (1956). Minority report: H. L. Mencken’s notebooks. Knopf. Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory. W. W. Norton. Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of Chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature. Bantam Press. Russell, B. (1956). Portraits from memory and other essays. George Allen & Unwin. Selye, H. (1956). The stress of life. McGraw Hill. Sharma, A., Das, P., Buschmann, M., & Gilbert, J. A. (2019/2020). The future of microbiome-based therapeutics in clinical applications. Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 107 (1), 123–128. Skinner, B. F. (1955–1956). Freedom and the control of men. The American Scholar, XXVI (1), 47–65. Solomon, R. (1983/1993). The passions: The myth and nature of human emotion. University of Notre Dame Press; Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. Watson, J. B. (1924). Behaviorism. W.W. Norton. Weimer, W. B. (1979). Notes on the methodology of scientific research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Wundt, W. (1902). Ethics: The facts of the moral life (E. B. Titchener, J. H. Gulliver, & M. F. Washburn, Trans.). Swan Sonnenschein & Co.

6 Education in a Free Society

Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. Justice Robert H. Jackson What are the duties of the state towards a citizen? And the entitlements of the citizenry? Protection against certain sorts of dangers from others to his life, health, and property. These are the sole duty of the state, the sole entitlements of the citizen. All other duties of the state, accumulated while treading the indirect path, are dangerous additions. W. W. Bartley, III

It is completely in accord with the étatist thinking prevalent everywhere today to consider a theory to be finally disposed of merely because the authorities who control appointments to academic positions want to know nothing of it. Ludwig Mises © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume II, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95477-2_6

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Tenure is neither necessary nor efficient. Its survival depends upon the absence of private ownership.… Competition amongst schools, teachers, and students provides protection in the search for truth without tenure. Armen Alchian

In the Western world of 100 years ago, the nature and structure of education was quite different. There was as yet no real attempt to indoctrinate an official position “from cradle to grave,” either for what was taught or how instruction was to be provided. Primary education was strictly local, and even in large cities there were many local schools and teachers from many different backgrounds for classes that were, by today’s standards, almost tiny. Large schools were the colleges or universities, and even within them there were few large classes except for general survey courses. Secondary education followed the same pattern, and a very large high school might have 1000 students, and a class size sometimes over 50. There was no such thing as forced busing to get students to school (you walked, or got a ride on your own), and school was not looked upon as a babysitting facility administered by the State, so education was a locally controlled and implemented phenomenon. But still things had degenerated to the point that Bertrand Russell (examined in Volume 1) repudiated his earlier views and said that we faced the “paradoxical” state of affairs in which public education had become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought (see Russell, 1922, the essay “Free Thought and Official Propaganda”).With the unprecedented intrusion of the federal government (into nearly all facets of life after World War I), this rapidly changed. It was assumed, on the basis of no evidence at all, that concentrating students into fewer but larger schools would be beneficial, not only from an economic point of view, but also with respect to the uniformity and quality of education students received. At this time, cafeterias and the provision of lunch (with options designed by the then new professional occupation of nutritionists) joined the provision of “bigger and better” shops (now called vocational technology), home economics (the girls’ “shop” class in cooking and buying), sports programs, laboratories for physics and chemistry, and usually the provision of school nurses for health concerns. The larger schools became

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“one stop shopping centers” for educational and vocational topics, nutritional aid, and sports and sporting events. This was the first flowering of Dewey’s (1935) “freed intelligence” directing change (as noted in Chapter 8 of Volume 1).

How Education Changed With the depression of the 1930s, it was simply assumed that these enlarged schools were necessary to provide essential services for children that could no longer be provided by their parents who were often out of work or now had greatly reduced income. It did not matter that the cost was constantly accelerating—school taxes went up and up because of “special, or one time” provision for building new buildings or cafeterias or stadiums and hiring new faculty (strangely, the onetime charges have never ceased). Anyone who opposed these tax increases was presumed to be either a religious fanatic who wanted to deprive children of their secular education, or someone who just “didn’t understand” that it was both necessary and all for the better. Legislation was passed in the states granting school districts (which did not necessarily correspond to other governmental municipalities) unlimited powers of taxation and eminent domain while at the same time increasingly limiting the forms of accountability to which those who ran the schools were subject. School boards became the most powerful (and almost always non-elected) bureaucracies in the state, insulated from attempts by parents or taxpayers to have a say in what mandatory education was to involve, or what was to be spent, or how it was to be administered.1 After Eisenhower’s forced desegregation of the South in the 50s, the idea of forced busing of students to ensure that minorities would be separated from their friends and sent to new schools in order to achieve some sort of racial balance came (to say nothing of a better education, but that was not emphasized since it had to admit that some schools were far better than others) to the fore (thus supporting a burgeoning business for the supply of school buses and the creation of transportation companies to supply the drivers and schedule pickups). It was not unusual

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for students to leave home at around 7 AM and not return until just about dinnertime, thus providing a “free” babysitting service for working parents (who continue to fail to realize that their taxes had paid for this babysitting). From the 1960s, the so-called progressive movement in education had begun to produce a large number of college graduates in primary and secondary education to teach in larger schools who, having been products of the previous consolidation movements, had never known that education could be anything else. They were used to following a prepackaged educational plan decided upon by the school administrators, and now their job was only that of implementing it. No longer responsible to the parents in any manner, they went to the infrequently scheduled parent-teacher meetings with the expectation that the school administration would insulate them from any criticism that was encountered. After all, they were only doing what the administrators had told them to do. Any problems were obviously the fault of the student. Like the proverbial scuba diver who only has to out swim his or her dive buddy instead of the attacking shark, they were set for life with tenure and benefits once they had pleased the administrators. Parents, like the shark, had been effectively removed from consideration. But who had educated the ever swelling ranks of administrators and the new teachers? The answer was colleges and universities whose faculties had themselves become increasingly progressivist in orientation, due in large part to uncritical acceptance of Dewey’s views on progressive education in conjunction with behavioristic psychological teachings (remember Note 3 in Chapter 5 of this volume) and ever increasingly interventionist approaches to economics and business administration from the Keynesian (or, more properly, the big governmental) revolution in macroeconomics. It looked as though the Comtean positivistic approach had at last been realized by the enlightened. Everything was becoming more “scientific” and technological in outlook and practice. Everything was being run as a benevolent dictatorship of and for the masses. When the near universal movement against racism (in the attempt to abolish discrimination) was added to the mix as though it were somehow a progressivist contribution to society, it was a landslide prohibiting any dissent from being taken seriously. With so much to

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fight for, and so much to deny and to oppose, it is little wonder that the rhetoric of the left has now become similar to that of the religious crusaders of centuries past. The new “crusaders” are all willing martyrs for the new religious crusade for socialism and enlightened tribalism to cover the earth—one big happy family and one happy village for one small blue planet. As martyrs they are willing, indeed see it as their duty, to be censors and book burners like their church predecessors.

The Sainted Book Burners History is replete with instances of tyrants attempting to blot out any history before them (and to suppress the intellectual framework of their past and present enemies). An example is provided by the first Chinese dictator, self-designated Emperor, Qin Shi Huang (in the presently preferred orthography). He ordered the scholarly books of Confucianism (and his opponents) to be burned and executed many scholars. In the Middle Ages, when Western Europe was under the thumb of a dominant and dictatorial church, it was common for the dictators, the religious hierarchy of officially anointed purveyors of truth, to hold book burnings in which works that were deemed to be blasphemous, i.e., in opposition to the Official Truth, would be destroyed so that their contents would not contaminate the faithful. Any education at all was just fine, so long as it was totally under the thumb of the local clergy, who were under the supervision of God, through his appointed minions in Rome. Throughout history, this all too common trend made the acquisition of knowledge a difficult and often frightening (or worse: death defying) business. The classic example in the history of science, often mentioned but rarely actually studied, was the conflict between Galileo Galilei and Cardinal Bellarmino. For science and epistemology, this clash added one important factor to the usual scenario of a dominant religion suppressing, killing, and torturing all those whose views were opposed to it. That had been and continues to be the pattern found in religions everywhere, and up until the invention of the printing press (and thus the more rapid dissemination of books), it was fairly easy for the organized structure of religion to control the “heretics” and their writings.

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Just brand a few scribes (almost always a local Monk or two) as heretics and then burn them and their books. The rest fall in line. But with Galileo, Bellarmino faced a more well-known adversary who had made many contributions to knowledge and renaissance society. Clearly a new strategy was called for. And Bellarmino’s (very successful) strategy has had a negative impact upon science and epistemology to this day.2 Bellarmino devised a new doctrine that has had a lasting effect: instrumentalism. The Cardinal said that only the church doctrine was actual truth, and those newly discovered “scientific” truths that were in conflict with that doctrine were merely instrumental procedures that could be employed in practical affairs, but which themselves had no hold on truth. Theories were neither true nor false—indeed, do not even aim at truth. So knowledge claims in conflict with The Truth of the church were just instruments or calculation devices, and as such not really in conflict with the one and only truth. Instrumentalism has spawned three more current positions: conventionalism, the idea that theories and their knowledge claims are merely human conventions and do not refer to reality at all; operationalism, the idea that theoretical terms (especially in quantum physics) have no meaning other than the operations defining them in practice; and pragmatism, the doctrine that whatever works is just fine (so go ahead and steal it until something better is found), and thus what one calls truth is just a matter of momentary pragmatic function within a specific conceptual framework. Instrumentalism, operationalism, conventionalism, and pragmatism are thus in opposition to realism, which holds that there is in fact a world independent of our conventions and pragmatic procedures, and it is the ultimate business of science and the quest for knowledge to discover the nature of the real world. Classical liberalism endorsed and is compatible with realism. It assumes that what Ferguson called “the results of human action but not design” are, although evolved human conventions that underlie social organization, quite real rather than instrumental fictions. The theories of society and the psychology of the individual underlying society are descriptions of real entities and processes in the world. The evolutionary approach of the liberal tradition, stating that organisms evolve under pressure from independent environmental pressures

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and organism-environmental interactions, fits within realism rather than instrumentalism or its offshoots. It is hard to be a sainted book burner within the tradition of liberalism. No one is sainted if everyone is a product of evolutionary history, and no one stands closer to the truth solely in virtue of a religion. There is no way to determine what knowledge claims or books are to be banned as heretical because the position does not enshrine any religion even though it can understand and tolerate religion as an evolved social phenomenon. Even a false doctrine or theory can be studied, if for no other reason than to understand how and why it is false, in an attempt to improve upon it. Science need not be presented as cumulative. One should not rewrite history as a cumulative record showing the inevitable progression to what is momentarily proclaimed to be the indubitable truth—whether in science or society. That is not so with the constructivist or progressivist approach, which, because it is (as its advocates immediately point out) in sole possession of the latest Truth (usually regarded as scientific knowledge), is quite happy to ban positions which are in opposition to it. Like Cardinal Bellarmino, constructivists know (or believe they know) enough to be the new sainted book burners—they are content to rewrite history to remove episodes that do not fit their conception of a utopian “liberal” society. They believe fervently in free speech and freedom of action so long as they determine what should be spoken (and by whom) and done. Those whom history regards as terrible (such as the Nazis) and those who are “unamerican” enough to be “deplorables” are not to be permitted to have a free speech forum at all.3 Banning those they disagree with is their entitlement. Thus, even though progressivists denounce conservatives for their role in it, they wish, as sainted censors, to rewrite history as though, for instance, slavery in the U.S. and everything associated with it had never in fact happened. So, it is all right to portray especially the Confederate side in the American Civil War as all “black” in terms of goals and values, and therefore it is necessary to tear down and destroy all traces of respect for Southern ideals and protagonists and to rename cities, military bases, and streets for contemporary social justice warriors instead. After all, no one complained when Hitler’s monuments and legacy were obliterated by the Germans and the victorious Allies after the second world war. And heaven forbid that members of one or another political party

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should be allowed to disagree with them. It is then all right to attempt to ban them from social media and news reporting (the literal equivalent of burning their books) because they are so obviously and clearly wrong in opposing cultural Marxism (sorry, make that racial equity enlightenment). Since anyone who disagrees is by definition anti-scientific and a deplorable and not “liberal,” they can be nothing except mere conservatives with no program other than resisting all change to preserve their privilege (even if they do not realize or show they are privileged). And for the triumphant warriors of the left they are not worthy of intellectual engagement at all. Just shout them down and then ban them as Marcuse and Gramsci ordered, and pretend they never existed. Banishment will hasten the cultural Marxist path to socialist totalitarianism. We then arrive at the point noted by Mises in the epigram to this chapter: a view is “disposed of merely because the authorities who control appointments to academic positions want to know nothing of it (Mises, 1981, p. 184).” This is the case not only in so-called “higher learning” but from pre-kindergarten on up. This is how education came to be in the hands of the sainted book burners. There is no freedom of education here: no freedom of choice in what to learn or what to think, of what to hear or not hear. No wonder that undergraduate education is now, as Thomas DiLorenzo puts it, socialist indoctrination camp. This issue can be stated succinctly from the economic point of view. Freedom is a two-sided issue: one must be free to supply, and one must be free to receive. Those are essential components of liberty. This, however, inevitably involves this context of constraint: along with the freedom to supply must go the freedom not to supply—otherwise I could rob you, or take from you against your will if you have something I want. Likewise, anyone with the freedom to receive must also retain the freedom to reject. Just because you are selling does not mean that I have to be buying. But this set of freedoms is violated if someone decides to play god and prevent me from exercising my freedom not to buy whatever position someone is selling. One does not educate when one prevents others from exercising their freedoms—that is a case in which the dictator dictates what can be received, and you have no freedom at all. Now it is obvious that buying and selling, if it is not to be restricted to face-to-face barter, requires intermediaries to distribute goods from

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producers and to bring such goods to purchasers. In the academic or educational situation, there are the equivalent of gatekeepers who fulfill this function. Since we do not all live next to Hyde Park and cannot bring and then get on our own soapbox every Sunday afternoon, we as producers must find a better distribution system. And since we cannot all travel to Hyde Park to listen, as consumers we need that same better distribution system. And this is where the problem arises. It is with the middlemen who control not only the booths and soapbox locations in Hyde Park but the pulpits, airtime, licenses, internet servers, academic appointments, certifications of competence and whatever—whatever is equivalent to the shelf space in a supermarket—that bottlenecks inevitably arise. These intermediaries become bureaucratic de facto gatekeepers who control both supply and demand—that is, they dictate what can be passed through their gates or transmission systems. They become de facto censors or regulators of the freedom to supply information. Likewise, in so doing they restrict or abolish the effective freedom to receive of the consumers. This is how they become sainted book burners. They will not in any event regard themselves as censors, but are going to consider themselves to be high-minded (and of course, self-serving) only, as simply exercising their alleged responsibility to the gullible public by enforcing standards of quality control. They thus assume not only the task of censorship but also their all-knowing ability to judge responsibly (without, however, disclosing their criteria of assessment) by withholding respectability from that which they have censored. So the question becomes quite simply: what sort of liberty to supply information does one have if there is a middleman who denies entry to the marketplace of ideas for everything that does not fit the progressivist ideals? If we want to return education back to being, as the liberal would propose, a matter of free inquiry then we have to do away with the censorial power of recently accumulated layers of middlemen. Because of high barriers to entry there are no market checks on these censors beyond the vague requirements (such as broadcasting “in the public good”) of the FCC, which their lawyers are well-paid for their work in evading. There are also no market checks upon universities beyond the vague statements of their charters and “mission statements,” which have usually been carefully crafted (often rewritten) to follow progressivist ideals. The result is

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the absolute marginalization and debasement of classical liberal thought and instruction. What we find instead are administrations and faculty selected (and self-selected) to purvey constructivist “politically correct” positions. And if they hesitate, the “woke generation” of entitled students will tell them what they are allowed to “teach.” In this way cultural Marxism manages to bypass the one thing that can easily destroy it: the free market in ideas and education. If you are actually “responsible” when put in the position of being a middleman or transmission channel, and you encounter something with which you disagree strongly enough to wish to censor it, what should you do? The answer is perfectly obvious: without infringing upon others’ right to receive all you can do is supply alternative information and opinion and recommend that others consider it when they exercise their right to receive. In that way one does not censor information or its transmission, and might actually, in presenting an alternative point of view, enable the receiver to make up his or her mind on the basis of more information than if one had prevented freedom of choice by banning that (to you) offensive position.

There Are No Market Constraints in Academia In this regard, it is interesting to note that modern academia—the alleged source of new learning and the supposed bastion of free speech—has never in history moved beyond feudal organization. There is no such thing as a free market in education. College departments (as well as the governments who fund them), like the professions they have fostered, are still guilds, cartels, fiefdoms, and protection rackets concerned with perpetuating their own existence through controlling the entry to their cartels by placing their vassals (former students) in their sanctioned professions and keeping competition out of the production of “knowledge.” In this fashion, they bloat the bureaucracy of the educational establishment far beyond what is required just to provide education. Like Federal governments who have bought their position by promising entitlements, the colleges have followed suit. They are not held in check by market forces. It is as Bartley (1990), citing Buchanan and Devletoglou

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(1970), put it, universities are places where the consumers (students) do not buy, the producers (faculty and instructors) do not sell, and the titular owners (trustees, state boards of education) control nothing except for their price-fixing for entry to classes. The professors do not sell: they impose their services to preserve their jobs; the students do not buy but are compelled to purchase, and to waste their time learning, a theory of learning that is both psychologically and logically impossible—a theory which, if students did actually “learn” inductively, they could not learn. There is no market here. Nor any education. What there is, is what Buchanan rightly calls a “public bad”. (Bartley, 1990, p. 113)

As an example of how this can be bad consider the problem posed by tenure. Originally intended as a protection to safeguard free speech, so that faculty could not be fired for teaching or writing something others disagreed with or opposed, it instantly became the employment and retirement benefits package (an entitlement) for second-rate and incompetent instructors. Nearly everyone who goes to college has had to take a (almost always, a departmentally required) course that was “taught” by a usually relatively elderly but completely incompetent instructor. To the question of why the instructor was there, the answer is obvious: they had tenure, and the department required their course so that students would have to take it, because otherwise no one would have signed up. Decades ago a young full professor and I attempted to abolish or at least restrict tenure in our department (nationally ranked) at a large state university. We argued that we would be able to fill the faculty slots that would open up with competent professors who would compete for positions because they would want to teach at a recognized department, and that this would not only benefit our students (by providing better taught courses) but also increase the reputation of the department, thus likely increasing our funding from the University (and possibly the number of undergraduate students), which in snowball fashion would in turn allow more research and support more and better graduate students. It should not be surprising that we were the only two “yes” votes at the faculty meeting, with everyone else opposed, ostensibly because they could see

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no benefit whatever to the proposal. None of the faculty even understood that tenure had not provided and protected free speech, but rather, its exact opposite. They all felt that the sole purpose of tenure was job security, their job security, and that free speech had nothing to do with it. Given the choice between a security blanket and new knowledge, most academics are wrapped up against a chill of their own making. Best not to consider giving away their precious benefits.4 If they did that, they might have to actually work for a change and keep up with their field and its changes. The pernicious nature of tenue in academia was first emphasized by Armen Alchian (1959, 1968), who (not surprisingly) was also one of the first to emphasize the evolutionary nature of the concept of private property. Alchian demolished the main arguments for tenure, which claims that it “protects” the individual in the heroic search for truth against the Bellarminos of the universe. His economic analysis indicated it results from a perversion of property rights within the university (after all, it doesn’t really exist in private industry). No one can (as a shareholder in a private company can) punish the CEO or chancellor of a university if he spends the money badly—the school just asks for more donations, and that is that. The property rights don’t reside in stakeholders, only in the faculty. But if (and this is the main point Alchian noted) no one “owns” a university the issue is who controls the allocation of its resources? Since it is the faculty, they choose to spend it on themselves, and dole out lifetime salaries through tenure. That is the one and only reason for tenure. Now (after only a half century) there is evidence to support that analysis (Brown, 2017). As Brown says “tenure is significantly more likely to occur in nonprofit institutions than in for-profit institutions, tenure is more common in public institutions than in private nonprofit institutions, and among private nonprofit institutions the incidence of tenure is positively related to the level of endowment support and negatively related to the institution’s reliance on tuition and fees (2017, p. 487). If there is enough endowment then tenure always occurs, because no market forces overcome the “easy money.” So the first requirement to return education to sanity is to cut as many nonmarket entitlements and entrenched policies as possible. Ideally, there should be no entitlements for students at all, and likewise there

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should be no entitlements for the educational establishment (abolishing tenure would be a wonderful start). Students should not be entitled to free education, or to substitute woke opinion for knowledge, or to be allowed to opt out of classes in which they might hear or learn things they did not want to hear or learn, or to remove faculty whose positions they disagree with. And the administration and faculty should not be insulated from correction by market pressures (such as their prices for “services”), and should not be allowed to structure knowledge “presentations” just to fit in with momentary political correctness, and in so doing exclude competing views only because they oppose that momentary “correctness.” The second thing to do, obviously, is to cut down the bureaucracy. This will only be possible if we can simultaneously do the third thing: kill the government supervision of entitlement and legislative interference. A large amount of the noninstructional component of any educational institution, draining its budget and interfering with its educational mandate, is comprised of people who had to be employed by the colleges for the sole purpose of keeping up with government ordered mandates, the legislation of particulars (and then particulars on top of particulars) that our elected “representatives” seem to think that we have all authorized.5 One example is the immense amount of legislated discrimination that ostensibly exists only to eliminate discrimination. Having started with the attempt to eliminate racial discrimination, it has now burgeoned into eliminating sexual discrimination, religious discrimination (apparently accomplished by removing religions except Marxism and Islam entirely), and is rapidly closing in on the “discrimination” of being “forced to listen” to a view or factual conclusion you do not want to hear. If we could educate our “legislators” that their purpose is not to increase the number of laws and regulations that we face but rather to pare them down to a bare minimum, it would be easy to begin to cure this problem. Unfortunately, it is a fact of life that people are drawn toward politics because they wish to control others, and apparently they feel the best way to exhibit such control is by “writing” legislation (it is quite obvious that their constituents do not require it). So there is little hope for the immediate future on this task. I often argued that

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one way to accomplish this task would be to mandate that our representatives carry a copy of all the laws presently on the books of their federal and their state governments with them (not to be carried by their aides) whenever the legislatures are in session. That alone would accomplish this task. More practically, if we could even begin to chip away at this invasive function of government, not only would taxes go down but the cost of college education would decrease also, and the breadth of education offered would increase. The fourth thing to do, implicit in all the others, is to (at least begin to) impose cost accountability for the first time in the history of the planet. The best thing to do here would be to remove the government from the role of education supervisor entirely, because if one thing in this universe is absolutely obvious it is that government does not know what cost accountability means. Since it has control of the printing press, it is not possible to impose workable accountability on any government program (pandering to the masses to buy votes guarantees that). Accountability could occur only if there were a commodity reserve currency in place rather than mere fiat money, so that before the government could “borrow” by simply printing more money it would have to have available the actual collateral necessary to cover its borrowing. This or some similar stricture against causing the inflation of paper money, the debasing of the currency, would have to be in place for any effective cost accountability of government “spending" to occur.

Knowledge Is Not Personal Expression of Opinion The breakdown of justificationist rationality has slowly made its way into the world of education. Here it has become the idea that the purpose of education is no longer to search for truth but rather merely to allow students to better express themselves. Bellarmino’s approach is now taken for granted as gospel in academia: since knowledge cannot be proven true or justified, it is regarded as just a variation of opinion. If this is taken as “true” (never mind how “they” think they know that “truth”), then education (as Marcuse intuited) is very much a matter of learning how

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to articulate and defend your position and nothing more. This is why contemporary academics are invariably drawn to instrumentalist variant called pragmatism—since it relativizes truth down to the level of individual opinion, they are comfortable with the idea that all they have to do is use something that works and abandon it when something better comes by. Since ultimate relativism reigns, your intellectual integrity consists in nothing more than competently and coherently arguing for your position against other individuals who can only do the same. This is where cancel culture comes to the fore: if you use guilt to silence your opposition, to shout it down rather than allowing it to present a coherent argument, then you are home free. Philosophy then becomes nothing more than the attempt, as Wittgenstein so aptly put it, to show the fly the way out of the unstoppered fly bottle (see Rorty, 1979, for the most popular recent presentation of this view). At the end of your “education,” the instructors, trained in Mr. Rogers” Neighborhood (see Chapter 7), parcel out diplomas as prizes to all who remain present and talking to their flies. Today the educational process has often degenerated into little more than an opportunity (paid for by unwitting parents and funding agencies) for both teacher and student to express themselves as cultural Marxists.6 A part of the motivation for doing so is perhaps to attempt to alleviate the alienation of modern society, which the educational establishment has now wrongly attributed solely to the breakdown of justificationist rationality. They have never heard of Ferguson or Polanyi (let alone Bartley or Hayek). Thus education has become a forum for indoctrinated students to vent their angst and make their demands with no fear whatsoever of being corrected by the requirement of clashing their positions with a harsh reality. (One should compare this with Freud’s conception of the purpose of therapy as being to free one’s id from the harsh sanctions of the ego and superego.) They are (in academia) provided with an artificial environment that is completely divorced from reality—Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, discussed in Chapter 7—in which everyone gets a prize merely for being there (and, of course, having convinced someone or some funding agency to pay for it). Instead of attempting to understand either themselves or reality, they now explore the hermeneutic circle so common to the

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academic form of their existential predicament. And by the way, since we are so happy here being supported by taxpayer dollars in the socialist paradise of freedom from our wants, why can’t all of you just join us in advocating the increase of government and its totalitarian socialism for all? How can you deny our version of education, or deny that it should be free for all (and of course, thus mandatory)? Such a position ignores simple but undeniable facts of life. Education is more than merely organized mutual conscious self-expression and congratulation. It is, as a social phenomenon, the modification of, and creation of culture, and at least in part our attempt to adapt to an unknown and unforeseen world. Whether they are aware of it or not, teachers present a grown structure of knowledge that they do not fully understand to students who also do not fully understand (it, or themselves). The student–teacher interaction is probably the smallest social unit that is found in the “marketplace” of ideas. Any market activity acts as both a knowledge transmission and simultaneously a discovery process for the creation of new knowledge, in which none of us knows fully what we are doing or where we are going. And it is not possible to anticipate the unintended consequences of our theories and behavior, even if we have explored them more thoroughly than anyone else. Once they are out in the marketplace of ideas, they influence the entire market order. The consequences of an idea may not only be unforeseen but also quite unwelcome, quite contrary to, any “self-expression” of its proponent. As Edmund Burke perceptively said, any plan can be amended by someone less competent than he or she who proposed it. Consider this: Expressionist accounts of knowledge production and the self must fail in three fundamental ways. First, they assume that there is a determinate core to the indiavidual, of which his work and thought are an expression. Second , they neglect the objectively unfathomable depths of the knowledge product. And third , they are consequently unable to capture the nature of the relationship between a man and his work. (Bartley, 1990, p. 63)

In sum, subjective, expressionistic approaches to knowledge misunderstand the nature of the individual self, the nature of intellectual work

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and creativity, and the nature of the relationship between the two. The best way to oppose the current climate of opinion in education is to allow for the free competition of ideas. Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and similar utopian conceptions of tending an artificial “peaceful garden of knowledge,” is in the realm of fantasy. Harsh though it may be, we need to come back to reality. Competition in the marketplace of ideas not only disperses knowledge that already exists, thus making it available to the widest possible audience, but it also generates new knowledge, genuine novelty, that as yet none of its participants know exists (as Kirzner, 1979, indicated). This is what a normal science research paradigm (in Kuhn’s sense) does in exploring its specified domain—by systematically working within that framework it finds things that point beyond it—to a new reconceptualization and hence to fundamentally new knowledge. Reality is always richer and fuller than theory. The market process is a means for getting at some of that reality beyond extant theory. It elicits or creates not yet existing knowledge about already existing theories and their consequences, and it also creates new products of knowledge—new theories, sometimes new facts, and their unknown consequences. It is how we adapt to an ever-changing reality.

A Little Alienation Is Good for You Most writers, such as Marx, who, after taking the notion from Hegel, popularized alienation as a pervasive existential problem, have assumed that it was something to be somehow overcome at all costs and, if at all possible, completely done away with. Like many constructivists, Marx was concerned with attempting to stay in control at all times. His idea was that so-called objectification is the process of alienation, while his proposed solution, communism, was a “positive” program to eliminate human self-alienation. Communism was to do this because it would bring everyone—the masses—into the role of being producers (of both the economy and of knowledge) and thus somehow by their participation in the process of production they would crowd out the loss of control that was responsible for the masses’ alienation. This, as I noted in earlier sections, denies that the individual is ever (or ever could be) a consumer,

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and hence a source of information to control production. Marx felt that only by being a producer could one remain engaged and in control, and in so doing eliminate being alienated. This approach has been adopted by the current educational establishment. The professional educators are producers (actually, purveyors of second hand ideas), and since there is no freedom of choice for students, the students are not really consumers. They do not affect the content of the production of knowledge per se— their input to the feudal system of education is entirely in terms of their own opinions about who should be allowed to educate (i.e., tell them what they want to hear). Thus students are merely filters of opinion who are free to express themselves by venting their opinions, but do not, in so doing, affect the production of any knowledge. That production function is entirely in the hands of the educated “elite” (which is to say, the elite “educators”). They are the gatekeepers—the sainted book burners— who determine what constitutes knowledge, and whether you may have access to it. They are the ones who allow certain individuals to publish in “reputable” sources and do their best to deny such access to anyone who threatens the jobs of the accepted producers, administrators, and other gatekeepers. This is why it was so easy for cancel culture to quickly take over academia. Against this, it is necessary to point out that the acquisition of knowledge depends essentially upon a bit of discord and psychological alienation. What we learn from a refuting instance (as Popper and his associates continually reminded us) is that something is “wrong”—incongruent, not what it was supposed to be—in trying to retain both our theories and all background assumptions relative to them. When we don’t get the result that we inferred was going to obtain we are forced into an incongruous situation—a bit of alienation if you will—in which intellectual honesty demands that we give up one or the other—we cannot continue to hold both the theory and the background assumptions which together resulted in a refutation. Life is disarmingly straightforward here—if we want to learn something new then something old has to go or be modified. Progress is similar to making an omelet on this point— you can’t have it without breaking and throwing away something, as one does with the egg shells. The acquisition of knowledge always occurs in an econiche that is unsettling, disconcerting, unpredictable—indeed,

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like our econiche, the universe in which we live, it is always a bit frightening. To achieve new knowledge we have to be a bit alienated—we have to distance ourselves and be as objective and honest as we can, willing (again, as Popper emphasized) to let our theories die in our stead. If we aren’t willing to take those risks, we get nothing new and are very soon going to be in the dustbin of history. Would it not be better to have our educational establishments convey to their students that this is the situation they face—this is the real world, not the peaceful garden that the socialists so lovingly allude to? We have to learn to live with ambiguity and the unknown. Indeed we can go somewhat farther, and suggest that not only should students learn this, but that they should be put into situations in which they come to learn it on their own. There is no better way for them to learn than to occasionally be exposed to a situation in which they are going to fail. We have relied too much on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, with helicoptering instructors (in addition to helicoptering parents) who constantly tell the students what to do, and what to memorize, in order to deal with a particular situation. Thus, our college students fail just as was noted in the discussion of the Neighborhood, when teenagers are confronted with the real world of new situations in the absence of their helicoptering parents or teachers. Students—at all ages—have to learn how to handle failure by themselves, when there is no one around to tell them that they are “special,” or give them an ego biscuit just for their attendance. They should learn from failure, rather than learn just to fear it. Students need to be taught (or learn for themselves) coping strategies for failure just as the alienated need strategies for coping with the abstract society. Nobody owes them a living, any more than evolution owes a species its continued survival. Survival is not an entitlement, because no one (least of all, government) is in a position to provide it to them. Evolution is a harsh mistress, but in a free society, she is the one we have got. The gods intervene to fix outcomes only in Greek drama, politics, and B grade movies, all of which are divorced from any reality on such issues. Once again: go learn to live with ambiguity.

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Steps Toward Education for an Impersonal Society How could we set up conditions for students so that, if any learning is to actually occur, it might do so instead of being suppressed? The situation exactly parallels the quest for the achievement of progress: how to plan for conditions in which progress will be able to occur, if it is going to. And as is obvious, the solution is similar: remove impediments to learning such as fostering the “you are special” and “you are entitled to success” attitudes from the Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood approaches. Substitute the possibility of learning something new and exciting. Acknowledge the possibility that one might fail. Above all, let it be known that we don’t in fact know everything and invite the student to join in the search for new knowledge. Let them know that while it is ok to have opinions, their opinions alone do not constitute knowledge. Knowledge is a matter of conjectures held in check by attempts at refutations, not opinions or beliefs. If they are unwilling to have their opinions and beliefs refuted, they are simply not willing to learn and do not belong in school at all. The mere existence of one’s opinions cannot ever confer any right or moral claim on anyone or against any other. People or groups of people may indeed incur obligations—or duties—to particular individuals, but they only do so as part of the abstract system of common rules, the rules of the game, that allow society to function. Rights derive from systems of relations in which the claimant has become a part through helping to maintain them. A claimant to a right must have been a participant in the system. If he or she ceases to do so, or never had done so (perhaps by “opting out” of society), then there exists no ground on which such an individual could make a claim to a right. The wish or desire of a claimant to a right cannot create any sort of duty which others are obligated to fulfill. Dropouts from society, or those who have been “alienated” from it, are nothing but parasites when they claim that they are “owed” some right. Ask a simple question: what entitlements would such a person have? As Hayek put it: “There cannot be any entitlement to be exempted from the rules on which civilization rests. We may be able to assist the weak and disabled, the very young and old, but only

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if the sane and adult submit to the impersonal discipline which gives us means to do so.… (1988, p. 153).” This puts the “alienated” (or are they not simply disgruntled?) in a bad position with respect to the abstract morality: “Socialism has taught many people that they possess claims irrespective of performance, irrespective of participation. In light of the morals that produced the extended order of civilization, socialism in fact incites people to break the law (ibid., p. 153).” This puts a very different perspective on the idea of an entitlement within a society. In a socialist society, one has entitlements from a dictator. In the impersonal morality of the abstract society, one has responsibilities and rights of participation. There are no entitlements as such in a free society. There is a familiar convenient fiction that expresses this. It is an allegedly ancient Chinese “curse” which states: “May you be cursed to live in interesting times.” Present scholarship says that the nearest known actual Chinese expression was “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.” This presents an interesting paradox, because one of these expressions fits very clearly within the progressivist ideal while the other fits equally clearly with the liberal point of view. If we take the known Chinese expression (perhaps of Confucian origin), then it is a typically bureaucratically stated rendering of the quest for security and happiness as “ultimate” desiderata within tribal or taxis organization. This is the goal of the utilitarians, Russell, and contemporary Socialist Democratic politicians. The idea is that even the life of a dog in a time of total and predictable stability—one in which no evolutionary forces or change exists—is superior to that of the life of a human when the unknown and unforeseen occurs. That is the epitome of the taxis mentality of the social planner—a place for everything, and everything in its place: no disruptions, no changes, no disturbances of our lives. This is exactly why Plato said “arrest all change!” The English “translation” into the common expression, “May you be cursed to live in interesting times” actually implies the exact opposite of the Chinese version. This translation is actually the liberal interpretation: we live in a world of uncertainty and unpredictability, which is exactly what makes it interesting. That uncertainty and unpredictability is what allows us to transcend the state of the dog quietly sleeping away its life in front of the fireplace. Our lives are richer—we can evolve and grow—we can change, both ourselves and

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our behaviors, and our social structures, because we can adapt to novelty in ways which are far beyond the capacity of any canine. We need our educational system to make things interesting, in exactly that sense, so students can learn that what is important is increasing the horizon of our ignorance rather than enshrining what we think we already know in some museum of science or museum of political correctness. We need to leave directives such as “a place for everything, and everything in its place” for how we organize the tools in our garage, not for how we raise and educate our children or train our adults. Once again, we need to learn to live with ambiguity. Education has to be for the future, for the unknown and the unforeseen, and not just for what is safe because it is in the unchanging past. To put it in terms consonant with the distinction between normal science puzzle solving and revolutionary periods of reconceptualization, we need to teach that the normal science traditions invariably point beyond themselves to the unknown at the fringe of our knowledge as it fades into the surrounding circle of our ignorance. Our evolution is all about pushing—increasing that circle of ignorance by pushing our existing paradigms farther and farther. The only way we can do that is by pushing the normal science puzzle solving approaches as far as they go. We can do that only if we abandon the entitlement mentality and the increasing bureaucratic structures that it entails. Education has to push beyond the present. It has to help us out into the unknown and unforeseen. We cannot be content like ostriches with our heads in the sand of our own personal opinions. The middle ages came to an end when reality intruded, despite the best intentions of the feudal organizers of a previous ostrich society. The competitive market order, if it is (allowed to be) applied to the domain of education, is the best way to ensure that it will be directed toward the unknown and unforeseen instead of restricting it to a situation similar to the medieval monks sitting at their desks slowly and laboriously exactly copying only what was already available. The next step in that monkish tradition is the sainted book burners and their desire to turn us all into dogs quietly sleeping by the fireplace until roused only in order to do the dictator’s bidding.

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Back to Beginnings: The Family or Small Group One could ask if I have not done a disservice in suggesting that some alienation is beneficial in the education process if students are to cope with the real world instead of the artificial environment of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. How could they cope with what is, on the face of it, a call to increase the alienation and distantiation from others if they cannot cope in the educational system as it presently exists? The answer is simple: put initial educational responsibility back into the family and small group or extended family structure. Where better for them to learn how, as Hayek (1988) put it, to cope with two different worlds at once? Perhaps the most unique feature of the family situation that has arisen in the brief tenure of the impersonal society as the requirement to face two worlds at once: the intimacy and benevolence of the small group, and also the impersonal phenomena that only appear with the market. Family structure helps children cope with both realms, as Horwitz (2015) has emphasized. The primitive taxis structure of intimacy, sacrifice and altruism, faceto-face benevolence, cooperation to face a zero sum situation, orientation toward unified ends or particular goals, and the many other facets of tribalism has been the source of our “warm and fuzzy” refuge for many thousands of generations. We have soaked up this comfort (in the few moments not spent in trying to survive in the face of scarcity of food and shelter, and the threat of death from hungry animals or rival tribes) almost by osmosis from being in a taxis or tribal structure. But in the last hundreds of generations the impersonal and increasingly abstract society has arisen and, because of its undeniable superiority in many things, begun to supplant tribalism. We now have luxuries that were unavailable to our ancestors: the “luxury” of being able to marry for love and affection instead of necessity, the “luxury” of more (or is it the first taste of ) leisure time to enjoy what we like instead of struggling to live moment to moment, the “luxury” of choices of foods to eat, the “luxury” of time for intellectual pursuits. It is tragic that, as Horwitz (2015) emphasized, “capitalism” gets blamed for turning us into cold calculation devices concerned with only material goods when the actual

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fact is that market orders have, for the first time in the history of life, given us the luxury of exploring nonmaterial “goods” that were all but inconceivable in tribalism. But this new found freedom of thought and expression has also terrified us. This, as Chapter 5 argued, is the basis for our malaise and increasing alienation. Our failed recent response, the “modern” constructivist educational format, has attempted to circumvent that trauma by extolling the virtues of “organized” tribalism while simultaneously suppressing both the presence of and understanding of the abstract society during the educational process. That has been the failure of our current approach to education: if the last chapters have done their job it should be all too obvious that we cannot suppress one “world” and glorify the other. That just exacerbates the problems. But that issue also explains why the “woke generation” of tribalists wants to break down family structure and authority: since it has been incapable of reinstating tribal primitivism, they will substitute the “woke” village dominated by critical race theory and indoctrinated guilt, as well as ancillary guilt “expression” issues such as gender identity and ideology (see Shrirer, 2020), in order to take over the role of raising the young, and, like Skinner in discarding freedom and dignity, and naive French constructivists such as de Sade and Rousseau who did not understand how their choices had originated, agitate to discard “outmoded conceptions” such as marriage and parental responsibility. They, the rational dictators, will take over the responsibility for all brainwashing—which will be called education—while any dissent will be labeled class based brainwashing. What Hayek noted and Horwitz emphasizes is that the family, as an evolved social institution, is the point of contact at which the young learn how to interact with both the personal benevolent and the impersonal cooperative domains. Growing up in a family (small group) provides the opportunity to learn, almost always tacitly, by observing and following older adults in their interactions rather than through explicit instruction (this is what Kuhn called learning from exemplary puzzles in science), how the impersonal market order works, and what behaviors are alright within it. We learn the tacit rules of conduct that are supplanting our previous solely tribal existence while remaining within the safe and familiar confines of the family structure. Learning these rules requires

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discipline. Most of the “Don’t’s” that especially the teenagers whine about have to be repeated over and over, because what is involved is learning to correct and hold in check our more primitive self-interest impulses and instinctive desires. Growing up requires the discipline of abstract rules which can only be inculcated over time, and that task of inculcating them works best within a familiar and safe backdrop provided by the institutional structure of the nuclear and extended family. Even when the adults cannot articulate why to behave in the way they do, their tacit knowledge of operating in the social realm is what is picked up by the younger generation. Thus, Edmund Burke made the family the institutional structure of the transgenerational “social contract:” it succeeds in tying together the dead generations of the past with present one(s) and also unborn forthcoming ones. There is no “contract” in any usual sense, but there is the framework of slowly changing “tradition” that is the evolved rules of conduct holding together the society as a context of constraint embodying the principles overviewed in Chapters 7 and 8 below. Family structure is analogous to the structure of tradition embodied in normal science research practice. Apprentice researchers literally learn how to “do science,” or be practitioners of their art, by being immersed in the tacit structure of the research tradition as it is practiced by the senior members of the field. By repeating classic studies (experiments and demonstrations) that have become definitive of their field (exemplars in Kuhn’s sense) they learn, with no particular conscious direction or explicit tuition, what the practice of their field is all about. This is what Polanyi emphasized as tacit knowledge, in the sense that those practitioners know more than they can possibly tell. They become embedded in a tacit social domain. Asked explicit questions about what they’re doing they will often become irritated, because when they are being honest they have to admit they have no idea. I have encountered the same thing in auction house and private dealer “experts” in a particular artist. They can walk into a room and tell from 10 feet away whether a painting or work of art was done by their artist. Asked by the unhappy client why their painting is a fake, they become agitated and defensive, and eventually reply “it’s just not right,” or “because I said so.” This

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skill set is very difficult to study, but it is undeniably real. The concurrence among experts (when they are unaware of other experts’ opinions) is extremely high. In that regard, it mirrors the uniformity of opinion among recognized scientific practitioners. So this phenomenon is not restricted to science, but is rather a general property of evolved social institutions. Children learn about the abstract society in the same way. Taken by parents outside the home they are given exemplars such as “Don’t throw your ball at that dog over there, he doesn’t look like he wants to play,” “Let’s go to the counter now and pay the clerk our bill for dinner,” “Take my hand and look both ways before you try to cross the street, because cars won’t stop and might hit you,” “I can’t play with you now because I have to go to work to earn the money to pay our bills,” “Always be polite when someone says something to you out on the street,” and countless other opportunities to realize that they and their family are embedded in a larger and impersonal structure of constraints. Far better they learn about that abstract structure surrounding them within the comfort zone provided by the family with its gradual exposure to exemplars than to be thrown out to face it on their own. Against this the constructivist educator will counter that the modern school system can totally replace the family in any educational task. It is true that these rules can be learned in non-family situations—religious groups, schools, organizations such as the boy and girl scouts (if they are left alive after the onslaught of political correctness), even the now frowned upon “unsupervised” play of groups of children. And certainly the school (especially in the personification of a revered father or mother figure as mentor) can do the job at least in part—in the handful of instances in which such parent substitute figures are present. But because we have denigrated the family and the “government” has taken over education, removing it to the distant school requiring busing and instructors (I hesitate to call them teachers) certified in political correctness, there have been more “broken” or one parent families with no nearby relatives, which now require more and more “revered” mentors when fewer and fewer of them exist or, if they do, have any time to take on more and more potential “family member” pupils.

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The family is not perfect. But it is a crucial evolved social institution that, on average, has done a far better job of preparing children to face the abstract society than has modern progressive education. The family as an institution allows children to learn the rules of the abstract society and how to apply them in a familiar and safe environment, which helps to ameliorate the feelings of malaise and alienation that we all increasingly face. In that framework, we need to bring family structure back from the constructivist inspired near extinction that it presently faces. The institution of the family is a better framework for children to experience and learn how to deal with the alienation necessary for the learning of the novel and unanticipated than the artificial “sanctuary or safe room” of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood where failure is not allowed to happen. Instead of being a parent who ameliorates alienation, Mr. Rogers increases it by failing to supply experience with the rules of the abstract society. Warm and fuzzy alone is only a part of an adequate approach. This is a major reason why, as Bertrand Russell aptly remarked, education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

Our Neoteny and Our Language Require Family Structure Before there could be any possible effect of “the village” on education there must be an infant capable of interacting with and receiving instruction from others. Our large brains need to be able to take advantage of others to aid their learning and adaptation. We have known about their capacity for some time—over half a century ago the neuropsychologist Karl Pribram presented a lecture at the American Museum of Natural History entitled “What Makes Man Human.” His answer (obviously applying to women also) was our brains. But what is that recent natural history of our brains? Lately we have studied brain development from an evolutionary-developmental perspective. This gives insight into why our brains are different from other primates and also how our language capacity has developed. Our anatomy got in the way of our neural development. Human evolution is unique in the extent of its neoteny. We have reached a point at which something had to give—either female

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pelvic structure or cerebral development. The solution to this dilemma that evolution has utilized has been to neotenize infants—the “premature” birth of the human infant compared to other animal species, which has allowed for fetal development for the year or so after birth in humans. In primates the fetus and newborn have big brains in respect to body size, very flat faces, thin brow-ridges, small teeth and jaws, and light skin with very sparse hair. But only humans retain all these features into adult life. Similarly, the front to back head axis of the trunk in the fetus in the newborn of all primates is retained only by humans throughout life, which is what allows us to have a horizontal line of sight while standing erect when all other primates can look around while walking on all fours. So big brains, flat faces, reduced body hair, upright posture, and head axis, while present in all primate fetuses, are unmistakable marks of the human in all stages of our lives. Clearly neoteny and many other processes of changes of timing (heterochrony) occur in other species. But no other species has ever developed a symbolic system. We model the world we live in and base our anticipatory structures upon symbol manipulation systems. Human knowledge is inextricably tied to symbols—the syntactic and semantic structures of our language. Human language is unique in evolution. The question, since there appears to be no unique genetic structure in humans which underlies language and its development, is why this development has taken place only in our species, and without having been programmed or occur by our genes. In other mammals fetal development is completed in utero—what is born is a fully developed infant, a smaller version of the final adult, that can already cope (within the limits of its size and strength) with its environment, as the infant prey animal (such as the giraffe or antelope running with its mother immediately after birth) so clearly demonstrates. No human infant can survive in analogous fashion: it takes a year or more of infant-mother interaction to allow the nervous system to develop fully enough to even begin to coordinate its movements into the behavior required for survival (recall the discussion of what is involved in prosocial interaction discussed by Porges in Chapter 5). So our species is deliberately born “prematurely” with respect to finishing the neural wiring and cranial development

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(as well as muscular development dependent upon that) and coordination that adults possess. In other mammals this brain wiring takes place completely “in the dark,” which is to say, in utero. In humans, the difference between intrauterine and extra uterine development is what makes us human. In order to keep female pelvic structures from splitting apart from our bigger heads, we have externalized the processes involved in bigger heads—both brain and skeletal-muscular development. This is crucial: The brain wiring that occurs in the last phase of fetal development provides the neurological basis for the mental models that the organism is going to use throughout its life. If that phase occurs in the highly stable and reproducible environment of the uterus, the operations of brain wiring follow a pre-established sequence of steps and generate a modeling system that has been highly conserved in evolution. In our species, however, the last phases of fetal development have been progressively displaced outside the uterus, in a radically different environment, and that created the opportunity for a radically new experiment in brain wiring. That was the precondition for the evolution of a uniquely human modeling system, … (Barbieri, 2010, p. 215)

And that precondition is why language developed: it began when the mother-infant communication system arose that allows a small, helpless, and demanding “almost but not quite human” to develop into a viable offspring. Development of this second communication system—different from the genetic language underlying all biological development—was a unique and genuine novelty in evolution. We can now give a more adequate answer to Pribram’s question of what makes us human. What humanizes us is this epigenetic development of our language as a symbol based system capable of utilizing the adaptive systems of models based upon feedback and feedforward systems (that was overviewed in Chapter 3). Our development into human beings requires the social interaction provided by language and the bonding between an infant and the parents who are constantly present, doing the caring and sharing, in its early years. This is why we are intrinsically and inevitably social creatures, and it is why that personal benevolent interaction, providing the warm and fuzzy feelings upon

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which the morality of the face-to-face society rests, has developed. Family structure is an evolutionarily evolved aspect of humanity. It is literally an interface between our past primate benevolence and the abstract society. You cannot substitute the more impersonal structure of the constructivist education system—the Rogers Neighborhood or “village” or tribal dictatorship of the progressivists—for that initial structure. We must retain family structure as the evolved point of contact between our taxis based evolutionary history and the abstract and impersonal society into which we have so rapidly evolved. It is where we tacitly pick up the rules of interpersonal interaction of the abstract society when our parents take us out into that strange and marvelous world where we don’t already know the people involved. The difference between the face-to-face and the impersonal is where the essential tension between tradition and innovation that underlies all our knowledge acquisition of reality external to the family begins. Lose it and we will lose all the tacit knowledge we have gained, and any possible understanding of the results of human action but not design.

Educating the Cultural Marxist Warrior How can one get through to the woke social justice warrior who uses the Marcuse-Gramsci technique of attributing everything to social class in the haunted universe doctrine framework noted in Chapter 3? How can one combat the “heads I win, tails you lose” rhetorical strategy which does not allow facts to intrude into their vociferous opinions/demands? One obvious strategy is to employ their own argument strategy on them. When the strident social justice warrior says “all whites are racist” one should reply in kind (equally stridently and vociferously) “all social justice warriors are racist bigots.” When they respond that such a statement is simply an exhibition of “white privilege” and the denial of “obvious” facts, the response is identical and equally simple: their denial is simply an exhibition of “black privilege” and deliberate Marxist racism, as well as the denial of equally obvious facts. When they attempt to argue that one should “lean into one’s guilt” and admit their racism, the response is the same: “lean” into your own guilt, and see it for the

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greed and envy that it is. Most importantly, one should be prepared to respond to the thesis of critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi, who has argued that in order to be truly antiracist you have to be truly anticapitalist. Here, the previous chapters should have provided enough insight to show that reality is in fact exactly the opposite from what this “critical” Marxist has argued: in order to be truly antiracist one must be capitalist and anti-Marxist. Only capitalism and the market based society provide a framework in which irrelevant factors such as skin color, religion, language spoken, etc. are completely unimportant . We cooperate by ignoring such factors. Remember Leonard Read’s pencil: its components were supplied by men and women (sometimes even children) of all different colors, sizes, shapes, religions, and whatever else one can think of. Similarly, Muslims are quite happy to buy the finished pencils even if they were made by Jews, as are religious fanatics of pencils made by atheists, and so forth. This is the exact antithesis of the blatant discrimination and dictatorship of opinion and fact that is central to cultural socialism. As the would-be dictators, the cultural Marxists would be quite happy to prevent those whom they despise from having any market participation at all and to be segregated and removed from their “enlightened” society entirely. The real question that one must ask is how could anyone have taken a position such as cultural socialism seriously? Here the answer, as with so many popular doctrines, lies in understanding the pontifications of some of Keynes’s “academic scribblers” of the past. Cultural Marxism presents the appearance of plausibility only because of the crisis in integrity within the justificationist metatheory of knowledge and rationality that came to a boil in the middle of the twentieth century. Our “educated” intelligentsia of that period came to believe that, according to justificationist standards of rationality and knowledge, there were no defensible standards by which one can critically assess the tenability of an argument purporting to be about empirical facts. Since these people (1) came to the agreement that justificationism had failed, and (2) uncritically assumed that therefore that meant all positions were on a par, so that any one position was therefore no more defensible than any other, therefore they (3) resigned themselves to total and complete relativism in both knowledge and culture. Thus they came to face their intellectual crisis of integrity

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in a manner incorporating the strategies of both the ostrich and the opossum: sticking their heads in the sand and playing dead. How and when did this come about? It arose primarily in the 1960s, as a result of the confluence of many factors. It was after the disillusionment of the intelligentsia at the conclusion of World War II that the crisis of rationality in the justificationist metatheory was almost universally accepted, no longer just by hardheaded philosophers of science but also by the more “muddle headed” philosophers and students of the social sciences and educators. This “crisis of integrity” was well-documented by, for example, Bartley (1962), Popper (1963), Feyerabend (from the late 1960s), Radnitzky (1970) and Weimer (1975, 1979), and this disillusionment followed the wave of disillusionment with Soviet communism and socialism stemming from Polanyi (1951) in science, Koestler (in Darkness at Noon), Eric Blair (writing as George Orwell) in 1984, in literature, and dozens of other writers and publications. Since the shining hope of socialism had been in the communist regimes, the intellectuals were forced to take a new tack in socialism’s defense. This is how cultural Marxism, as a substitute for economic Marxism, came to take center stage. Relatively “lightweight" intellectuals (such as Marcuse) distilled out of the zeitgeist of these failures a different focus designed to lead to the destruction of market based society. How did it take hold so quickly throughout the remainder of society? Through Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and similar programs that were already endorsing the tenets of socialist morality in conjunction with the failure of justificationism. What “you are special” and “everyone is a winner here” teaches is the failure of justificationism—that there are no tenable standards to separate individuals or knowledge claims, and that therefore “everyone is equally special” and therefore “entitled” to hold their own opinions and beliefs as inviolate and not subject to correction by “mere facts" or conflicting opinions. Cultural Marxism succeeded by taking over the ultimate relativism that seemed to be entailed by the perceived failure of justificationist standards of rationality. Thinking that critical thinking itself had failed, the well-meaning educators scrambled to outdo each other in replacing education with the “warm and fuzzy” helicoptering approach of caring and sharing. Critical thinking is now no longer taught or emphasized in the social domains or in basic education.

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I mean that last sentence literally. In an examination of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, Cusmariu (2021) noted that the document (which outlines the goals and standards to be taught by the states) did not include in its glossary such key terms as “argument,” “conclusion,””reasoning,” “correct reasoning,” or “inference.” And instead of correctly characterizing the undefined term argument as “valid” and “invalid,” and explaining those terms, the document directs students to consider whether arguments are “plausible,” “effective,” “viable,” or “make sense.” As Cusmariu correctly notes, those (undefined) terms imply that the validity of an argument is nothing more than a personal opinion. So, it is literally the case that instructors are now to tell students that arguments—and the test answers based upon them—are in need of no more support than their making “sense” to them, fitting in to their biases and prejudices, aiding their “warm and fuzzy” feelings. Validity or truth? Outmoded concepts, obviously. Welcome to the woke generation of noneducation. Understanding this failure in so-called critical thinking is crucial to the defense of liberalism. That is why I have devoted (in other chapters) much space to what at first blush appears to be merely philosophical “tangents” or “asides” from directly discussing topics in the traditional literature of liberalism. But liberalism cannot succeed, nor can it be adequately defended, unless one simultaneously understands the failure of the justificationist metatheoryin philosophy and also the necessity for an evolutionary approach to knowledge and culture that recognizes we are the results of human action but not human design. And that impersonal cultural structure has no skin to have a color and no agency to have an ideology at all.

Notes 1. As an example of this, consider school districts in the state of Pennsylvania where their right to eminent domain allows them to condemn property for any sort of school use not only within their own school district but also in another school district. In fact, the law is general enough that a school district near the border of the state could legally

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condemn property for its own use across the state border in another state. And the courts have allowed them to do whatever they want as constituting part of their “educational” mission. As a case in point, one district in Washington County was allowed to condemn acreage to allow it to construct a bus waiting area outside the school property and well away from where students entered or exited from the buses, simply because a student had been brushed by a car in another part of a parking lot. That expense was accepted as an “educational” requirement, to allow another exit for the bus traffic. 2. At this point, those in the hard or physical sciences will object that the account I am presenting holds only for the “liberal arts” students but not for the “real” scientists. They will point to the great disparity between humanities and social studies majors, on one hand, and those in science, technology, and engineering on the other. Their claim is that science is independent of, or above, those mere matters of opinion, since it deals with “hard facts” and is based upon testability. So surely the hard sciences are above such things. Their students are taught “meaningful” content about genuine subjects and are therefore not susceptible to the distractions of “mere philosophy” or the musings of the writers studied in English classes. They are disappointed and somewhat sorrowful when their own children choose to go into something of “lesser” worth than their chosen areas of interest. If we leave aside the (on this point largely extraneous) fact that the humanities and social studies have been marginalized (because of the extreme politicization of their fields and the extreme security blanket mentality of those who go along with momentary political correctness), we can note that hard science fares no better when attempting to claim the mantle of “real” knowledge or science as cumulative or justified. While the hard sciences clearly require a different skill set (far more knowledge of mathematics and computer technology, etc.) it is not possible to successfully cling to the justificationist building block model of science as proven or probabilified truth, and it is impossible to ignore that revolutions in science have occurred, or that they fundamentally change the fields involved, sometimes even throwing out the previous factual basis in favor of an entirely new one. So

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there is no more certainty or less alienation and malaise in their fields because of anything having to do with their subject matter. The existential predicament of humanity covers everyone, and there is no way to stop it at the walls of the Citadel of hard science. 3. A case in point is found in an MSN Internet item (on 1/23/2021) entitled “Universities face pressure to vet ex-Trump officials before hiring them.” The a priori assumption of the progressivist constructivist is that any “conservative” politician is deplorable. For example, according to that article, the backlash was swift at Carnegie Mellon University the previous June when the school announced former Trump official Richard Grenell was hired for a one-year fellowship. Then in an open letter to university administrators, critics said Grenell (who served as acting director of national intelligence and ambassador to Germany) has a “well-documented record” of sexism and support for racist political movements. No supporting evidence or documentation was offered in support of the claims. So what did CMU do? What all academic institutions do—it deflected criticism by forming a committee to study Grenell’s appointment. Campus leaders later acknowledged tension between the institution’s embrace of free expression (a matter of the First Amendment to the Constitution, a fact that was conveniently not mentioned) and its “diversity as a core value.” As the Washington Post’s writer stated, the debate will “undoubtedly prompt” a public clash between these institutions’ mission to promote the exchange of ideas and a renewed focus on inclusion sparked by the “racial justice movement.” It does not matter that freedom of speech and expression is a constitutional right of citizenship in the United States so far as the left is concerned. However, it is not a matter that can be contradicted as the result of a “debate.” The Constitution is to be trumped by their momentary political correctness concerns. This is what it will mean to “vet” appointees. None will be found acceptable unless they recant and publically toe the leftist line. This is the inevitable result of following the new cultural Marxist line initiated by Gramsci and Marcuse (See Chapter 8 in Volume 1). 4. What would be an optimal strategy for forcing academics out of their security blanket mentality? The ideal solution is easy: eliminate all federal government support. If that were to happen, colleges and

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universities would actually need to have to have something to offer the student that would make him or her think about going to that school instead of simply basing their choice on “Who will give me the bigger scholarship?” Educational institutions would actually have to compete with each other rather than being part of the same cartel. And faculty within individual educational institutions would then be motivated to go out and find their own means of support for their research and graduate student assistance. If supplemental funding for education were limited to that supplied by the state legislature (in which the university or college were located), there would be considerable variation in the amount of funding supplied to different schools, because the different states would have very different desiderata for funneling economic support: for example, states with concentrations of technological firms and their workers would want to fund primarily technological research, while agricultural states would direct much support for improving agricultural yield and decreasing associated costs, while institutions in states that have a large stake in educational institutions might have legislatures who would want to funnel money into actually improving the ease of access to and quality of education. What about the poor students who need help paying their outrageous tuitions? They would have to make an appeal to the only sources that ought to be funding them at all: private charities. Since it might turn out that there would be less private scholarship funding for higher education overall, this would have the very beneficial effect of correcting the widespread opinion that everyone ought to have a college education (really, just a degree). We cannot continue to support the myth, beautifully satirized in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone stories, of being in a Camelot location “where all the children are above average.” By definition many are not, and they certainly do not need to go to college to get a job for which they are capable. And they most definitely do not need to have a “free” college education paid for by taxpayers who have no say whatsoever about the nature or quality of the education they were to be provided at those taxpayers’ considerable expense. How could I be so foolish as to assume something like this might work? Because there are cases in which it has been shown to work.

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One example was provided by George Mason University in the hiring of black classical liberal economist Walter Williams. Because other departments did not want him to be appointed, University funding was channeled away from the Economics program and into other directions. This forced Williams to go out—literally outside of the University entirely—into the public (actually, the private) realm for support of the Economics department of which he had been appointed chairman. He was so successful in obtaining support for the then (as now) highly unpopular (with those of prevailing progressivist attitudes) classical liberal position he fostered within the GMU program that the department’s overall funding actually increased, and the reputation of the department and the quality of graduate students followed suit. The fact that that occurred in great part because of two things that progressivists in education hate—actual liberal economics and raising money on their own—is simultaneously one of the greatest possible embarrassments to progressivist “education” programs and also the reason why it is not well-known. It is also one reason why progressivists go out of their way to label any private funding as invariably “bowing to special interest groups” and promoting “antiliberal” (meaning: anti-progressivist and socialist) and therefore obviously un-American ideals and programs. It is a pity they do not realize that those special interest groups are the American taxpayers. 5. Interestingly, note in this regard that schools which refuse all federal funding (such as Hillsdale College) or accept a bare minimum (such as Grove City College) tend not only to be highly ranked in terms of their educational services and the ability of their graduates to get jobs, but also tend to have very low tuition rates in comparison to schools that are considered to be in their peer group. One reason why they can be “good” schools and also have lower tuition rates is because they have smaller bureaucracies to support who do nothing more “academic” than fill out government mandated paperwork. The number of bureaucrats employed by the larger state universities to fill out such forms and comply with all the mandates is usually close to the total of faculty at these schools. And the schools that do not take more than a minimum of government money also do a far better job at getting

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private funding from their alumni and businesses and charitable institutions than do the government-funded institutions (after all, who needs to pay more than their taxes?). With tuition costs increasing on a yearly basis—at a rate that is well above any reasonable measure of inflation—students would be well-advised to act like consumers and consider such factors in their choice of where to go. 6. One should hesitate to go down the rabbit hole of “wokeness” but it is interesting to contrast how the two sides view the issue of being “woke.” So far as the propaganda of the leftists goes, being woke is an intellectual badge of honor, and shows that one is in fact taking the moral high road. One should note that they do not bother to define what constitutes “moral”: In an editorial opinion by Michael S. Roth in CNN opinion published Saturday, November 23, 2019, we hear such things as: I am a college president and a teacher at a school known for student activism, and I’ve noticed a new trope on the scene with rising potential as a national scapegoat. It’s the politically correct, “woke,” college student… In one of the early debates in the 2016 election,… questioned the candidate about his demeaning comments about women over the years. “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” he replied (to applause from the audience). Throughout the election, he turned what might have been judged as moral lapses into heroic refusals to conform to politically correct moral criteria…

Roth claimed that the images of the welfare queen and the woke student are convenient because they provide “excuses to not engage” with differences, placing certain types of people beyond the pale. These positions become scapegoats, meant to inspire solidarity by providing an object for hostility (or derision), and he admonished that educators and civic leaders should not play along. CNN said he felt Educators and pundits should stop whining that young people aren’t what they used to be and start cultivating civic preparedness. Students can reject the tired tropes of the past and embrace what many in the

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older generations have forgotten: how to build effective coalitions with people who have a variety of points of view,…

So from this woke college president’s point of view it is all right for the “woke” to refuse to listen to others who disagree because they are in fact actually assuming “their civic responsibilities, and universities have a responsibility to help them.” It was not equally all right for an opposition candidate to refuse to answer why he had been demeaning to women by changing the subject to momentary political correctness and asserting that his “moral lapses” were merely heroic refusals to conform. On the other hand there is no discussion of what it would take to “build effective coalitions” with those who refuse to listen or to engage at all. Against that position David Clemens, in an editorial in the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, September 11, 2020, took a very different approach One asks oneself, “Am I woke (good)? Or not woke (evil)? How woke is woke, how much woke is enough, and who decides?”…Woke language is full of terms such as “toxic” (even “catastrophic”) masculinity, “whiteness,” “white privilege,” “white fragility,” countless new pronouns and genders, “systemic racism,” “cancel culture,” “social justice,” “gaslighting,” and “de-platforming,” most of which are casually or arbitrarily defined, if at all.…

Discussing the case of an NYU professor, formerly a progressivist, after he was outed for saying that woke culture was wrong, Clemens noted that: he was then shunned, harassed, and finally investigated. NYU’s Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group, concluded the “cause of his guilt” is the content and structure of his thinking. This chilling sentiment sounds as if it were lifted straight from 1984. Then Orwell called it “thoughtcrime,” Clemens noted that now NYU calls it “liberal.” He argued that shows the finality of woke. No one can have an opinion on reality—in wokethink (as he called it) opinion literally creates reality, and the one opinion that is permissible is that of the woke.

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So there you have the views of two professors. How do you choose between them? Especially if truth is, like beauty, entirely in the eye of the beholder? Then we would have to ask “Who is the most (correctly) woke?” Thus it would then be a matter of different umwelts, self-made worlds, like the instrumentalist philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Rorty (1979) propose. Unfortunately, for such thinkers the real world (in the form of realism correcting instrumentalism) does intrude, and only critical assessment of the positions can help one decide. Where is the evidence? Even socialists could “woke up” to the fact that there is a world external to our individual selves and beliefs, and that it is our responsibility to understand that world even when it clashes with our opinions and desires. The choice is yours: acknowledge the reality of an external world and try to adapt to it as best you can, or close yourself off in a tiny realm of your own that is divorced from reality. If you do the latter, do not expect the rest of us to be either amused or to grant you entitlements. We might, however, be inclined to remind you of this comment of Justice Robert H. Jackson (in concurring opinion, Krulewitch v. United States, 1949): “The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.” That is, after all, what social justice and wokeness are all about.

References Alchian, A. (1959). Private property and the relative cost of tenure. In P. D. Bradley (Ed.), Public stake in union power (pp. 350–371). University of Virginia Press. Alchian, A. (1968). The economic and social impact of free tuition. New Industrialist Review, 5, 42–52. Barbieri, M. (2010). On the origin of language. Biosemiotics, 3, 201–223. Bartley, W. W., III. (1962/1984). The retreat to commitment. Open Court (Now Cricket Media).

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Bartley, W. W., III. (1990). Unfathomed knowledge, unmeasured wealth. Open Court (Now Cricket Media). Brown, W. O. (2017). Alchian on tenure: Some long awaited empirical evidence. Journal of Corporate Finance, 44 (C), 487–505. Buchanan, J. M., & Devletoglou, N. E. (1970). Academia in anarchy: An economic diagnosis. Basic Books. Cusmariu, A. (2021). Common core state standards for mathematics flunk logic 101. Academia Letters, Article 1592. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1592 Dewey, J. (1935). Liberalism and social action. Capricorn Books. Hayek, F. A. (1988). The fatal conceit. University of Chicago Press. Horwitz, S. (2015). Hayek’s modern family: Classical liberalism and the evolution of social institutions. Palgrave Macmillan. Kirzner, I. (1979). Perception, opportunity, and profit. University of Chicago Press. Mises, L. (1933/1981). Epistemological problems of economics. New York University Press. Polanyi, M. (1951). The logic of liberty. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Reprinted by Liberty Fund. Popper, K. R. (1963). Conjectures and refutations. Harper & Row. Radnitzky, G. (1970). Contemporary schools of metascience (Vols. 1 and 2). Humanities Press. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton University Press. Russell, B. (1922/2014). Free thought and official propaganda. Project Gutenberg e-book #44932. Shrirer, A. (2020). Irreversible damage. Regnery Publishing. Weimer, W. B. (1975). The psychology of inference and expectation: Some preliminary remarks. In G. Maxwell & R. M. Anderson (Eds.), Induction, probability, and confirmation (pp. 430–486). University of Minnesota Press. Weimer, W. B. (1979). Notes on the methodology of scientific research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Fanatics may suppose, that dominion is founded on grace, and that Saints alone inherit the earth; but the civil magistrate very justly puts these sublime theorists on the same footing with common robbers, and teaches them by the severest discipline, that a rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive. David Hume Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion to their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal , well meaning but without understanding. Justice Louis Brandeis Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society. William James He was born afresh every day (attributed to) Henry James, about his brother William © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume II, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95477-2_7

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In other countries but not in the Americas, the “American liberal” would be classified as a socialist and recognized as a social planner who must, to be consistent, be an enemy of individual liberty and freedom— indeed, virtually everything liberalism stands for. This is because, as Joseph Schumpeter (1954) so tellingly remarked, the enemies of freedom have appropriated its label. As a result, many earlier liberals in America have rallied to a new term, libertarian or libertarianism, as an antidote to the socialist variant of constructivism. This was initially an extreme laissez-faire position elucidated about half a century ago by writers such as Rothbard (1970, 1985) and Richard Cornuelle, in Reclaiming the American Dream (1965). These are men of zeal. Their position has morphed away from liberalism based upon understanding the principles of spontaneous complex phenomena (and the context of constraint necessarily required for all such systems) into rationalist constructivist advocacy of deliberately replacing all government controls and programs as rapidly as possible. The nonspecific idea of laissez-faire seems to guide most of these positions, and the assumption is made that ignoring the context of constraint in favor of “laissez-faire” is essential to the position. Unfortunately, constructivism is no better or more tenable when it is “libertarian” than when it is socialist or anarchist. So this chapter has to explain why a liberal cannot be a libertarian, since we have not yet adequately differentiated that position from classic liberalism. There are two major reasons why one should not endorse libertarianism. First, the libertarian position is based on rationalist constructivist adherence to explicit “rational” direction and control. Historically, it was usually associated with the view that all law or regulation is a (conscious) imposition upon, or restriction of, freedom, and an interference with “natural rights.” In this vein, the libertarian is a “framework anarchist” who wants to unchain the individual from the constraint of unnecessary traditions and rules or legislation that limit free expression of individual conduct. That much is held in common with the leftist anarchists and those who “improved” classical liberalism by explicit directives. Thus, Chomsky’s anarchism, as well as the earlier position of Jeremy Bentham, (who regarded all law as a restraint upon freedom), is in this regard not far removed from the Marquis de Sade, who felt the same way about all morals. Similarly, the majority of libertarians are blatant

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rationalist constructivists. In this regard, Rothbard, Block, and Mises are representative: all propose that we can instantly move toward an ideal “liberal” society just by deliberately adopting certain courses of action. They presume that one can deliberately impose liberal ideals by rational or explicit thought and action, using that as an Archimedean lever with which to set the earth spinning in a better direction. They wish to overcome all tradition and start anew toward the rational reconstruction of society along their proposed lines because a particular tradition has been harmful . Against that view, these Volumes defend the classic liberal tradition as found first systematically presented by the Scottish moralists and the continental liberals, and then resurrected and improved primarily by (many) so-called Austrian school economic theorists. This position acknowledges that we, and our society, are products of evolutionary developments and traditions which simply cannot be ignored or “improved” except by small or “piecemeal” changes—”engineering” as Popper misleadingly called it—to correct mistakes when they become obvious from their effects. From that perspective, I have focused upon the harmful effects of a false approach to rationality, what Hayek and I have called constructivist rationalism, which twists the meaning of liberalism from its original conception based upon a definite context of constraint based upon equal justice under the rule of law and freedom of opportunity to pursue private aims and hold private property (primarily by the introduction of a false theory of morality and ethical behavior called utilitarianism, and then by twisting the meaning of freedom into the utilitarian-socialist conception of freedom from want). While (as Schumpeter noted) that twisted and debased conception of liberalism saw fit to retain the classic term for its new and antithetical position, it actually developed into a congeries of positions that bear less and less in common except that false theory of rationality. There are many variants of a “libertarian” position, ranging from socialist variants such as Chomsky’s and those opposed to traditional liberalism, into those within the camp of defenders of the original position. We must differentiate and discuss some influential thinkers who, for one reason or another, have endorsed the justificationist and constructivist approach to rationalism while still defending (at least some) central aspects of classical liberalism. Invariably, they have in common uncritical acceptance of the justificationist

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conception of knowledge and rationality in philosophy, and as a consequence, acceptance of the rationalist constructivist conception of explicit reason as capable of reformulation of economics and social and political thought. The second main reason one should not endorse libertarianism concerns the attempts to specify one or only a few of the co-dependent tenets or principles of liberalism as its “essence,” and to ignore the others or relegate them to “inessential” status as ancillary only, and thus able to be dismissed. This ignores the necessity of a co-occurrent context of constraint that arises in unison with the central positions of liberalism, and can thus never be ignored or relegated to “second-class” status. While not exhaustive, we can separate main conceptual strands of these twisted and overlapping positions by distinguishing between five representative groups: 1. Classical liberalism as developed from the Scottish moralists through to Hayek; 2. The utilitarian twist beginning in the nineteenth century with happiness and the greatest good leading up to the “new” freedom from want—primarily from Bentham and the Mills through the organization thinkers such as Russell and Dewey up to today; 3. A libertine approach stemming from Rousseau, leading today to Chomsky and the idea of constructivist “liberal” socialist anarchism; 4. A “social physics” or hard science and a rationalist a priorist approach to explanation as the deduction of “laws” of nature for functional social phenomena, exemplified in the Austrian approach of Ludwig Mises and his followers; 5. A primarily philosophical approach stemming from the critical rationalism of Karl Popper, given extreme expression by Paul Feyerabend. A skeptical view of Michael Polanyi is also in this “philosophical” category, but as “post-critical.” The first three positions have been discussed in Volume 1. There our focus was upon differentiating classical liberalism from constructivist variants that arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that were often based upon utilitarianism. Now, we focus upon the last two, in

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order to show that aspects of those positions are crucially dependent upon rationalist constructivism, and hence do no service to classical liberalism. Aspects of position (3) above (noted in Volume 1 only with respect to Chomsky) also are central to the libertarian view, as in points (4) and (5). This is particularly problematic and confusing, since authors in the latter two camps have done much to defend liberalism in other regards.

All These Positions Expect Too Much from an Inadequate and Outmoded Conception of Rationality This can be shown first by pointing to the justificationist conception of knowledge and rationality1 underlying them (and overviewing the limitations of that metatheory), and then by noting the essential differences between the “hard science” approach that initially worked in the study of simple physical phenomena from what is required in the domains of essential complexity. We can then elaborate further problems posed by the existence of the functional, semiotic domain pertaining to all life on this planet, and thus to all human activity, specifically in the psychological and economic domains of human action in distinction from the physical domain of movement in space–time. With that in mind as background, we can better differentiate the failures of the explicit rationalist and justificationist approaches in comparison with those emphasizing the evolutionary and tacit domain underlying all spontaneously arisen complex orders. We need this background especially to discuss two famous philosophical discussions of liberalism, those of Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend.

The Failure of Justificationism It creates for its adherents insoluble dilemmas: by fusing concepts that do not belong together, it creates a metatheoretical structure that

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must inevitably lead even its most brilliant practitioners to insurmountable problems, infinite regresses, and problems that simply admit no solutions at all. By its nature, the justificationist quest is impossibly difficult. In comparison, the superiority of non-justificational approaches is simply that they show, from alternative points of view, either how these dilemmas do not arise at all or how the problems they pose are soluble in a consistent manner from outside the justificationist point of view. The problem of inference, brought to the fore by Hume, shows this pattern of failure. If one understands Fries’s (1828) argument that propositions can only be derived from other propositions, and thus cannot be proven by facts, then it is obvious that they cannot be “probabilified” either. It will not do to substitute near-certainty, in the guise of the calculus of probability, for absolute certainty in the guise of deductive certitude. Fries’s argument showed why neither can be obtained: no inductive logic can assess the merit of propositions where “merit” is taken to be either the truth or the probability value. Nor, to make matters worse, can they be proven to be false. Because of the disconnection of theory from fact, there is no real “logic” in any form of justificationism. Within this conceptual framework, the skeptic, who holds that no informative knowledge is actually possible, always triumphs over the “positive” justificationist. When recognized, this led to a new strategy: attempting to render the skeptic’s acknowledged victory to be as painless as possible. This is why contemporary empiricists are perhaps the best representatives of existentialist despair and dread—by the consistent application of their own criteria of rationality, they have shown that their trust in empiricism was not justified—and have as a result retreated to a faith in empiricism and have thus abandoned all attempts to defend it.2 This is simply a retreat to commitment, one that is no different, and no less irrational, when practiced by the “scientific” empiricist than by the defender of a traditional religion. Rationalism fares no better. There is no possibility of “proving” that the clear and distinct ideas of my Cartesian common sense—which are so “obviously” different from and “clearly” superior to yours—are in fact the proven or true ones. Thus, whatever rationality there is to science and our knowledge and its acquisition lies outside the confines of either empiricist or rationalist forms of justificationism.

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Why was the justificationist framework the dominant metatheory of all rational inquiry for millennia? The answer is that it is based upon a simple confusion and a resulting fusion. Since the time of the dawn of mathematics with the thinkers of the Fertile Crescent and ancient Greece, it has simply been assumed (probably only because it worked so well) that mathematics was the ideal science, and the necessary and appropriate model for all others. Mathematics (and logic) are contentless syntactic structures which operate according to grammatical rules that require only the consistent use of symbols in order to “prove” or guarantee the “certainty” of a conclusion from premises. But this certainty is purchased at the expense of achieving anything new—the conclusions are “proven” only because they are contained in the combination of the premises. So the quest for a theory of the “proving power of reason” was to find an approach to inference in the empirical world that was equally certain and indubitable. Classic thinkers simply assumed that mathematical reasoning should represent the form of inference for all science to emulate. This led to a problem that plagued the attempt to understand scientific inquiry until the second half of the nineteenth century. Mathematics is axiomatic. The definition of an axiom is identical to that of a certain truth. A proposition is axiomatic if and only if (as a clear and distinct “Cartesian” idea) it is not possible to doubt the truth content thereof. Axioms in mathematical proofs are assumed to be “self-evidently” true. That assumption was not abandoned in physical theory (in factual as opposed to formal reasoning) until the second half of the nineteenth century when Heinrich Hertz dropped the pretense of scientific theories starting from a basis in intuitively true axioms and pointed out that science did perfectly well by simply postulating initial premises and then deriving (deductive) consequences from them. If the empirical results the theory predicted were obtained, then the theory was considered a “good” one. It is not necessary to assume that a scientific theory starts from absolute truth and thus deduces certain conclusions. Science is postulational or hypothetical (conjectural), not axiomatic. Hertz thus became the founder of the so-called hypothetico-deductive method for science. But in so doing he removed the central conceptual pillar underlying the whole justificationist approach to knowledge and rationality.

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At that point, we have come back to Hume’s skeptical conclusion that knowledge is “mere animal belief ” which cannot be proven, and in so doing, back to the psychological domain (more properly, the domain of evolutionary epistemology) for a theory of what knowledge actually is and how we achieve it (if in fact we ever do). Likewise, at this point, we abandoned as impossible to achieve the Cartesian ideal of Reason as standing outside the natural order and capable of judging or correcting it. For the remaining justificationists, as with the contemporary “woke” members of society, standards of rationality have now given way to conventionalism and instrumentalism as “mild” forms of skepticism. Why not admit that everything is just conventional, incapable of being proven (says the disgruntled ex-positive justificationist), that all standards are on a par in being temporally limited to a particular historical epoch and to the arbitrary position of a thinker’s status and position and race and sex and whatever else? Isn’t every position subject to a tu quoque argument3 against its rationality? Without defensible standards of rationality and conduct, why not just admit to having nothing more than a faith in one or another doctrine, and let everything else fall by the wayside? That, of course, is the position of the libertarian anarchist and extreme constructivist libertarian. Break down all the indefensible restraints on conduct and just “go with the flow” of your favorite notion as definitive of liberalism—anarchist socialism for Chomsky, happiness for Russell and the Bloomsbury Group, the mythical greatest good for utilitarians, absolute property rights for Rothbard and Block, praxeology for Mises, and so on. Laissez-faire anarchism for everything except your particular faith, which is inviolate and not subject to criticism because it specifies what (you think) laissez-faire or liberalism actually is. And it must be emphasized that all these thinkers retreat to an absolutistic faith of one form or another to support their position. In that respect, they have exemplified that men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding, (as Justice Louis Brandeis warned us) are the greatest danger to liberty. But there are standards, and while they can never be “proven” (true, false, or anything else), they are not arbitrary commitments because they can be defended by adducing good reasons for them, and they can

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usually be criticized, and often replaced by ones that are better at whatever task the standards were intended to accomplish. Understanding how and why this is so requires moving from the static and non-evolutionary justificationist framework to a dynamic evolutionary one that is nonjustificational, and does not identify criticism with the attempt to prove truth.

Unfusing Criticism from the Attempt to Prove All that is required is a conception of rationalist identity, a theory of what it means for one to be rational, that is, according to its own formulation, rational. To do this, we simply break the fusion between criticism and proof. The power of the tu quoque argument against justificationist conceptions is broken when the infinite regress of standards of justification is no longer required. One can be critical forever, never shutting off debate, without ever justifying or failing to justify a position or belief. If we redefine the essence of rationality to be in terms of criticism, then it is rational to hold an unjustified belief and even in principle unjustifiable ones, so long as criticism is never arbitrarily cut short. And in the assessment of truth claims in either common-sense reasoning or scientific propositions, there is no possible a priori or definitive specification of what can count as a criticism. What one has to do to criticize a position or a theory is in a broad sense to work within it, to explore and to articulate it and examine as many of its consequences as possible. Whenever possible, this should include the detection and elimination of error—in any empirical realm—but in the case of clashing metaphysical viewpoints, they can be criticized without ever being shown to be factually “false” in the manner in which an empirical proposition can be falsified. That criticism is provided by clashing the metaphysical doctrine with a competing one or with a scientific theory that has extensive empirical support. Being critical is a standing obligation, not algorithmically specified.

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Rationalist Identity Requires no Conception of Commitment We need a more adequate or comprehensively critical conception of rationality. Calling such a comprehensively critical conception of rationality pancritical rationality, Bartley characterized it this way: A pancritical rationalist, like other people, holds countless unexamined presuppositions and assumptions, many of which may be false. His rationality consists in his willingness to submit these to critical consideration when he discovers them or when they are pointed out to him.… When one belief is subjected to criticism, many others, of course, have to be taken for granted-including those with which the criticism is being carried out. The latter are used as the basis of criticism not because they are themselves justified or beyond criticism, but because they are unproblematical at present. These are, in that sense alone and during that time alone, beyond criticism. (1984, pp. 121–122)

Note two things. First, there is no need to be constantly or incessantly critical of everything. This allows the framework of tacit tradition, so necessary for liberalism, to operate. In order to criticize a position, one must inevitably presuppose a large number of positions and assumptions that are not at that time subject to criticism. They may be criticized on their own at another time, but for the purposes of a given criticism they are simply presupposed as part of the framework of that criticism. Anything and everything is potentially subject to criticism, but not all at once. This is the equivalent of “piecemeal tinkering” in the social domain. Second, there is no need for any sort of faith or “uncritical” commitment in this position. Most importantly, there is absolutely no need to be committed to the rational way of life, or to hold an absolute faith in liberalism. Those are empirical issues. They are as subject to criticism as anything else. In point of fact only Friedrich Hayek among the major members of the Austrian economic approach endorsed a position identical to the comprehensively critical or “pancritical” rationalism formulated by

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Bartley. Well aware of the implications of Hume’s refutation of justificationist rationality, and of the social and political theory that he and the Moralists developed, Hayek held that “Though the liberal must claim the right critically to examine every single value or moral rule of his society, he knows that he can and must do this while accepting as given for that purpose most of the other moral values of the society, and examine that about which he has doubts in terms of its compatibility with the rest of the dominant system of values” (Hayek, 1978, p. 298). This philosophical excursus provides a sufficient framework from which to critically assess the views of Karl Popper, one of the staunchest advocates of classical liberalism and the role of tradition within it. Despite having provided the framework in terms of which Bartley (and I) developed non-justificational epistemology and rationality, Popper himself retained a justificationist conception of rationality. Popperian critical rationalism is based upon a faith in rationality. Liberalism cannot survive if it is based only on faith or irrational commitment.

Popperian Critical Rationalism Cannot Adequately Defend Liberalism Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (originally 1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (in 1957) as well as many articles are some of the most influential defenses of classical liberalism in the twentieth century. But his position was based upon a justificationist commitment—of simple faith in rationality—rather than a defense of it: Whoever adopts the rationalist attitude does so because he has adopted, without reasoning, some proposal or decision, or belief, or habit, or behavior, which therefore in its turn must be called irrational. What ever it may be, we can describe it as an irrational faith in reason.… the fundamental rationalist attitude is based upon an irrational decision, or upon faith in reason. (see Popper, 1950, Princeton one volume edition, p. 416)

According to Popper (like Hobbes), our choice is open: freely to choose some form of irrationalism. This is not an adequate “critical”

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rationalism. When Bartley pointed out the superiority of his comprehensively critical (or pancritical) reformulation, Popper made minor changes to the subsequent (the fourth or 1962) edition, but never actually repudiated his faith basis for rationalism. When Bartley subsequently argued that from a non-justificational point of view Popper’s approach to the “demarcation problem” (between science and metaphysics), which had occupied a major part of his professional life and output, was neither crucial nor absolutely necessary, it was too much to bear and Popper excommunicated Bartley from his official circle for nearly a decade. While not as extreme as Max Planck’s comment that “science advances one funeral at a time,” this episode is an indication that feelings and emotions are not banished from intellectual history, but rather are an intrinsic part of it. An interesting extension of this dispute was found in the conversion of Paul Feyerabend’ from his earlier (1962) defenses of Popperian methodology against traditional justificationist building-block views (found in the then dominant position of logical empiricism), through to a realization that Popper’s prescriptivist methodology was inadequate to explicate the rationality of science and its praxis. Feyerabend, like so many, simply assumed that there was a forced choice between his conception of the rationality of science (late 1950s Popperian methodology) on the one hand, and irrationality and chaos on the other. At that point, since he could not find an adequate prescriptive methodological framework for how science should proceed, he abandoned that approach entirely and proposed an “anything goes” anarchistic approach to “method” in its stead (Feyerabend, 1970, 1978) in Against Method . Here, falling into the classic “Either I am right or all is lost,” he proposed the equivalent of libertarian anarchy—arguing that the only defensible methodological rule for the practice of science was that there are no definite rules or framework (see Weimer, 1980). Like other constructivist intellectuals, Feyerabend honestly believed that conscious rationality could impose whatever theoretical and conceptual framework one wanted upon the organization of our nervous systems and upon the organization of society. He felt this issue was purely factual: “whether all principles, including the most esoteric ones, can be incorporated, physically, into our reaction patterns (with possible effect

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upon our perceptions), or whether some such principles are not just ‘too much’ for our organism” (1965b, p. 249). Totally neglecting the tacit dimension of cognition and society, he assumed it was simply a matter of education: “It seems reasonable, then, to assume that a new mode of education whose principles have as yet to be found will make it easier to change points of view, to integrate theories into behavior, and in this way to see the world in terms of such theories” (ibid.). Thus “organizations” at will and with no deleterious effect. Unfortunately, the statement “it seems reasonable, then” is a paraphrase of Thomas Sowell’s characterization of socialism as the attempt to substitute something that seems reasonable—what sounds good—for what works pretty well. While such a “seems reasonable” position may weakly “defend” a genuine anarchism, with no rules other than those specified by momentary Cartesian common sense, they cannot support liberalism at all (and are in fact refuted by it). Liberalism requires precisely the tacit dimensions of neural functioning and grown or spontaneous society that Feyerabend would have us dismiss as irrelevant, as something to be eradicated by (re)education (shades of Brock Chisholm). But cosmic orders function precisely because there is no single locus of control, and no conscious or top-down organization can ever account for the complexity of a cosmos. We cannot simply “rationally reconstruct” either science or society so that it will be better than what it is as a spontaneously arisen or grown institution. The individuals involved in a grown institution are always acting in a framework that is mostly unknown to them. Polanyi was crystal clear about this necessary ignorance of particulars underlying science: The knowledge comprised by science is not known to any single person. Indeed, nobody knows more than a tiny fragment of science well enough to judge its validity and value at first hand. For the rest he has to rely on views accepted at secondhand on the authority of a community of people accredited as scientists. But this accrediting depends in its turn on a complex organization. (Polanyi, 1958, p. 163)

The same holds for society. There will not be any wholesale replacement of what Sellars (1963) called the manifest image of enlightened

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common sense (which is what Feyerabend felt could be “dispensed with”), without reducing all of science and common sense to a conscious taxis. And, if Kuhn’s conception of science (1970, 1977) is correct, entirely taxis-based science would only be normal science puzzle solving, and not revolutionary. Thus, it could not support Feyerabend’s “revolutions in permanence” anarchism. So while Popper’s fidistic commitment to rationality cannot support liberalism against alternative conceptions, Feyerabend’s explicit approach to the failure of justificationist rationality is equally unsatisfactory, and, because of the inescapable and indispensable presence of the tacit dimension, irrational on its own standards.

Polanyi and the Overextension of Authoritarianism No one can deny the effort and importance of Polanyi’s clear presentations of the inevitably destructive effects of totalitarian “planning” in the collectivism of the Soviet Union, nor the brilliance of his documentation of the tacit dimension in the individual and in society, nor his contributions to analyzing possible control structures of complex phenomena. But just as Popper did, Polanyi provided a prescriptive (rather than descriptive) account of the spontaneous orders of science and society. That account requires that we unquestioningly submit to the authority of the order, leaving absolutely no room for the possibility of any corrective effort (or planning) upon the part of the individual in a cosmos. His intent was clear: To accept the pursuit of science as a reasonable and successful enterprise is to share the kind of commitments on which scientists enter by undertaking this enterprise. You cannot formalize the act of commitment, for you cannot express your commitment non-committally. To attempt this is to exercise the kind of lucidity which destroys its subject matter. Hence the failure of the positivist movement in the philosophy of science. The difficulty is to find a stable alternative to its ideal of objectivity. (1969, p. 59)

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Instead of repudiating justificationism, Polanyi relocated the epistemological authority from explicit rational assessment procedures (as in logical positivism and logical empiricism) to the tacit dimension of social interaction. The authoritarian structure of research became for him an ultimate standard or authority. Submission to consensus on the basis of passionate personal commitment is the essence of science for Polanyi. The possibility of criticizing and improving this authoritarian structure was never considered, because of both the tacit nature of the consensus and the tacit nature of the individual’s affiliation to that structure’s framework: Where there is criticism what is being criticized is, every time, the assertion of an articulate form. It is our personal acceptance of an articulate form that is judged to have been critical or uncritical. In the sense just specified, tacit knowing cannot be critical.… systematic forms of criticism can be applied only to articulate forms.… tacit acts are judged by other standards and are to be regarded accordingly as a-critical . (1958, p. 264)

So Polanyi asserted a “fiduciary program” for a “post-critical” philosophy that acknowledged that belief, rather than reason, is the source of all knowledge. In the “critical” philosophical age, belief was no longer to be a higher power that reveals knowledge lying beyond the range of observation and reason, but merely personal acceptance. This falls well short of empirical and rational demonstrability. “Here lies the break by which the critical mind repudiated one of its two cognitive faculties and tried completely to rely on the remainder.… All belief was reduced to the status of subjectivity: to that of an imperfection by which knowledge fell short of universality” (ibid., p. 266). The key point is that for Polanyi, belief is a “higher” power than “objective” reason, one that “reveals” knowledge. (We encountered a similar view with respect to the higher-as-equal-to-initial power of judgmental inference within the passions—or emotions—in Solomon’s [1983] account in chapter 5). This sort of fideism in belief characterizes every religion and is one reason why secular individuals want to “replace” grown institutions—they think they are as irrational as religion.

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Here, Polanyi tied criticism to the explicit dimension of rationality and therefore asserted that the tacit dimension of individual knowledge and social praxis (such as science) destroys “critical” conceptions. He never considered that criticism could be redefined outside the justificationist framework. His conclusion as a skeptical justificationist was thus inevitable: the so-called post-critical philosophy simply abandoned objectivity for belief. Here we have Polanyi’s new religion. This is the liberation from objectivism: to realize that we can voice our ultimate “convictions” only from within our convictions—“from within the whole system of acceptances that are logically prior to the holding of any particular piece of knowledge” (1958, p. 267). Polanyi decided to treat an indispensable aspect of human knowledge as beyond criticism. He did so because of his own “tacit” identification of criticism with the justificationist-constructivist concept of explicit reasoning. He offered no theory of why tacit knowing should be acritical—he merely asserted that it is, which means only that it is not critical according to justificationist canons of rationality. Thus, while a staunch advocate of liberalism and the tacit dimension, he remained a skeptical critical rationalist committed to a “post-critical” position because of a faith in the priority of tacit processes. He did so to restore to us once more “the power for the deliberate holding of unproven beliefs” (ibid., p. 268). While we can agree with that intention (there is no possibility of “proof ” in any empirical domain, so belief is always “unproven”), it is necessary to argue, against Polanyi, that it can be done only in a nonjustificational framework that breaks the identification of criticism with the attempt to prove.

The Physical Is Neither Functional Nor a Priori Chapters 1 and 2 overviewed differences between the sorts of knowledge we can achieve in the “simple” physical domains and how that is different from what we can hope to come to know about things in the realms of spontaneously ordered complex phenomena. We noted differences between explanations of the principle as opposed to the particular, the impossibility of experimentation (as that is defined in

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physical science studies) in the life sciences and psychological and social domains, the limitations of and upon measurement, the superior power of negative rules in both constraining and explaining complexity, the limits of linear accounts of complex phenomena (when compared to hierarchical, polycentric, and coalitional control structures), and hinted at the inevitable historical determination of living organisms (subjects as opposed to objects), as well as the inevitable semiotic or functional nature of those subjects. With that material presupposed as background, we must discuss what is untenable in the position of one of the most famous Austrian economics theorists, Ludwig von Mises. Harking back to the long discredited notion of science as axiomatic, as starting from a priori true premises, Mises wanted to make economics as a science into an a priori discipline which he called praxeology, in order to disclose inexorable “laws” of human nature. In so doing, he confused the timeless or rate-independent realm of human cognition (and its products) with the rate-dependent dynamical realm of things that behave within time. Throughout, his analysis depended upon the constructivist view that reason (with a R) could disclose the complete nature and content of economic theory (“laws” of human nature and thus action) in this timeless world. His defense of an a priorist approach began with an obvious point: exploring the available content of a theory (postulate set) does indeed provide “new” (i.e., not yet articulated) knowledge of its consequences in so doing: Nobody would contend that geometry in general and the theorem of Pythagoras in particular do not enlarge our knowledge.… The significant task of aprioristic reasoning is on the one hand to bring into relief all that is implied in the categories, concepts, and premises and, on the other hand, to show what they do not imply. (1966, p. 38)

This point was later explored by Kirzner, who expanded our knowledge (by economic analysis of its structure) of how normal science exploits the circle of ignorance around its puzzle solving traditions. But Mises then moved to an untenable position, confusing contentless mathematics with content filled empirical science: the theorems attained by

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correct praxeological reasoning “are not only perfectly certain and incontestable, like the correct mathematical theorems. They refer, moreover, with the full rigidity of their apodictic certainty and incontestability to the reality of action as it appears in life and history. Praxeology conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things” (ibid., 39). This could only be considered to be true if one grants certain presuppositions, which simply do not hold in the real world. First, the “certainty” will obtain only because the system is contentless, like mathematics, and thus cannot tell us anything “new” about real things (or indeed, anything at all about real things unless there is an independent theory specifying how the contentless system relates or attaches to that reality). It is at best a series of definitions. The only possible “new content” would be limited to the unpacking of tautologies—statements of semantic equivalence that have been built into the system before anyone draws any conclusions within it. Mises admitted as much. The starting point of praxeology is not a “choice of axioms and a decision about methods of procedure, but reflection about the essence of action” (ibid., p. 39). But what, and where, is the “essence of action?” Mises saw this as unproblematic. If we didn’t have this in our mind (the schemes provided by praxeological reasoning), we should never be in a position to discern and to grasp any action. “We would perceive motions, but neither buying or selling, nor prices, wage rates, interest rates, and so on” (ibid., p. 40). And later he said every attempt to reflect upon the problems raised by human action is “necessarily bound to aprioristic reasoning.… Whether the interpretation is considered satisfactory or unsatisfactory depends on the appreciation of the theories in question (ibid., p. 40),” which were established beforehand on the ground of aprioristic reasoning. So at this point, Mises has talked himself into a circle: economic theory is an aprioristic theory, which means that it is given in advance, and it depends for its acceptance upon that theory having been accepted in advance. That means that the whole system is nothing but a bundle of definitional fusions and confusions hanging in some conceptual space, and cannot as such be empirical or provide any actual novel empirical content, nor indeed can it be applied to empirical content in any manner at all without the provision of correspondence rules (as the logical empiricists

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called them) between the a priori definitions and actual results. What is missing from praxeology is any possible way of tying the a priori praxeological axioms (known to be found only in Mises’ head) to empirical reality. There is nothing within praxeology that does that. It is only in light of Mises’ particular Cartesian intuition, which must stand outside (uncritically accepted as a given) the natural order and make such a judgment, that his approach (as opposed to an equally “praxeological” approach by Joe Smith or Charlie Brown) is to be taken as definitive. Mises simply put his a priori approach beyond the possibility of criticism and was thus as guilty of a retreat to commitment in his faith as were Popper, Polanyi, and all the others who are dependent upon a justificationist conception of knowledge and its acquisition. Can we make sense of what Mises was attempting to do without relying upon the Euclidean approach to a priorism that was abandoned in all the rest of science after Heinrich Hertz noted that simple postulation of initial premises was all that was necessary to account for how science really operates? When Mises was trying to explain this, he confused the axiomatic nature of a theory and its logical consequences with empirical reasoning about a theory’s domain (in this case, human action). Clearly Mises was also noting the difference between physical and functional phenomena, but apparently knew no other way to state that difference than to completely isolate the functional realm by moving it into an a priori domain. He was correct that functionally defined concepts, such as human action, can never be exhaustively specified by a single physical description—and vice versa, because an exhaustive physical specification of movement alone can never define a single functional action concept. Functional action is always ambiguous from the standpoint of physical specification—a given functional concept can always be realized by an indefinitely large number of physically specified space–time movements, and as already noted, a given series of physical movements can instantiate numerous functional categories (see Weimer, 1984, 2020, 2021, 2022, for a fuller discussion of this). So the meaning of any action is always and inherently ambiguous. And that alone makes Misean praxeology inherently ambiguous and incomplete. Likewise, on Mises’ account, there is only a finite set of categories of actions, all of which are present already in his axiomatic “science,” so

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there can never be any new category of act in the future. Like behaviorism and finite state grammars, there is no possibility of creativity allowed into the Misean system. Likewise, there can be no unintended consequences of actions that are in themselves productive of new actions. Everything has to be “contained” before one can draw conclusions. So praxeology must remain pre-evolutionary and finite, and opposed to the tacit dimension, creativity, and spontaneous ordering of society. To reply to this, Mises had only this sort of response available: “The experience of complex phenomena....can never,...prove or disprove any particular theorem....The ultimate yardstick of an economic theorem’s correctness or incorrectness is solely reason unaided by experience....The economist can never refute the economic cranks and quacks in the way in which the doctor refutes the medicine man and the charlatan” (ibid., pp. 862–863). This is an ultimate form of the retreat to commitment that Bartley showed is neither necessary nor unavoidable, either in economics or anywhere in the intellectual realm. While Mises was correct to argue that economics is not experimental in the manner in which physics is, he was completely incorrect in assuming that if science was not experimental it must be, like mathematics, a priori and axiomatic or “certain.” Despite understanding how functional economic and social phenomena were different from physical phenomena, he had no awareness that there was an evolutionary approach to epistemology and complex phenomena that was empirical but not experimental, and which did not lapse into the primitivism of an axiomatic a priorism.4 There is much in the voluminous writing of Mises that is compatible with classical liberalism, especially in the monumental Human Action. But that substantive contribution stands orthogonal to and independent from the Cartesian constructivism of his overarching praxeological approach.

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The Anarchism of the Right Is Just as Untenable as the Anarchism of the Left Discussion in Volume 1 chapters noted that Chomsky, as an anarchistic socialist, is representative of the leftist approach to a total laissez-faire “libertarian” (or, for Rousseau, libertine) form of anarchism. The term “libertarian” is most often associated with the right, popularized by writings of Murray Rothbard and his associates. Rothbard was another rationalist constructivist who defended (some of ) the principles of a liberal social order mainly from outside the academic environment, as a “pamphleteer” like Saint-Simon and later the quasi-academic Russell had defended socialism—largely as a populist outsider. Rothbard adopted Mises’ approach to economics as an axiomatic a priorism, endorsing praxeology, vitriolically opposing mathematical and statistical attempts to make a hard or physical science out of economic research. What anarchists or extreme laissez-faire theorists on either end of the spectrum—of collectivism or property rights—have in common is the complete inability to understand that liberty—and thus freedom no matter how defined —cannot exist except within the framework of a context of constraints that regulates the ongoing functioning, or the order, of society. We all—every member of society—want to be free from any unnecessary constraints. That is a given. What is at issue is only what constitutes necessary constraints for the functioning of a liberal social order. The context of constraint—the rules of order that keep the peace of society and allow the ongoing order to continue to exist —is incompatible with complete “laissez-faire” or lack of constraint, whether on the left or on the right. There is no possibility of having a society that actually exists and continues to function in which “freedom” is defined by a total lack of restraint beyond the central idea upon which the position is based. Such a position, whether based upon a liberal or a collectivist philosophy, would guarantee an immediate and inevitable slide back into the Hobbesian position of life being “nasty, brutish, and short.” Not only does social order itself emerge from an evolutionary context within a framework of rules, but the rules themselves have emerged through that process of evolution, and cannot be arbitrarily removed and replaced. While Chomsky

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continually failed to see that his desideratum of the fullest development of the individual and the society—the flowering of productivity or creativity as his analysis of language has disclosed—cannot possibly occur within the confines of a socialist taxis directed to fulfill particular ends (any more than it can be explained by a finite state grammar), it is absolutely necessary to acknowledge that one must include in the liberal position the context of constraint provided by the rules that “keep the peace of the order.” Analogously, Rothbard and his associates failed to see that their otherwise excellent defenses of the centrality of property rights cannot alone provide the basis for a free society without also requiring the constraints which allow property to function. That position would be akin to the rationalist attempting to be constantly critical of all positions at once, which would result in no effective action (critical or otherwise) at all. Property rights require a functioning context of constraints in order to exist at all (and thus to function). While private property is indispensable—for the growth of knowledge and for the growth of wealth and well-being—it alone is not sufficient to provide a framework for social order. Property is one pillar (an indispensable one) of a free society, but not the only one. Additional rules of order must simultaneously be evolved and function alongside property as an aspect of social order and structure (as is developed more fully in Chapter 8). An analogy can be made to trying to be totally conscious and explicitly rational at all times, with no acknowledgment of the tacit dimension of neural processing that underlies and thus precedes all conscious activity. One must have both at once. Both the individual and the society require the sort of tacit framework that all grown institutions do, and while these structures may be in many instances the result of deliberate human action, they can never be entirely the result of explicit or conscious design. That was the message of Ferguson (1767), in emphasizing the results of human action but not design. Rothbard thought that this tacit framework could be pared down to a bare minimum in property, which did not include most of the factors we have discussed in previous chapters or the points summarized in the next chapter (note the similarity to Feyerabend, but also the crucial difference of retaining the indispensability of property, whereas Feyerabend retained nothing). From this, he developed a prescriptive methodology for the

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achievement of the liberal agenda. Rothbard built his system on what was called the “nonaggression axiom”: “that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else” (1985, p. 23).“ One should note that this is not in fact an axiom—it is not a self-evident truth. It functions only as a postulate in his theory, as an initial premise, and that is all. Calling this an “axiom” is necessary only if this is to be a praxeological (a priori) system. Rothbard adopted this “axiom” to combat a deadly enemy—he saw an “overriding aggressor” against property rights in the state with a capital S. The dragon he must slay to defend the libertarian position is the state: While opposing any and all private or group aggression against the rights of person and property, the libertarian sees that throughout history and into the present day, there has been one central, dominant, and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights: the state. In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the state the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. (ibid., p. 24)

Wishing to do away with the coercive power of the state (or of the inevitable bureaucracy that a state imposes) while defending property rights and liberty, he became an anarcho-capitalist. In place of the state, he wanted voluntary cooperation (based upon deliberate acceptance of his “axiom”) in an anarchist society. He did not seem to understand that protection from the state would require a stable framework of law and sufficient “coercive” power within the remainder of society as a dynamical structure to protect the individual who was to exercise his or her property rights. He noted that this required law to protect against aggression, but never seemed to comprehend what that framework of law meant or required. Voluntary cooperation is conduct between individuals, but that alone is not equivalent to the impersonal institution of the rule of law. Rothbard defined anarchist society as one in which there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely the expropriation of private

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property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights (in “Society without a State” in The Libertarian Forum, 1975).

If this is the goal—elimination of the state as much as possible— should we approach it gradually, in a series of small steps (as Popper and Hayek have advocated) which would allow us to check to see whether or not those steps had deleterious effects on the spontaneous order and hence provide us with an opportunity to correct them, or should we go whole hog and, like the revolutionaries in France who went after the monarchy with swords and guillotines, not be afraid to shed as much blood as they could? On this point, he tried to walk what he perceived to be a middle road: One of the reasons that the conservative opposition to collectivism has been so weak is that conservatism, by its very nature, offers not a consistent political philosophy but only a “practical” defense of the existing status quo, enshrined as embodiments of the American “tradition.”… The libertarian must never advocate or prefer a gradual, as opposed to an immediate and rapid, approach to his goal. (1985, pp. 301–302)

The first sentence above places him squarely with Hayek—conservatism fails because it has only opposition to change to offer. But the second sentence, in favor of total rejection of less than immediately jumping to full property rights-based liberalism (parallel to Feyerabend’s rejection of all tradition in favor of revolutions in permanence), is what is really at issue. Rothbard, exactly like Feyerabend, felt that change could and therefore should be immediate and “all or none” in fashion. That is constructivism, and constructivism at its worst. From the standpoint of evolution, it is simply not possible. Next he argued, against Hayek, that such a position does not make him a “utopian,” claiming the true utopian is one who advocates a system that is contrary to the natural law of human beings and of the real world: “A utopian system is one that could not work even if everyone were persuaded to try to put it into practice” (ibid., p. 303). Once again, there

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is mention of natural law (based upon natural rights) and human structure and organization, but no discussion of what that natural law would actually require in terms of presuppositions. And left unaddressed is the issue that social organization, because of its inevitable tacit dimensions, is not, and can never be, based solely upon explicit rational “persuasion.” If one understands the message of prior chapters, Rothbard’s position is indeed utopian, precisely because it is contrary to the way in which spontaneously organized complex phenomena, such as our central nervous systems and the society at large, are organized and function. It is exactly as anti-evolutionary and utopian as Chomsky’s position. Grown spontaneous institutions cannot continue to function (and thus to exist) independently of the context of constraints necessary to support them. It simply is not possible to make nearly instant and total changes (any more so than it would be for Feyerabend to dismiss the manifest image entirely), because it is not possible for an explicit taxis to satisfactorily replace a largely tacit cosmos that has many conflicting taxis components. It is equally not possible for such a wholesale change to occur if one considers the power of the gut and autonomic nervous system (as in Chapter 5) against all aspects of the abstract society we have been in for only several thousands of years—no one is going to explicitly endorse anything so frightening and lacking in the comfort of a well-defined replacement framework as the anarcho-capitalist position would appear to be to most people. Rothbard did not see himself as a leftist utopian. He felt that leftists invariably postulate a drastic change in the nature of man: “to the left, man has no nature. The individual is supposed to be infinitely malleable by his institutions,…” (ibid., p. 304). In contrast, he felt that the libertarian believes that, in the ultimate analysis, every individual has (like Feyerabend) free will and thus molds themselves. It is therefore folly to put hope in a uniform and drastic change in people brought about by the projected socialist new order: “The libertarian system is one that will at once be far more moral and work much better than any other, given any existing human values and attitudes” (ibid. p. 304). But this is, as with Feyerabend’s thesis, an empirical issue: it is not one that can be endorsed without adequate understanding of human psychological functioning

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and a knowledge of the evolutionary genesis and functioning of spontaneous social orders (such as society). To the constructivist mentality, seeing everything as a matter of deliberate conscious choices and decisions in the present moment, it may appear that this anarchistic position is reasonable and possible to attain—Rothbard is clearly correct that one cannot expect a total blank slate approach to somehow overcome human nature and social organization. But his conception of human nature as explicitly rational is just another form of utopian fantasy. The empirical issue concerns what factors must be taken into account as necessary accompaniments or co-occurrences for any possible form of social organization (liberal, anarchistic, or whatever). When one does that, Rothbard’s position is no more tenable than that of the blank slate leftist libertarian.5 Indeed, it is all but indistinguishable from it. Both are equally utopian and thus outside the realm of practical achievement in the real world. Better to do as Hayek did: hold the principles of liberalism—which are essentially negative prohibitions to certain classes of action—up for all who want to examine them to see and understand (and in so doing to be able to criticize and, hopefully, improve), and then undertake limited repair work (directed toward preservation and defense of those negative rules of action) to attempt to create the conditions in which progress toward those ideals might be able to occur rather than to attempt to plan the particulars of immediate implementation of such ideals. In the absence of having the powers of a Laplacian demon, we cannot immediately institute any ideal state, whether liberal or tribal. Parenthetically, we may note that Walter Block, whose views are discussed in the next section, argued with Rothbard for attempting to implement a liberal approach immediately. He sees (Block, 2019) no reason not to argue for an immediate transition based upon a clear understanding of the centrality of property rights and thus argues against any gradualism or extended transition period being needed. Nevertheless, in a Wall Street Journal editorial letter, he chastised his libertarian colleagues for voting for the Democratic candidate in the 2020 US presidential election because even though the candidate in the opposition party may have been personally otiose, that party as a whole better represented the libertarian position, and would have been more likely to foster

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its goals. Thus, even those who wish, like Feyerabend in wanting to bypass the manifest image, or Rothbard and Block, to immediately institute a revolution, are forced by admission of actual circumstances to be gradualists. This is not accidental—there is neither a theoretical nor practical alternative. That is because the context of constraints necessary to support a cosmos—such as present society—cannot be ignored in favor of a restricted conscious directive. Cartesian “common sense” does not work, no matter who claims to possess it. A crucial point to discuss concerns the nature and extent of human “free will” in relation to education and the clash between gradualist versus revolutionary attempts at change. If, as I have argued throughout, we do in fact have free will and can “control” our voluntary action, then what determines the limits of that voluntary control and its ability to change ourselves and our society? At what point do we have to acknowledge the operation of, and superior power of, tacit stabilizing processes and the interplay of opponent processes in complex orders? Haven’t we had periods of what S. J. Gould (Gould & Eldredge, 1972, 1977) called punctuated equilibrium, instances of evolution that were not continuous and gradual but which evidenced seemingly qualitative changes? Can’t this be used to support a revolution that would bring about liberalism now? Rothbard used that argument to explain the failure of later nineteenth-century liberalism because ignoring the fact that liberalism had to break through the power of authoritarian elites, the social Darwinists became conservatives, “preaching against any radical measures and in favor of only the most minutely gradual of changes” (ibid., p. 17). And in a footnote he referred explicitly to Gould, arguing that modern evolutionary theory is coming to abandon “completely” the theory of gradual evolutionary change. Instead, it now perceives that a far more accurate picture is “sharp and sudden flips from one static species equilibrium to another; this is being called the theory of ‘punctuation of change’” (ibid., p. 17). On the face of it, this sounds like a “scientific” reinstatement of Feyerabend’s doctrine of revolutions in permanence. If evolution is really sometimes revolutionary, then we should be able to change society in a similar, revolutionary rather than evolutionary, fashion. But what the punctuated equilibrium approach in evolutionary theory really showed was that evolution, as a spontaneously ordered complex phenomenon, is subject to opponent process regulation. It,

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like the cybernetic helmsman, tacks back and forth between opposed constraints. And depending upon the time period involved in our observations of the swing from side to side considerable change can be in evidence. The issue of “straight line” versus “revolution” is entirely one of scale: in relatively short timescales, such as in a generation or two, evolutionary change appears to be gradual (even invisible), as it also does in the straight line effect of extremely long timescales. It is only in more intermediate length temporal periods that revolutionary episodes (swings to a new tack) can be clearly discerned. So since revolutionary change is a scale-dependent phenomenon, it neither supports nor refutes the idea that social change can be consciously directed to rapid deviations from apparent continuity. One must examine arguments that would specify factors involved in the temporal periods of such “revolutions.” Libertarians have not done this. They need to come to grips with the opponent process regulation noted above. William James changed fundamentally every day (as his brother Henry emphasized), but in turn William emphasized that our habitual structures (an early reference to the tacit dimension and the context of constraint) are an indispensable flywheel for society. There is no real opposition or incompatibility in holding both views.6

Block on Property Rights Versus Friedman and Hayek Walter Block began a book with two sentences that the classic liberal must be in agreement with: “Private property rights are the bedrock not only of the economy but of civilization itself. They may not be a sufficient condition to justice and prosperity, but they are certainly a necessary condition” (Block, 2019, p. xiii). Earlier chapters have argued that knowledge and civilization as we know it presuppose property rights. And I fully agree that they are necessary but not sufficient conditions for a liberal social order. But how far can one push an explicit rationalist libertarian conception of private property against interventionist doctrines? And what are “interventions?” More importantly, what distinctions must be drawn between interventions in a “free market

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order” and those constraints which are necessary for the functioning of the complex orders of both the individual nervous system and of society? How does one differentiate between interventions and constraints? As a libertarian “property anarchist” Block argues that necessary constraints upon the functioning of spontaneous orders are in fact unnecessary interventions, and are residual socialist or totalitarian doctrines grafted upon the basic principle7 (Is this basic principle only property rights, or is it property rights plus the Rothbard axiom?) of the liberal social order. He regards the context of constraints that the Moralists were well aware of as external, as state or government interventions that unnecessarily restrict freedom. For the limited government, free enterprise-oriented classical liberal, there is only one type of entitlement the citizen may properly receive from the state: security of his person and property. This entitlement entails an army to protect them from foreign despots, a police force to shield him from domestic villains, and a court system to determine who is and who is not an initiator of violence against another person or his property. Any and all other entitlements are illegitimate—at least from the perspective of this economic philosophy. (ibid., p. 19)

(Below we must distinguish between rights and entitlements (it should be obvious that security of your person is not an “entitlement” but rather a prerequisite of civil society)—which evidence the distinction between constraints and interventions—but consider whether a government is to protect a right or munificently provide an entitlement.) Following the praxeological tradition of Mises and Rothbard, Block proposes an axiomatic system against the empirical postulational theory of spontaneous social organization developed by the Moralists, Hayek, and these volumes. Block views such an axiomatic framework as necessary to support (i.e., to justify) the market order: One searches in vain for a principal , such as the non-aggression axiom of libertarianism, which would serve as a rudder with which to steer the ship of political-economic philosophy. As a matter of fact Hayek specifically renounces the possibility of a principal: “ There is nothing in the basic

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principles of liberalism to make it a stationary creed: there are no hardand-fast rules fixed once and for all.” Not only is there no principle, he specifically singles out free enterprise as precisely the wrong path: “Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rough rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire.” Lacking such an axiom or postulate, Hayek needlessly weakens his case for the market (ibid., p. 45).

Granting that terms such as “principle” and “stationary creed” are used ambiguously in economics and philosophy (and in this quotation), it is still necessary to distinguish between axiomatic closed systems built upon alleged definitionally self-evident truths (i.e., systems which presuppose so-called a priori truths) and scientific theories, which, although postulational, remain hypothetical and empirical, and thus subject to correction. The essence of that distinction is the difference between rigidly planned specifics for planning progress, and establishing the conditions in which, if it is to occur, it will be able to occur. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek attempted to state this contrast simply as the attitude of the liberal toward society “is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions” (Hayek, 1944, p. 18). Operating from a rationalist constructivist position, Block interprets this not as it was intended, as an attempt to, as Hayek said, “create the conditions most favorable to its growth,” but as exhibiting a central planning mentality. There is absolutely no central planning involved, because what is under discussion is the context of constraint, the rules of order, which allows a spontaneous order to function. It is the individual who must be knowledgeable, not any central powers. Neither Hayek nor I advocate prescriptions of particulars—central planning of results—in the liberal society. What we argue is that it is absolutely necessary to have a stable and essentially tacit framework of expectations in terms of which “principles” such as equal freedom under the rule of law and equality of opportunity can be allowed to function. As a Misean constructivist, Block can only see this as meaning that Hayek meant “People are like chess pieces, to be moved around the board at the behest

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of the relatively all-knowing chess master” (Block, 2019, p. 45). Hopefully, there is enough content in previous chapters to indicate that Block’s interpretation is exactly the opposite of what Hayek actually proposed. As a classical liberal Hayek was well aware of what Adam Smith had said about “the man of system” and categorically denied any attempt to force individuals into uniform chess pieces (objects) being moved around on a taxis board (see the discussion at the end of Chapter 7 of Volume 1). In an exchange of letters with Milton Friedman (Chapter 5 in Block, 2019), Friedman accused Block of being a fanatic and not reasonable (please see also the epigram from Hume at the beginning of this chapter). Clearly, Block thought he was being reasonable. How do we explain these two different conceptions of rationality? From the standpoint of pancritical rationalism, with the acknowledgment that anything at all can be criticized but that not everything can be criticized at once, with its compatibility with an understanding of the constraints imposed upon spontaneous complex structures in order for them to function at all, Block’s explicit rationalist variation of justificationist rationality is at best somewhere between the classical theory (what Bartley called comprehensive rationality) and a variant of critical rationalism. As such, Friedman was perfectly correct to call his position fanatical. While there is much to criticize in specific formulations proposed by both Hayek and Friedman,8 they are not wrong on the central points discussed here. One cannot confuse conditions necessary for the operation of society—the context of constraints necessary for the existence of an impersonal society—with interventions imposed by some external source such as coercive government upon those systems. Those constraints are part of the tacit evolutionary history of humanity and, for society, the result of human action but not design. We are the products of that evolutionary matrix. It is as Hayek said: we did not deliberately make our morals and our rules of conduct, we are the products of their operation. We have become what we are without any conscious understanding or deliberate choices of how that occurred.

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Causality: Polanyi Showed Us That Life (and Cognition) “Harnesses” Physicality A central point of liberalism is that freedom entails that one be “free to choose.” And as such, phrases like this seem to play into the hands of a libertarian position. We need to see that that is not so. As I have repeatedly noted, freedom requires a context of constraint in order to exist. But what if this freedom of choice is illusory, and we are, after all, physically determined in our behavior, as, for instance, Skinner held in arguing that we are controlled by schedules of reinforcement, regardless of whether we know it or want it? (We can neglect asking Skinner how he knew he was determined, or how he had chosen to think one could choose a schedule of reinforcement for one’s own control.) How do we defend the ability to exercise free will in the face of a deterministic approach to science? To answer that, we need look no farther than the title of the classic paper by Dickinson S. Miller (writing under the pseudonym of R. E. Hobart) entitled “Free Will As Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It.” Miller pointed out that for free will to exist it entailed that an individual, a subject of conceptual activity, was responsible for his or her own choice of activity. And we need to emphasize that he specified “determination” and not determinism. The notion of determinism has been modeled upon the “simple” idea of billiard balls striking billiard balls and in so doing “causing” the struck ball to move in a fashion that it was not doing prior to that impact. This presupposes that the entities— the balls themselves—are conceptually and physically independent of one another, and that determinism involves the impression upon one ball of a “force” transferred from another ball upon impact. But the real world has never allowed those presuppositions to be true. The empirical world is always probabilistic and never deterministic (see Chapter 2, especially the section “Of clocks and clouds, determinism and determination”). We exist in the rate-dependent realm, and the conceptual idea of determinism exists only as a concept within the rate-independent realm of our cognition. So the relationship between events in the real world is determinate and not deterministic. Thus, our question becomes “How can subjects of conceptual activity, who exist in a determinate framework of

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physical phenomena, bring about or “cause” their own functional wishes, intentions, desires (or whatever) to change the physical universe?” In short, we arrive at Polanyi’s fundamental question: “How does life harness physicality?” It does so by imposing higher order semiotic or functional constraints upon the determinate laws of physics. (This is what Mises tried but failed to state in distinguishing physical from functional in the concept of action.) Polanyi (in 1968, reprinted in 1969) was the first to note that higher order constraints such as cognition operate, through the process of downward causation emphasized by Campbell (1974a, 1974b), that has occurred in populations of organisms through long time spans over multiple generations.9 Those higher order constraints—our cognition as noted in functional concepts such as our intentions, needs, and desires— take determinate control of the physically specifiable “laws of nature” that govern the movement of our bodies as physical objects in the space– time manifold. While we cannot violate the laws of nature (by definition nothing can), we can (because through evolution we have developed higher order constraints that we label but do not explain by calling them our cognitive capacities) exercise choice control over our thought and the movements of our bodies. In so doing, we have brought about changes in the otherwise physically determinate occurrences on our planet. We have created all our knowledge, all our technology and material goods, and as a result have physically transformed the surface layers of our planet and the space around it. We, as subjects of conceptual activity, choose what to do (within only the constraints imposed by the physical laws of nature). We cannot fly as birds do. But we can look at how birds fly and come up with the Magnus effect (which shows how the physical movement of the atmosphere around an airfoil causes the lift that enables a bird or an airplane to fly) and we can then control physicality and build an airplane. Living systems such as human beings are functional rather than purely or solely physical, because they are in fact capable of exercising choice control (Abel, 2010, 2011). As Friedman noted, we are indeed free to choose. It is at this point that the interaction of our cognitive capabilities as individuals with the structure of society has, as a result of human action but not design, allowed the market order to come into existence. Schedules of reinforcement may

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constrain our existence in specifiable circumstances, but we are perfectly capable of choosing whether or not to allow them to otherwise control our behavior (indeed, see Brewer, 1974, for a refutation of the idea of “conditioning” being an unconscious process). Our cognition does not require that we be controlled by a schedule of reinforcement any more than it is required to follow a doctrine called determinism. We are free to choose because it is we as functional subjects of conceptual activity who constrain physical phenomena. As functionality, we harness physicality, and physicality alone does not “cause” our, or any living thing’s, behavior.

A Case Study: Pushing Change Too Fast and Hard It is informative to consider what happened to Great Britain and the United States in the late 1970s and through the 1980s with respect to attempts to implement liberal principles. As a result of the welfare mentality in conjunction with the power of the printing press to supply fiat money to paper over problems, both countries faced rampant inflation caused by the excess money supply and the lack of any increase in growth in real wealth to begin to neutralize it. Since both countries had majorities raised in the tradition (as Friedman had called it in Free to Choose) of cradle-to-grave socialism, the masses in both countries knew nothing to do except call for more governmental control and more printing press money to combat the problem of stagflation. In the United States, the presidency of Jimmy Carter (1976–1980), who was the equivalent of a Fred Rogers—a well-meaning bureaucrat who tried to personally oversee all aspects of governmental and economic functioning—when faced with the OPEC oil crisis, had inflation that was conservatively measured in the double digits. In the UK, there was a labor Prime Minister (James Callahan) from 1976 to 1979, who likewise could not cope with OPEC and stagflation. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the one and only classic liberal Prime Minister in the last century (if Churchill is not counted), came to power in Britain, and in 1980,

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Ronald Reagan won the first of two terms as president in the United States. Both leaders immediately began to institute essential aspects of liberal policy to begin to bring inflation under control and to allow the private sector of the economy to grow (the latter by attempting to remove shackles imposed upon economic activity to favor labor and unions over “capitalist” owners and investors). Both leaders publicly advocated for a return to liberal principles and painted socialism as a disastrous throwback, an atavism from the past. Both leaders chose to fight inflation by raising the interest rate (through central bank increases) in order to cool down economies that were “overheated’ by excessive borrowing. The thinking that had guided “business” leaders in periods of high inflation is that it was always cheaper to borrow paper money now—with the promise to pay it back in the future—when in that future, as a result of the interim debasement of the currency by inflation, it would be worth much less than the face value of the money borrowed in the present. Governments have employed this policy for centuries: issue long-term debt instruments at relatively low fixed rates in order to raise money today, and pay it back “tomorrow” at face value at a cost that was actually far less than that face value because the passage of time, in conjunction with rampant inflation, would have made the paper worth much less than its face value when it was borrowed. Thus, the government wins because it gets to pay back a debt at what looks like “full value,” but actually is less, and the bureaucrats who instituted the policy get off Scot free because they have long since retired from government service. So both leaders took the same tack with regard to inflation: raise interest rates to slow the economy down and force out the borrowers who were not in fact investing to produce growth in the economy. The iron lady was uncompromising, and it got to the point where her own “conservative” party members would no longer back her, because the constituents they represented complained too loudly that they were suffering too much. As a result, she was forced to resign (with the job only half done) the Prime Ministership in 1979 and left politics. With subsequent lackluster successive “conservative” leadership that effectively abandoned liberal principles in favor of appeasement, Britain’s position as a world leader has slowly declined into the twenty-first century with

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the pendulum swing back to the socialist-Labour Party. Today, its residents literally know nothing except how “wonderful” their government handouts are, and wish for larger ones, not realizing they are the ones paying for them and simultaneously increasing the size of the otherwise totally nonproductive bureaucracy that must administer them. In contrast, Reagan, a skilled orator (as an ex-actor), succeeded in presenting an optimistic vision for the future (without specifying any exact details or particulars to be achieved) in a more “capitalistic” society, and managed to deflect the blame for painfully high interest rates (at one point they exceeded 20%) to the unelected bureaucrat, Paul Volcker. To his credit, Volcker understood that inflation had to be brought under control, and indeed, it is, to his credit, by any historical standards extremely low coming into the third decade of the twenty-first century. As a result of these differences, Reagan is respected today while Thatcher, misunderstood and unappreciated, is largely reviled. This episode is a classic example of why the Rothbard-Block approach will fail. Faced with the inertia of the various masses of society, one cannot change everything overnight. The weight of tradition (no matter how short it is) combined with our gut and the concomitant anxiety will overrule the best of intentions. This episode also illustrates the dangers inherent in an unelected bureaucracy that actually runs the country largely independently of the “elected” representatives in government. The greatest danger to liberty of the last centuries has been the growth of totally dominant and largely independent central banking systems. National and international economic policy in the Western world is now set more by central bankers than by elected officials. These are some of the “men of zeal” that Justice Brandeis warned us about. While we can occasionally get a good one (who will recognize and attempt to control inflation, for example), one is more likely to get a neo, or a neo-neo-Keynesian interventionist who feels that they have been designated dictator to control the money supply in such fashion that it accomplishes momentarily socially acceptable purposes and favors certain productive factors over others. And since these bureaucrats are not elected, they are simply not subject to the checks and balances of being in a representative government. A central banking system that has been disconnected from reality, the basis of

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money in commodities that are valued for their use—whether as a basket of commodities or as a single one such as gold or silver—cannot be tied to the wealth of a nation. Since it costs the bankers nothing to print paper money, there is no intrinsic check upon doing so, and the inevitable result of printing press money programs is to debase the value of the currency that everyone held before the presses went into operation. This is why everything costs more, while everyone has less. You are wealthier on “paper,” but poorer in fact.

Notes 1. The justificationist metatheory of inference and rationality. What follows is a compressed summary of material more adequately developed elsewhere (Bartley, 1984; Weimer, 1975, 1979). It is necessary to include it here because it outlines the inadequacy of the epistemology and theory of rationality underlying nearly all variants of traditional philosophy, and for our purposes especially the various philosophies of liberalism and its opponents (including any rationalist constructivist position whether libertarian or socialist) with the exception of those stemming from the work of David Hume (as noted in Chapter 11 of Volume 1). Justificationism is a rule system or conceptual grammar that specifies how our knowledge and concepts can be formed. It enshrines a number of definitional fusions (and confusions) in its outlook, and these fusions and confusions, which are the rules of its conceptual classification, are what defines this point of view. By fusing concepts together, it defined in advance what can be taken as appropriate answers to fundamental questions such as the nature of science, the nature of our knowledge and the manner of its acquisition, and especially the nature of rationality (or rational inquiry). Listing these central fusions shows how a justificationist must approach the questions and issues noted above. The justificationist concept of knowledge requires the identification of knowledge with both proof and authority. Any putative knowledge claim cannot be accepted as genuine unless it can be

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proven, and it cannot be proven except by submission to the appropriate epistemological authority. For empiricists such as Locke, the ultimate authority is the deliverance of sense: genuine knowledge must be founded upon the authority of sense experience. For the intellectualist or rationalist such as Descartes, the supreme epistemological authority needed to certify knowledge claims as genuine is clear and distinct rational intuition. All justificationist philosophy refuses to accept as genuine knowledge any claim that cannot be validated by whichever ultimate epistemic authority that theorist accepts. Justificationism is the fusion of knowledge with the procedure of proof and with an ultimate authority for its foundation. A further fusion from the identification of knowledge with proven assertion: the conception of valid knowledge gradually accumulating (through inductive inference or rational intuition) into the body of scientific knowledge. If knowledge is proven, than once certified, it remains so forever. Scientific progress must therefore be the accumulation of more and more certified valid truths. The justificationist approach to historiography, entailing this “cumulative record” position, rewrites all history to guarantee the continuity (and therefore the rationality) of scientific progress up to the present moment. Anything which does not fit that cumulative approach is either discarded as unscientific or ignored entirely. Defining its concepts in this manner requires that the justificationist approach must demand certain things obtain in the acquisition of knowledge and practice of science. Half a dozen requirements are the following: first, there must be an “empirical basis” of facts that are known for certain (clear cases of intuition for Descartes, obvious and “undeniable” empirical facts for Locke). This is the so-called foundation of empirical knowledge (the “empirical basis” for empiricism). Second, theories must be second-class citizens, because they are derivative from facts and accumulated generalizations (i.e., they are inductions based upon prior inductions). Third, science must be cumulative and gradual: facts piled upon facts to construct the edifice of knowledge. Fourth, factual meaning must be fixed for once and for all (independently of theory) and must remain invariant. Fifth, explanations consist in showing that a “proven factual proposition” follows

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deductively or logically from a theoretical proposition. Sixth, science evaluates one theory at a time, never two or more. Justificationism requires monotheoretical or single-position theoretical assessment at any time. Classic justificationism gave way a little more than a century or so ago to neojustificationism when it was gradually realized that no scientific proposition is actually provable, or can be “known for certain.” This was actually shown nearly a century earlier, by Fries in 1828, as a special case of the logical thesis that logical relations, such as provability, consistency, and so forth, can refer only to propositions and propositions can be derived only from other propositions and cannot ever be derived from “facts” themselves. But in this case, all theories are equally unprovable and that signaled the failure of the classic method of justificationism. The empirical basis of knowledge failed also, when Duhem (1914) showed that science is fact-correcting rather than fact-preserving. New theories often refute the facts of older theories. There is no eternally valid “factual basis.” But this obvious criticism has often been ignored, because it has simply been assumed that with a simple change then available—relaxing the definition of knowledge from proven assertion to probable assertion—that everything could be salvaged. Knowledge was no longer proven assertion but now (merely) probable. At that point, justificationism had to develop a probabilistic approach to logic, to provide what is now called a confirmation theory, that would assign a probability ranging from 0 to 1 for any putative scientific proposition. Nothing else of significance is changed with the move to this neo-form of justificationism—the problem is still to justify knowledge, but now it is the justification of probable rather than certain claims. The epistemic authority must be relocated into the probabilistic inductive procedure—otherwise, there is no epistemic authority, hence no proof procedure, and therefore no rationality to science. At best, science would be left where Hume left it—and mere animal belief, for the justificationist, is merely psychological and therefore not rational (i.e., not subject to logical or deductive proof ). 2. This is how Bartley originally (1962) summarized the argument behind such a retreat to commitment in faith:

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Obviously, a man cannot, without arguing in a circle, justify the rationality of his standard of rationality by appealing to that standard. Yet, if he holds certain beliefs--for example, the standard itself--to be immune from the demand for rational justification and from the question “How do you know?” he can be said to hold them irrationally or dogmatically. And, so it is claimed, argument among men about the radically different beliefs they hold in this way is pointless. For rational argument consists in mutual criticism, with each man supporting all his beliefs with good reasons. The limits of rational argument within any particular way of life, then, seem to be defined by reference to that object or belief in respect to which commitment is made or imposed, in respect to which argument is called to a halt. (1984, pp. 90–92)

This reasoning seems to provide the skeptical critic of justificationist rationalism with a tu quoque argument to rationally justify a commitment to irrationality. One would thus have a “scientific” excuse for being unscientific. This is why irrationalism and dogmatism made such a tremendous comeback among the intelligentsia after World War II, when the failures of justificationist philosophy and rationality were becoming widely known, and filtering down to literary and sociological levels in what came to be called the post-modern era (the intent of which was actually to be the “post-rational” era). To beat this argument, one must abandon the premises upon which it is based, in this case by unfusing the implicit equation of criticism as the attempt to prove a position to be true or “verified” or “valid,” even when the proof is to be only probable. 3. Popper was never clear on the distinction between planning conditions which allow progress to occur from planning progress itself. He first advocated what he called (borrowing the term from Roscoe Pound: see Popper, 1962, vol. 1, page 286) social engineering. Popper asserted that the social “engineer,” which he changed to a piecemeal engineer, will be aware that perfection, if at all attainable, is far distant, and that every generation of men: and therefore also the living, have a claim; perhaps not so much a claim to be made happy, for there are no institutional means of making a man happy, but a claim not to be made unhappy where it

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can be avoided.… The piecemeal engineer will, accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good. (1962, p. 158; p. 366 in 2013 edition)

With that view, the classic liberal is in complete agreement. It is utterly impossible to plan progress as a program of particulars to be achieved unless one is willing to turn the cosmos of society into a limited taxis, and thus abandon liberty and freedom for totalitarianism. One should also note the negative rule approach in reformulating the issue of happiness as “not being made unhappy.” And Popper was right that in this matter (as in science) we learn only from our mistakes, and the business of correcting social errors is the only task that we can undertake which begins to resemble the “reconstruction” of society. Thus, we must defend Popper against well meaning but in fact uncomprehending utilitarian admirers such as Edward Boyle (1974) who thought the weakest point in Popper’s political philosophy is, surely: his presupposition that the sole purpose of social engineering should be to eliminate avoidable evils. Can we be content with this? Granted that “there are no institutional means of making a man happy,” isn’t it true that there are means of increasing possibilities of happiness? Don’t we--most of us--regard the preamble to the declaration of American independence as an important milestone in the history of the human race, with its insistence that all human beings ought to be free and happy? Susan Stebbing wrote finely on this topic in her little book Ideals and Illusions. (pp. 855–856)

This view indicates just how far Great Britain had slipped down the road to serfdom in its embrace of the “new rights” of socialism. We have noted that Jefferson, under the influence of the French constructivists, misrepresented the Scottish moralists’ correct conception of “life, liberty and property” by twisting it into life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But with respect to Boyle’s progressivist intentions (clear when he mislabels piecemeal engineering as social engineering) in the “new rights,” the liberal’s reply, following Hume,

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remains that an “ought” must imply a “can.” There can be no moral imperative present when there is no means by which it can be fulfilled. There is no “can” available here. We cannot legislate particular means to happiness as an ultimate end, any more than we can calculate with the Benthamites how much of it there is. We do not have a “right” that can be extracted from others to be happy. Like virtually all of the British intelligentsia, Boyle and Stebbing failed to grasp the difference between planning progress (e.g., fulfilling claims to specific rights or goals) and planning for progress (allowing the game of catallaxy to produce novelty and progress by strengthening the rule structure of the relevant institutions in which it occurs). We must be content with the purely “negative” program of weeding out errors after they arise as unintended consequences—anything more positive is guaranteed to lead to progressivism and hence totalitarianism. We must retain meliorism rather than either pessimism or utopianism. And the way to do this is by the essentially negative program of safeguarding the rules of order necessary for planning for progress and arguing against the attempt to plan any particular progress itself. Here, the liberal must agree with Hayek (1976) when he said he felt reluctant to adopt (piecemeal engineering) because “engineering” suggests “to me too much a technological problem of reconstruction on the basis of the total knowledge of the physical data, while the essential point about the practical improvement is an experimental attempt to improve the functioning of some part without a full comprehension of the structure of the whole” (p. 157).“ But numerous passages in Popper’s writings show piecemeal engineering in a very “positive” and constructivist sense. Consider this passage (1962, vol. II) arguing against Marxist historicist prophecy. This is a formulation that the true liberal can only regard as appalling: If we wish freedom to be safeguarded, then we must demand that the policy of unlimited economic freedom be replaced by the planned economic intervention of the state. We must demand that unrestrained capitalism give way to an economic interventionism. And this is precisely what has happened. The economic system described and criticized by Marx has everywhere ceased to exist. (p. 125)

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It has been replaced, Popper felt, by various interventionist systems, in which the functions of the state in the economic realm are extended far beyond the protection of property and of freely entered contracts. Popper did not comprehend that intervention in the game of catallaxy, analogous to his attempt to legislate conventions of proper testing and explicit rational standards in science, is incompatible with freedom. This is not, as Popper asserted it to be, merely setting up the correct conditions for progress but rather interfering with the operation of the economic order. On this point, Sampson (1979) was superior to Popper’s static prescriptive correct: Popper “fails to grasp the liberal arguments against economic intervention” (p. 218). This is also why Kuhn’s descriptive evolutionary account of science is superior to Popper’s prescriptive rules static account of what one must do to have “good” science praxis. More recent theorists who similarly fail to understand the liberal arguments against interventionism are evolutionary biologist D. S. Wilson, who supported the position of Daron Acemoglu and J. A. Robinson (2012) in their popular book Why Nations Fail , in a 2016 Evonomics interview. The title of the interview was “Stop crying about the size of government. Start caring about who controls it.” This constructivist sentiment fails to distinguish theorists such as Hayek, who fully recognized the necessity for a sufficiently strong government legal structure to regulate conduct in the market order, from the laissez-faire libertarians who would give it free reign without legal restraint. Wilson and these book authors approve of large bureaucracies, indeed, regard them as inevitable, and think the only thing that is important is somehow (not specified) to select the correct dictators to appoint to the bureaucratic positions. The whole purpose of this chapter is to argue against any such interventionist positions. The point of classical liberalism is to argue for the smallest possible government, and in that sense against any sort of bureaucratic interventionism. The functioning of the market order should be regulated by the law, as part of the context of constraint necessary to “keep the peace of the order.” No market order should ever be controlled by unelected bureaucrats who cannot be held responsible, or by nothing other than (usually continually) changing legislation.

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4. One way to understand Mises’ position is to see that he was preoccupied with (and blinded by) arguing against the whole German Historical School, in a now forgotten episode about social science methodology called the Methodenstreit (see Lachmann, 1978). Here, his most famous enemy was Max Weber, who took the historicist approach. In the preface to his 1933 edition of Epistemological Problems of Economics, Mises said the purpose of his book is to establish the logical legitimacy of the science: that has for its object the universally valid laws of human action, i.e., laws that claim validity without respect to the place, time, race, nationality, or class of the actor. The aim of these investigations is not to draw up the program of the new science, but to show what the science with which we are already acquainted has in view. (1981, pp. xxi, xxii)

Later he added that what is denied is the possibility of deriving a posteriori from historical experience any empirical laws of history in general, or of economic history in particular, or “laws” of “economic action” within a definite period of time (see ibid., p. xxii). His opposition—the historicists—tended to assume that one could explain the phenomena of the social sciences by explicating such things as historical epochs, or race, or class status. And as Mises put it that according to the Historical School, “the laws of the universally valid theory are applicable only to the capitalism of the liberal era” (see ibid., p. xxv). But Mises himself fell prey to a sort of historicism, because he wanted to extend the historical analysis from a limited particular time period or location (his) to an unlimited “everywhere, every when” historical position as the only viable opposition. To do so, he had to move from actual history (any history) to a purely conceptual and time-independent realm: What we know about our action under given conditions is derived not from experience, but from reason. What we know about the fundamental categories of action--action, economizing, preferring, the relationship of means and ends, and everything else that, together with these, constitutes the system of human action--is not derived

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from experience. We conceive all this from within, just as we conceive logical and mathematical truths, a priori, without reference to any experience. (ibid., pp. 13–14)

And later: The theorems of economics are derived not from the observation of facts, but through deduction from the fundamental category of action, which has been expressed sometimes as the economic principle (i.e., the necessity to economize), sometimes as the value principle or as the cost principle. They are of a prioristic derivation and therefore lay claim to the apodictic certainty that belongs to basic principles so derived. (ibid., p. 17)

Once again we are faced with the typical forced choice: either my position is accepted as eternally true and valid, or everything is lost. What Mises in fact did was confuse the rate-independent realm of human conception with the dynamical realm of behavior. Neither realm is “given” in any a priori sense. Accepting such a position would in fact be equivalent to losing all knowledge in the nonphysical sciences. For instance, biology is equally as historical in character as economics, since no two living subjects are ever identical and cannot be understood except by considering their history, so it should follow that biology also should be an a priori rather than an empirical discipline. It is not, never has been, and never will be, nor will psychology. 5. Indeed, there is a coherent argument that Rothbard is not a liberal at all but rather a socialist. Consider these remarks by Spangler (2006), who contended in a blog post that Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism is misnamed because it is actually a variety of socialism, offering an alternative understanding of existing capitalism (or any other variety of statism) as systematic theft from the lower classes and envisions a more just society, without that “oppression.” Rather than depending upon the labor theory of value to understand the systemic theft, Rothbardian market anarchism utilizes

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natural law theory and Lockean principles of property and selfownership taken to their logical extreme as an alternative framework for understanding and combating oppression.… Murray Rothbard was a visionary socialist … Because the market anarchist society would be one in which the matter of systemic theft has been addressed and rectified, market anarchism… is best understood as a new variety of socialism--a stigmergic socialism. (p. 4)

One problem with this interpretation is that the market order is not a collective in any way, shape or form, so the correctness of this interpretation would have to be restricted to a defined taxis order of individuals in order to constitute a collective form of organization. But it does illustrate the fact that instead of a straight line from extreme leftist positions at one end to the extreme fascism of the radical right on the other end we actually have a circle. What that means is that the supposedly straight line is pulled into a circle with the extremes joining at some point, a point (or curved section) at which socialist anarchism (Chomsky) and libertine laissez-faire (Rothbard) positions meet and become indistinguishable from extreme libertarian ones. The anarchism of the left is virtually no different from the anarchism of the right, and equally incapable of realization in any impersonal abstract society. 6. One should consider an argument of Dawkins (2006) on this gradual versus full-blown appearance in evolution controversy. Here is a paraphrase, starting from Darwin’s rhetorical admission that the existence of eyes and wings are prima facie arguments against evolution. Certainly, one can ask “what is the use of half an eye? Or, what is the use of half a wing?” Such arguments assume that there is an irreducible amount of complexity involved in an eye used for seeing or a wing for flying, and that thus there must have been the equivalent of a Gould “saltatory jump” in the achievement of either. (We neglect the fact that Darwin’s opponents were clergy who assumed that this was somehow an argument for God having created the eye in full-blown form.) Dawkins pointed out that someone with one eye, or cataracts, might not have full eyesight, but still had enough to get by (which is to say survive) in many conceivable circumstances. Similarly, half

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a wing is better than none, especially if you’re falling out of a tree and it helps you to a less bumpy landing. Indeed, even having 51% of a wing would help a little bit more than a smaller percentage in many situations. There must be smooth or relatively smooth gradations (gradients) along such dimensions that are survival worthy, and therefore would be selected for by gradual evolution. As Dawkins said, a flatworm has an eye that is less adequate by any sensible measure than what a human possesses. Ammonites such as the Nautilus shellfish have a very small camera obscura type of eye that is far less good than ours but it aids their survival. No one can deny that invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all far better than no eye at all, and it is therefore possible for standard mechanisms of evolution to produce them, and in turn to supplant them with “better,” which is to say more survival worthy, variations. I would put this in terms that are familiar to the neuropsychologist—with every quantitative change in nervous system complexity, there are qualitative changes in behavioral output that become available. This is why Chomsky, despite his clear and distinct Cartesian certainty, was forced to abandon his antievolutionary arguments for the uniqueness of language in humans. Things are still as Karl Lashley put it over 90 years ago: we are finding that every aspect of human behavior has its antecedents far down the ladder of evolutionary development. Language and cognition are no different in this respect. 7. What is the role of laissez-faire in liberalism? And in libertarianism? The eighteenth-century use of laissez-faire resulted from a question being asked to this effect: “What shall we do about such and such?” Such and such was some ongoing aspect of social functioning. And the answer was “laissez-faire,” which meant “leave it alone.” In the currently popular idiom, this means “If it isn’t broken, do not try to fix it.” In the libertarian or libertine-anarchist interpretation, it has come to mean something quite different: “anything goes.” I have argued that this “anything goes” interpretation leads to disaster, because an ongoing spontaneous order requires a context of constraint which one should not interfere with, because the order will cease to function as it had been doing. The Chomsky-Feyerabend-Block interpretation of unconstrained individual action (even if based upon

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property rights) violates that context of constraint. But what about the original “If it isn’t broken don’t try to fix it” interpretation? Is that indispensable to liberalism? The answer is no, it is not. Strict adherence to such a position leads to conservatism, opposing all change without any other mechanism that could lead to progress. That original interpretation was a response to interference (or attempted interference) from the outside by constructivists who wanted to speed up progress. And if the process in question is working tolerably well, then it is a directive one should follow, because it will allow the spontaneous order to function and perhaps to change without interference. But with respect to the issue of change in society, it is a disaster, since it licenses anything to continue without constraint or correction. 8. For example, what Friedman is most famous for, monetarism in monetary theory, is a straightforward application of logical positivism to money. As such, it is an attempt to do away with theories in favor of a pure descriptivism utilizing only intervening variables and not hypothetical constructs. Positivism is not an adequate philosophy to support liberalism. Hayek, as Block correctly notes in several instances, did often give away too much to economic interventionism. (A better contemporary introduction to the failures of socialism is found in DiLorenzo, 2016.) The ostensive reason for the Block-Friedman correspondence was to focus upon whether or not gradualism could be replaced in practice in the attempt to build a social theory on the basis of property rights. Block, following Rothbard, favored the attempt at immediate replacement of anything that he interpreted as “interventionist,” and admitted no possible exceptions to this rule (for him, a moral rule) of procedure. Thus, he criticized Hayek for supporting a “bare minimum” wage, arguing that that was a government interventionist policy and therefore socialist (and thus ultimately totalitarian). Hayek told me that he regretted that he had not fully explicated the original context he had in mind in the 40s—attempting to prevent any sort of forced labor or outright slavery by requiring some payment for work done in employment. In such a context, the position makes sense, and it is hard to see anyone disagreeing with it. But in terms of the modern socialist conception, in which a “minimum wage” is now provided with a fixed

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money interpretation and mandated into effect by government (and for which leftist politicians constantly argue for a higher amount in order to buy more votes), it is an absurd proposition. So while any theorist is fair game for criticism (from left or right), one cannot lose sight of the actual issue here: what constitutes an intervention on the part of government, versus what constitutes a necessary constraint for the operation of a spontaneous social order. This is an empirical issue, and it will be resolved only when we have a thoroughly worked out theory of spontaneously ordered complexity and social phenomena. One thing that is quite obvious now is that Block and the libertarians do not understand the difference between constraints of order and interventions by government. In so far as a minimum wage is a government imposition, then Block is correct. But insofar as the prevention of slavery (or some similar argument) is concerned, Hayek is correct. Is that latter position a constraint applying to how the abstract society endures? Think carefully before you jump to an answer. Parenthetically, we must note that what Rothbard and Block desire—a property based rather than sovereign and coercive based government society—is in fact gradually emerging in the proprietary (and thus noncoercive) approach to real property development that MacCallum (1970) was the first to describe (discussed in Chapter 8). 9. Polanyi did this by exploring the distinction, common to all of physics and “hard” science since Newton, between the inexorable laws of nature, on the one hand, and the initial or boundary conditions, on the other. Boundary conditions are always extraneous to—definitionally, outside of—the processes which they delimit and harness. This is the separation of the knower from the known, or the controller from that which is controlled, that occurs in setting up an experiment to determine if a putative law of nature applies in a given situation. Polanyi noted that this places a system under a form of dual control—operations of what can be called “higher” or more abstract, intrinsically semantic and rate-independent principles or rules, act to constrain the workings of what can be called “lower” levels of physical phenomena (as described by the inexorable laws of the physicochemical domain). Higher order or semiotic constraints are required in

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addition to the laws of nature, and those higher order constraints can never be reduced to any laws of nature. Polanyi (in 1968) provided the first statement that life as functionality constrains, or harnesses, physicality. All knowledge requires the presence of semantics (functionality, teleology, formality, intentionality, purpose, whatever one calls it) to come into existence. The physical realm alone can never constitute knowledge or produce any complex structure that has knowledge. Knowledge is simply not a physical concept—it is intrinsically functional. Knowledge exists only within and for subjects of conceptual activity. In a purely physical universe with no life or meaning, there could be no knowledge or purpose—no subject would ever stand apart from that which was to be known, no semiotics could constrain physicality, no functionality could disambiguate syntactic movement, and no regularity of any sort could be known to exist. Inexorable laws of nature never have alternatives. Inexorability precludes the possibility of the existence of alternatives. Because they have alternatives from which they may choose, subjects as agents have the possibility, the freedom, to choose, and of making errors. There is no physical concept of error: it is purely functional and abstract. This is also the case for the existence of novelty. Subjects, although they cannot violate the inexorable laws of nature, can, as functional agents, do new, unexpected, and unpredictable things. (Indeed, this is what Chomsky showed us that language does all the time.) There could be no novelty—nothing new—in a universe totally controlled by inexorability. Ambiguity comes into existence with subjects (and only subjects) because it requires conflicting or incompatible meanings or interpretations. Choices are inextricably related to that ambiguity. Choices lead not to any deterministic finality but to more and more choices. Choice determination (see Abel, 2010, 2011) leads to more and more possibilities for future action, not fewer and fewer necessary outcomes. Semantics and choice contingency, even though we construe them to be deterministic in the rate-independent realm, lead to the possibility of indefinite creativity in dynamical reality—to unfathomed knowledge, and unmeasured wealth, as Bartley (1990) put it.

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Polanyi should be remembered (and studied and extended) for his fundamental contributions to control structures in complex phenomena and the origin of life and functionality, not for his misguided endorsement of justificationist authoritarianism as a “consequence” of the tacit dimension of mind and society. Far too few economists and political theorists have recognized polycentric control (the Ostroms are a salient exception—see V. Ostrom, 1972; E. Ostrom, 1990, 2005) and fewer still his foundational work in what is now called biosemiotics.

References Abel, D. L. (2010). Constraints versus controls. The Open Cybernetics & Systematics Journal, 4, 14–27. Abel, D. L. (2011). The first gene: The birth of programming, messaging and formal control . Longview Press. Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. (2012). Why nations fail: The origin of power, prosperity and poverty. Crown. Bartley, W. W., III (1962/1984). The retreat to commitment. Open Court (Now Cricket Media). Bartley, W. W., III. (1990). Unfathomed knowledge, unmeasured wealth. Open Court (Now Cricket Media). Block, W. (2019). Property rights: The argument for privatization. Palgrave Macmillan. Boyle, E. (1974). Karl Popper’s Open society: A personal appreciation. In P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), The philosophy of Karl Popper (pp. 843–858). Open Court (Now Cricket Media). Brewer, W. F. (1974). There is no convincing evidence for operant or classical conditioning in adult humans. In W. B. Weimer & D. S. Palermo (Eds.), Cognition and the symbolic processes (Vol. 1, pp. 1–42). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Campbell, D. T. (1974a). “Downward causation” in hierarchically organized biological systems. In F. J. Ayala & T. Dobzhansky (Eds.), Studies in the philosophy of biology. Macmillan. Campbell, D. T. (1974b). Evolutionary epistemology. In P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), The philosophy of Karl Popper (pp. 413–463). Open Court Cricket Media.

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Cornuelle, R. (1965/1993). Reclaiming the American dream: The role of private individuals and voluntary associations. Transaction Publishers. Dawkins, R. (2006). The god delusion. Bantam Books. DiLorenzo, T. J. (2016). The problem with socialism. Regnery Publishing. Duhem, P. (1914/1954). La Theorie Physique: Son Objet, sa Structure. Translated as The aim and structure of physical theory. Princeton University Press. Feyerabend, P. K. (1962). Explanation, reduction, and empiricism. In H. Feigl & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Scientific explanation, space, and time (pp. 22– 97). University of Minnesota Press. Feyerabend, P. K. (1965a). Problems of empiricism. In R. G. Colodny (Ed.), Beyond the edge of certainty (pp. 145–260). Prentice-Hall. Feyerabend, P. K. (1965b). Reply to criticism. In R. S. Cohen & M. W. Wartofsky (Eds.), Boston studies in the philosophy of science (Vo.l 2, pp. 223–261). Humanities Press (Now Springer). Feyerabend, P. K. (1970). Against method. Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge. In Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science (Vol. 4, pp. 17– 130). University of Minnesota Press. Feyerabend, P. K. (1978). Against method . Verso Press. Fries, J. F. (1828). Neue oder Anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft (Vol. 1). Christian Freidrich Winter. Gould, S. J. & Eldredge, N. (1972). Punctuated equilibria: An alternative to phyletic gradualism. In T. J. M. Schopf (Ed.), Models in paleobiology (pp. 82–115). Freeman, Cooper and Company. Hayek, F. A. (1944/2003). The road to serfdom. University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (1976). Law, legislation and liberty: The mirage of social justice. University of Chicago Press; Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hayek, F. A. (1978/1985). New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas. University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1962/1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1977). The essential tension: Selected studies in scientific tradition and change. University of Chicago Press. Lachmann, L. (1978). Foreward (1978). In L. Mises (Ed.), Epistemological problems of economics. New York University Press, 1981. MacCallum, S. H. (1970). The art of community. Institute for Humane Studies. Mises, L. (1966). Human action (3rd ed.). Contemporary Books. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.

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Ostrom, E. (2005). Understanding institutional diversity. Princeton University Press. Ostrom, V. (1972, September 5–9). Polycentricity. Workshop Working Paper Series. Workshop in Political Theory and Political Analysis. Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Polanyi, M. (1958/1974). Personal knowledge. Harper and Row; University of Chicago Press. Polanyi, M. (1969). Knowing and being. University of Chicago Press. Popper, K. R. (2011/2013). The open society and its enemies (Rev. ed.). Routledge, 2011; Princeton University Press, 2013. Originally Harper & Row, 1962. Rothbard, M. (1970). Power and market: Government and the economy. Sheed, Andrews and McMeel. Rothbard, M. (1985). For a new liberty: The libertarian manifesto. Libertarian Review Foundation. Sampson, G. (1979). Liberty and language. Oxford University Press. Schumpeter, J. (1954). History of economic analysis (E. B. Schumpeter, Ed.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sellars, W. S. (1963). Science, perception and reality. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Solomon, R. (1983/1993). The passions: The myth and nature of human emotion. University of Notre Dame Press; Hackett Publishing Company. Spangler, B. (2006). Market anarchism as stigmergic socialism (Blog). www.oza rkia.net/bill/anarchism/library/StigmergicSocialism.html Weimer, W. B. (1975). The psychology of inference and expectation: Some preliminary remarks. In G. Maxwell & R. M. Anderson (Eds.), Induction, probability, and confirmation (pp. 430–486). University of Minnesota Press. Weimer, W. B. (1979). Notes on the methodology of scientific research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Weimer, W. B. (1980). For and against method: Reflections on Feyerabend and the foibles of philosophy. Pre/Text, 1(Fall/Winter), 161–203. Weimer, W. B. (1984). Limitations of the dispositional analysis of behavior. In J. R. Royce & L. P. Mos (Eds.), Annals of theoretical psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 161–198). Plenum Press. Weimer, W. B. (2020). Complex phenomena and the superior power of negative rules of order. Cosmos + Taxis, 8, 39–59. Weimer, W. B. (2021, in press). Problems of a causal theory of functional behavior: What the Hayek-Popper controversy illustrates for the 21st century—Part 1, Cosmos + Taxis, 9 (11 + 12), 1–29. Part 2, Cosmos + Taxis, in press 2022.

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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the people alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H. L. Mencken It is the rules of property and contract on which the growth of a worldwide, peaceful, and prosperous society was based.… We can do more good to unknown people if we follow the impersonal signals of the market, which enable us to serve the needs of people whom we do not know and to make use of opportunities and facilities with which we have no direct acquaintance. F. A. Hayek

The theory of spontaneously ordered complex phenomena first articulated by the Scottish moralist philosophers has yet to be shown to be inadequate (either wrong or incomplete) for the explanation of society, or for its continued existence. Similarly, despite the intentions of “helpful” critics or reformers, it has yet to be significantly improved, “simplified,” or made to “work better.” What has happened is best summed © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume II, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95477-2_8

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up by saying that it has simply been ignored with the onslaught of rationalist constructivist thought—on both the political left and right—in the attempt to replace it by returning to primitivism, and also usually ignored by those who have attempted to “defend” it with liberalizations and reformulations. The libertarian reformulations have failed to understand that evolution, whether in species or societies, requires a delicate balance of essential tensions, a context of constraints, that cannot be deliberately simplified or partially removed without having severe effects upon that process of evolution. And once one re-incorporates the classical position into the libertarian doctrines, what is survival worthy is simply the original doctrine or position itself. When one examines the constructivist alternatives to liberalism it becomes clear that they are simply incompatible with what is known about evolution and what is known about spontaneously organized complex phenomena. As examination of socialism and similar collectivist doctrines shows, they are simply variants of the totalitarian structure of the taxis or deliberate organization. As such, they are dependent upon the limited information processing and directing capabilities of (at best) hierarchical structures and can never be as adaptive to new situations or to the production of novel knowledge and goods as the decentralized systems of polycentric and coalitional orders found in spontaneous orders. While it is clear that smaller groups of humanity survived for a very long time within taxis structures, it cannot be denied that their life situation— that of the face-to-face organization of society—was fairly accurately described by Thomas Hobbes as “nasty, brutish, and short.” Improvement in that outlook, in terms of our lifespan expectation and the numbers of our populations, as well as the health, material goods, and the knowledge and technology we now possess, is vastly greater as a result of taxis organization being initially at least partially and later (at least in various geographic areas) more completely supplanted by the abstract society based upon impersonal cooperation in market orders. The superior nature of our present life situation as a result of the development of market based society is simply undeniable. The question that has been asked when we have achieved the leisure to reflect upon that success has been simple: is there anything that we can do to improve upon it, to make progress more rapid than it has been? The reformers on the left

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side of the political spectrum—uniformly rationalist constructivists— have answered affirmatively and proposed one or another taxis based program of “clear Cartesian ideas” to supplement or to entirely supplant the grown order of abstract society. Having reveled in our progress (and misunderstood it as due to prior deliberate planning), they have desired to step outside the order of society so that they can control it, and thus achieve greater and more rapid progress. Constructivists on the right side of the spectrum have likewise thought that it was possible to make extensive changes, usually simplifications, in the ongoing order. While they correctly repudiate the dictatorial framework of the organizational mentality of the left, they assume that one can bypass the essential framework of concepts and rules of action that come into existence with spontaneous social orders, in so doing elevating one or another concept or aspect of liberalism at the expense of the others. That course of action is likewise equivalent to attempting to step outside the social order in order to judge and to control it, even though an essential aspect of the liberal framework would be doing the controlling. This also would inevitably turn the grown, cosmic order of society into a directed taxis, now controlled by a hierarchical structure. In advocating these policies constructivists of both the left and the right have failed to understand that that progress which they point to depends entirely upon keeping intact a framework in which social evolution, and thus progress, occurs. By attempting to plan the nature of progress, to restrict it to certain outcomes they desire, laissez-faire libertarians, socialists, and progressivists alike have unwittingly restricted the output of the social order to what can be achieved by a directed taxis. They have failed to see that the cost of achieving their particular goal is the loss of the spontaneous ordering principles that have brought us all our present wealth and achievement of material goods and our knowledge. Without knowing it, they have endorsed goals and programs that sacrifice the golden goose that has produced our knowledge and progress in order to try to obtain one particular golden egg. Thus, as a result of well-meaning error, they inadvertantly would return us to a more primitive form of organization, all in the name of achieving their particular idea of progress.

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That idea of “progress” has turned out to be based upon false conceptions and in principle unobtainable goals. We cannot substitute in principle unobtainable goals such as “the greatest good for the greatest number” or any form of distributive or “social” justice for conceptions that actually work. We cannot achieve the utilitarian desideratum because there is no such thing as the greatest good, nor can we intelligibly select any actual greatest number. We cannot achieve so-called social justice because the distribution problem admits of no tenable solution. Specification of any attempt at distribution is inherently contradictory because it is nothing more than one or another form of discrimination imposed upon society by someone or some group who assumes the mantle of a mortal god in order to effect and oversee the distribution. We cannot stand outside the market or economic order in order to “distribute” anything—justice, particular goods, education, or whatever—without imposing discrimination upon at least some members of society who would not otherwise be discriminated against. There can never be a “fair” society that deliberately discriminates against (at least some of ) its members for any reason. At first blush, libertarian attempts to immediately institute the original liberal goals by removing the constraints (in the case of the progressivist or constructivist proposals, they are literally ridiculous constraints) designed to produce some sort of deliberate utopia or at least better society, seem to be less pernicious. Unfortunately, such laissez-faire proposals fail also, because one cannot achieve a viable social organization based upon an incomplete or stripped-down set of liberal principles (or a “one size fits all” central principle) and nothing more. As an evolved structure society requires—literally exists only in virtue of the presence of—a context of constraints that are largely tacit and thus inherently not subject to conscious or deliberate control. Essential tensions and complementarities require both poles to exist at once, not just one. We cannot simply throw away everything except some basic principle of liberalism such as the primacy of private property or the abstract nature of justice. Those notions can exist only within a context of constraint that we are only just beginning to comprehend. They come into existence only in the simultaneous presence of other constraints. It is similar to a hammock suspended between two trees: cut one suspension rope on one side and

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one no longer has any part of the support a hammock affords. It is necessary to understand and delimit the entire context of constraints in order to see what cannot be dispensed with. To consider just one, justice (as an obvious example that one cannot eliminate) requires a framework in terms of the rule of law in order to prevent the arbitrary usurpation of power by some tyrant, mob, or governmental body or process. Justice must, in short, be safeguarded by the presence of a system of abstract rules which apply to all individuals. Those rules are equivalent to the rules of sportsmanship or correct play when playing a game—they are rules that “keep the peace” of the order so that the game can be played at all . That is what the principles of a liberal social order do: they specify what keeps the peace of the order of society so that it can in fact function. They do not impose commands to achieve particular “motives” or results. Liberalism is a framework—a context of mainly negative rules of order —in which society can be maximally productive of products such as wealth and knowledge and freedom. It can do no more than that. We are the result of our actions but not our designs, and no deliberate framework which attempts to remove or replace that evolved background structure can be any kind of improvement upon our present situation. Indeed, attempting to do so simply limits us to an anarchistic situation or to the dictatorial organizational structure of the tribe and the small group from which, in evolutionary perspective, we have only so very recently been able to escape.

There Is No Silver Bullet for Freedom There is no possibility of instituting any simple program (whether political, educational, from the left or the right, or whatever) to begin to unravel the totalitarian structure of our society. Even if we could find a Lone Ranger to defend freedom he or she could never manage to shoot a hydra headed monster like “Big”—whether big government or big business or big whatever. Since there is no one left alive in the Western world who was born in an era in which Big Government did not control, directly or indirectly, every aspect of their existence, no one has ever experienced a time in which that was not “natural.” Like it or not, all

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we can hope to do is educate people to the insidious effects of what we have given up of our freedoms, and hope that, with the inevitability of gradualness on our side for once, we can slowly change attitudes and institutions in order to restore more aspects of our lost freedoms and our lost property (and here we need to note once again the crucial role of the private—our private property, and the so-called private sector in opposition to the ludicrously misnamed “public” sector). We have no choice but to be incrementalist or gradualist, as all evolution is. We cannot hope for an overnight revolution in which people somehow wake up from their stupor and consciously recognize the value of freedom under the rule of law and the context in which it flourishes. The siren song of cradle-tograve care and comfort is too strong for that, due to the parental care entitlement mentality of contemporary constructivist tribalism. All we can do is chip away over a broad front at the intellectual rationalizations being used to deprive us of the benefits of the abstract order and the liberal approach to spontaneously arisen complex phenomena. Having been labeled as old fossils and conservatives and deplorables by those who are “woke” to the wonders of totalitarian socialism, there is little we can do except lay out as thoroughly and obviously as possible both the theoretical and historical arguments that simultaneously show the drawbacks of the attempt to reduce the abstract society to a taxis structure, and also the benefits of allowing the context of constraints necessary for the functioning of the abstract society to flourish. That context of constraints has come into existence all of a piece, in the sense that the co-occurrences of its essential aspects are necessarily interdependent. The understanding of why we must keep that entire evolved context of evolved constraints is the focus of this chapter. We need to overview the major constraints and then show, like the ropes on each end of a hammock, their essential interdependence in the functioning of the social “hammock” on which we swing.

Back to the Basics The abstract society in which we are found today is the result of nothing more than basic evolutionary principles having produced a complicated

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structure, a context of constraints, in which humanity now finds itself. These factors (principles, concepts, theoretical structures, it does not matter what one calls them) have come into existence when certain evolutionary processes and evolved behaviors have occurred which have allowed human populations to greatly exceed what they had been in faceto-face groups. These factors arise in unison, as the complementary sides of a coin do when it is minted. It is not possible to have a one-sided coin. It is a physical impossibility as well as a conceptual one. Such an entity must have both a front and a back side. As a result of the dimensionality of the universe something like a coin is constrained to exist in three spatial dimensions: length, width, and depth. The depth of a coin is irrelevant to its conceptual function as a medium of exchange, but it is unavoidably there nonetheless, as is a fourth dimension of time, because no coin is infinitely thin or lasts forever. That is a minimal (physical-temporal) context of constraint for coinage. Similar constraints exist within the functional domain. When life arose (apparently as a result of the folding transformation reshaping strings of molecules) several co-occurrence relationships simultaneously appeared. With that folding operation measurement and record-keeping came into existence. Measures and records are meaningful, and meanings exist only for functional subjects to use. With measures and records the possibility of error also arose, because no record can possibly be a complete description, no more than any measure can ever capture all properties of something at once. So when life got started it not only required but brought about the existence of the first, most primitive, measurements, records, meanings, descriptions, errors, and more. Life exists because they exist, and vice versa. They are complementarities that coexist when the functional realm joined the physical domain in existence. Without any one of them there would be none of them. Like liberty or freedom, life is a “take it or leave it” package (see Pattee, 2012; Weimer, 2020). As life evolved and became more complex and differentiated in its manifestations, so did the co-occurrent relationships noted above become more complex and differentiated. With quantitative increases in nervous system complexity seemingly qualitative increases in behavioral capacity, sensory acuity, and meanings came into existence. By the

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time hominids appeared the nature of social behavior and custom had, through downward causation and increased selection pressure, gotten to the point that evolution now depended upon an unavoidable social component in addition to sexual reproduction. There literally never was (or could have been) any time in our history when our ancestors were not found in groups. Because of that simple evolutionary fact we are inevitably the product of group selection pressures. We were made by our groups, not vice versa. When we look at the evolution of current society (and human beings within it), we find a similar context of constraints—co-occurrence relationships—that come into existence together and must continue to exist together. When we switched from the taxis organization of family or tribal group society to the decentralized impersonal organization of abstract market orders, a very different context of constraints (as cooccurrence relationships) came into existence. In similar fashion, if those constraints do not all exist together, the abstract society will not exist. We are only beginning to understand what this context of constraints consists of. Thanks to the liberal tradition and the insights of the Moralists and other students of society (from the Athenian and Stoic Greeks and Lao Tse to the present) we are becoming familiar with an essential set of these constraints. We have discussed them in the chapters above, mostly in the purely theoretical and artificial situation of their relative separation from one another. While that strategy may work for initial didactic purposes it cannot be assumed to be the whole story. We need to see how the “principles of a liberal social order—all of them” literally are the context of constraint that is necessary for the existence and continued survival of the abstract society. Consider a cluster of six concepts in terms of their inevitable co-occurrence relationships. These appear to be central requirements for the existence of an abstract society. It so happens that it is a matter of historical development that they are among the central principles of what has been called the liberal order of society. 1. First is the concept of property. This is the protected sphere of the individual, that which he or she has property rights to or over. It ranges over both physical objects (foremost our bodies) and functional or conceptual entities. Once we were only concerned with the

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possession of clothing and tools or edible animals or their products (as in the hunter gatherer society) and then later with shelter as well as land and its products (with the beginnings of agriculture and settled existence), and more recently intellectual property such as knowledge (both know how and knowledge that). So there are now three fundamental “types” of property rights we presently consider: First, those stemming from our behavior or skill, such as the game we kill or the products we produce; second, those we “produce” with our intellect such as our ideas and knowledge; and third, those stemming from land—its use value, as in ownership or rental value. 2. Property is usually discussed in conjunction with the rule of law, which is necessary for its protection if brute force is to be prevented from controlling everything. Law has arisen in two forms: first, as nomos, an initially tacit and not explicitly articulated system of rules of conduct that arose through group evolution, and, operating as a constraint, helped to “select” us because groups of individuals who had followed those rules of conduct had displaced other groups who had not. Nomos was immediately supplemented (not replaced) by thesei, the directives or commands to do particular things or actions, provided by the tribal authority figures. This combination of nomoi and thesei governed our initial social groups, and when the first settled societies attempted to codify or write down the laws which govern them, they inevitably mixed them up and classified them together. By a gradual process, involving the distinction between a law finder and a lawgiver, the abstract principles of morality, the nomoi or the context of constraint in which the society had arisen, became delimited as separate from the legislation of particular acts specified by a ruler or the legislature. This distinction could not arise until the span of control for the group exceeded the limited ability and personal familiarity of the tribal leader (or any other individual). This is when private property came to the fore in social organization, and it was necessary for it to be protected by the general framework of law. A crucial point, discussed later, is that law and agreed regulation does not presuppose government as a sovereignty (MacCallum, 1970). 3. With property and law the complementary concepts of liberty and freedom must come into existence. Liberty consists in “freedoms to.”

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The first freedom is to receive. The second freedom is to supply. A third freedom is to refuse—to refuse to receive, or to refuse to supply. All these freedoms are freedoms of contract: freedoms for the individual to enter into a contract to receive or to supply property. So freedom, property, and law and contract must exist together. In order to have property at all, it must be protected by law. In order to have freedom to do with one’s property what one wishes, that property must be protected by law. Freedom itself can only be specified in a negative format: freedom from any coercion to one’s self or to one’s property. 4. Once one moves beyond the face-to-face constraint of the taxis organization of the tribe, the constraints of the market order must arise. The market decentralizes control for the problems of supply and demand and disperses information (or alternatively, knowledge and goods) for the freedoms noted above throughout an impersonal order. It does so as an embodiment of tacit knowledge, as a grown social institution that was never the result of any particular conscious action or direction. While the divisions of knowledge and labor arise concurrently with barter in a taxis order, the market order creates something new—the consumer as a source of information. This new function— the consumer—is the best guide to producers as to what to produce: far better than the demands of a dictator or central “planning” board. Market orders function only as their own context of constraint. That constraint ensures the peace of the order—it creates a level playing field in which all who wish to participate may do so according to their freedoms, and in such a manner that no potential participant has an unfair advantage over any other. As such, the central feature of the market is that it is merely a means to satisfy disparate demands and not an end in itself. It is clear that the law and liberty are necessary co-occurrent presuppositions, along with property, for any market to come into existence. The power of the market order stems from the fact that it is the only impersonal cooperative system that has ever developed in which the selfish individual aims of particular persons (consumers) all have a possibility of being (at least partially) satisfied. It is this ability to extend the impersonal order of cooperation beyond individuals who are known to the participants that is the key to the

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abstract order and its obvious superiority over a taxis society based upon an authority parceling out goods in an attempt to satisfy individual and conflicting goals of property-less followers. The producer is a product of the taxis. The consumer exists in the market order. But there is no such thing as a liberal “principle” of free enterprise according to the doctrine of laissez-faire. Without the co-occurrence constraints of the rule of law to protect all individual participants equally there could be no order and thus no “enterprise” whether free or otherwise in such an order. 5. Morality cannot be separated from the market order in an abstract society. The rules of conduct that guide our behavior have shaped us into what we are. We are products of our moral rules rather than the other way around. Morality in a market is in conflict with morality in the tribal organization, even though it is an outgrowth from tribal organization. In the face-to-face form of social organization, shaped by our millions of years of mammalian evolution, our bodies have (been) adapted to the cues provided by personal social interaction, and as a result positive social interaction, prosocial behavior, is intrinsically reinforcing and comforting to us. The rules of conduct that shaped us in the tribal society have long ago created that situation (Levendis et al., 2019). Our malaise and alienation in the abstract society is largely a recent result of the fact that here cooperation is impersonal, and no longer based upon our familiar face-to-face benevolence or personal interaction. We are only beginning to understand that we will have to evolve into full-fledged denizens of the abstract order if it is not to perish due to our fear of its emotional costs. Until that happens we will have to utilize coping strategies to aid our internal mileau in the change from total immersion in the face-to-face or tribal society into greater and greater immersion in a society in which impersonal cooperation has replaced personal benevolence. If we fail to do so we will slip back into the restricted domain of tribal organization and in so doing lose the benefits we have come to expect from abstract forms of organization. 6. Tribal society is governed by tribal structure, which is hierarchical. Governance here is a matter of obeying the leader upon penalty of capital punishment or starvation. The market order is governed

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by abstract principles of organization that do no more than keep the peace of the order. So what is the role of “government” in a cosmos? The liberal answer is straightforward: as absolutely minimal as possible to guarantee the functioning of the market order, where that means providing the minimal conditions necessary to allow it to continue functioning. Whenever possible, government must be limited to providing the absolute minimal essentials for the preservation of society as an ongoing evolutionary order. What that minimum consists of is protection of the individual from harm to his life and property rights. What constitutes such protection? Here, the classic liberal disagrees with both the constructivist on the left and on the right. A fairly large number of opponent process regulatory principles will be needed. But the essential limitation upon any government or “state” based upon sovereignty will be that no such entity may ever usurp any power beyond the protection of life and property of its citizens. The so-called social contract results from that requirement, and not the other way around. We don’t first have a social contract and then choose to construct a government. It is rather that as a requirement of the protection of life and property something like a social contract, and hence usually a government, arises. What is in fact required for the protection of life and property is an empirical issue—we do not yet have any definitive answer to this question. One thing, however, should be obvious: government must provide a framework in which to keep the peace of the order. It is not an independent sovereign structure that arose outside the social order that somehow provides individuals with entitlements. Rules that keep the peace of the order do not “entitle” at all—because they do not bestow anything upon an individual that can somehow be granted by an anthropomorphized agency called government. In that regard, they are negative constraints upon our conduct rather than positive prescriptions of actions that must be achieved.

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The Overextension of Government and the Entitlement Mentality No, merely being in society does not in itself entitle you or I to anything at all. We need to understand what Burke meant in Reflections when he said that there are no rights without corresponding duties and strict qualifications. Entitlement comes either from specific individuals (or groups thereof ) or from governmental agencies (presumably also human agents) who have been granted specific agent-like powers and which actually possess the means and ability to grant them. If you are a member of a private club with dining room facilities you are entitled by that membership to access to those facilities, because the club already can provide them (but you are not thereby entitled to world-class cuisine at all times—the club can’t provide that). If you have purchased a firstclass ticket you are entitled to the better seats and other amenities that it is stated that the ticket provides. You are not entitled to live to be 1000 years old—no one has the power or the ability to provide that. You are not entitled to sunny weather whenever you want because no one can provide that or “guarantee” it. But what about hot button issues like healthcare? Are you entitled to that? First, what is packed into the term healthcare? Or even more ambiguous terms such as “free healthcare” or “basic healthcare?” The answer is that no one can define any such concepts in a form in which one is “guaranteed” to have them provided as an entitlement by either an individual, a group of individuals, or a government (this is exactly analogous to the situation with trying to either define or provide “the greatest good of the greatest number”). One cannot be entitled to something which does not yet exist or cannot be specified and provided. And in no case whatsoever—never in the history of the human race—has there been an instance in which any entitlement was literally “free.” There is always a cost associated with any economic good, and if it is available it is by definition true that someone somewhere must have paid for it. It is not “free” if the taxpayers or someone you do not know are footing the bill for it. And it is not free if the government simply prints paper money to cover the cost—that bill (to cover the cost) will have to be paid by future generations of taxpayers.

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The enormous growth of government in Western societies that have been infected by the cancerous entitlement mentality has been due to the obvious fact that a larger and larger layer of bureaucracy is required to commandeer and then parcel out specific entitlements that have been enacted into legislation by “representatives” who are too scared to say no to each such entitlement request for fear of being voted out of office. With this increase in bureaucracy has come a corresponding decrease in our understanding of private property and its role in society. There is potentially no limit to this increase in the bureaucracy. At its theoretical limit it becomes communism—however, no longer the dictatorship, but rather the bureaucracy, of the masses. In practice, communism is impossible to achieve, because there is always a strongman or woman who will usurp dictatorial power over the property of others, thus limiting the chimerical dictatorship of the masses to the dictatorship of the strongman socialist tribal leader. But the demands for more and more entitlements—always supposed to be “free” or requiring just one more “small sacrifice”—never go away. They coincide directly with the disappearance of private property, since they require sovereign government to arrogate more and more to the “public” sphere for distribution. Continual demand for entitlements can be controlled only by brute force and suppression. There is no alternative to the degeneration of the entitlement mentality into the socialist form of taxis dictatorship, since the elite planners must inevitably control all distributions. What happens when the ever-expanding bureaucracy becomes larger than the productive or “private” sector that is being taxed into oblivion in order to support it? We have already seen what happens: just read Bronowski’s description of the Inca bureaucracy in Note 2 of Chapter 5. Having become rigidified and directed to only a few particular ends by a single, backward looking planning board, the whole house of cards can be blown over by the first unexpected wind. Governments East and West are well on their way to becoming unstoppable bureaucracies. How do we kill this cancer when the bureaucrats would have to go out and get actually productive jobs if we were able to return (or would it be, turn for the first time?) to a less constrained economy? Not even the elected leaders could manage to

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dismantle the bureaucracies. Alienated and terrified of losing their security blankets, they will not “go quietly into the night.” Unaware of what it would even look like to have a job in the “private” sector economy, let alone how one might go about procuring one, they will not willingly give up their security blanket pension and vacation status no matter how boring, meaningless, and alienating their lives have become. They are on a vicious positive feedback cycle: the more meaningless and unpleasant their lives, the more they agree to stay with their jobs because of what the alleged “entitlements” and benefits provide. They will stay as close to the seat of power as they can in order to cling to their jobs. This is why each populous country has a major magnet city surrounded by the minions of the bureaucratic class who want to be right beside the seat of power in order to ensure their continued indispensability, while they in turn are surrounded by those who wish to become members of the governing class, all the way out to the outermost slums populated by those who want desperately to get closer in, hoping to eventually get in to the circle of power. Centralized power and bureaucratic structure inevitably produces the equivalent of a ghetto or shantytown at its extreme outskirts, beyond what is called in the U.S. the Beltway fringe, or at the outskirts of places like Mexico City. That is why the political divide is between the constructivist leftists who take over the center and larger cities (supported by both extremely rich and extremely poor perimeters), and as power brokers advocate taxis style, top-down control, while the “rural” areas, with much greater decentralization of (less stratified) wealth and power, are in “conservative” opposition, and regarded as “deplorable” by those who hold power. This can be seen in the current power split in the United States, which effectively represents two different versions of what was earlier a single country. Clustered in large cities on each coast are the real and (self ) imagined “movers and shakers,” who control power and broker it to and through the bureaucratic class surrounding them in the large cities, while in the interior of the country a more dispersed population remains largely self-reliant and opposed to increasing entitlement handouts that, since they have to pay for them, benefit the large cities and coastal populations more than themselves. Once upon a time it was assumed that government existed

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to provide for and benefit the people. Now we see that people exist in order to provide for and benefit the government.

Is Sovereign Government Always Necessary? Historically it has been assumed, without question, that government was both necessary and sovereign. As sovereign, it has coercive powers over the individual citizens. As necessary, it is presumed to be a requirement for providing the law, a standing army, public works such as roads, and other items required for the benefit and safety of the members of society. While it is hard to conceive of a society without functional organization, it is not often considered whether one could dispense with government sovereignty and still have adequate organization. But we can ask whether governmental functions can be based on something other than force or coercive power held by government as a supervenient independent entity. Could we have a functioning society based upon something else, such as voluntary contractual obligation, instead of coercive force? Contract law need not involve government sovereignty. We could have a Popperian open society based on contracts. With respect to property based on land (and extendable to intellectual and bodily property also), the recent form of proprietary communities provides a model for study. A key difference is that a tribal group or village is structured as a cooperative endeavor (benevolence) while a proprietary community is structured as an income producing property (impersonal cooperation). Consider the difference between a tribal village and a proprietary grouping such as a shopping center or a managed housing development. The latter is based upon the concept of ownership whereas the former is not. In terms of community structure and function, proprietorship is a functional form of organization, while tribalism is instead a form of disorganization. Sovereignty substitutes force for mutual benefit determined by contractual obligation, and it conceives of rent from land or its use as “unearned” passive income (as does the US tax code to this day). Proprietary ownership can, as a local

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and voluntary and contractual as opposed to coercive form of organization, provide the services usually assumed to require “government” to supply. Consider this insight from only 50 years ago: Landowners have begun to assume responsibility for some of the public improvements to land, both in residential subdivisions intended to be sold off as individual lots and in developments such as shopping centers intended to remain under whole ownership. Shopping centers, for example, are providing many of the services normally performed by municipal agencies in the older retail districts. These include parking, roads, lighting, landscaped common areas, police and fire protection, storm sewers, and in some cases, sewage disposal. Such a development has become increasingly necessary as sovereignty has failed to meet the advancing demand. (MacCallum, 1970, p. 101)

If such voluntary land organizations continue to operate (as a condominium presently does), there is no need for them to perform all the services and then give or dedicate them to some municipal “sovereign” authority (see also Bos [2015] for a detailed elaboration of this). They can perform all the functions of municipal authority, and it can be financed (in whole or in part) from the “for-profit” structure and motive of the organization, and thus eliminate the need for the local government and its taxation. To the response that a condominium owner is “forced” to pay association fees just like taxes one must point out the crucial difference: the taxpayer is stuck with the ever increasing tax bill as a vassal of the state (which is why countries make it so hard to renounce citizenship), whereas the condominium owner is free to choose—voluntarily accept the condo contract, or sell his or her interest at whatever the market rate is and move elsewhere where the expenses are acceptable. The owner cannot be guaranteed some money amount in advance, because the market changes from moment to moment. But at least the owner can sell and move elsewhere. That is more freedom than is provided by the sovereign government-coercive model. The ownership model is equally at work in organized or professional sports and entertainment. Athletes and pop singers (representing physical performance property and intellectual property) sell their products (their performances) according to contracts determined by the ticket

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prices people are willing to pay. There are none of the traditional labor market problems here—no “minimum wage” or “hours of work” distractions. Such factors are determined by what the market will bear—when sports or concert ticket prices are too high, no one buys tickets anymore, so it doesn’t matter if players have unions or agents. If the league has a minimum payment for employment (minimum wage) that will automatically drop if ticket prices are forced to go down in order to fill seats. The market signals take care of adjustments, and they do so automatically, without recourse to governmental coercion or labor union bullying. Many legal cases are now settled by private binding arbitration instead of in the traditional state controlled legal apparatus. Again, the impetus for this is the logjam of cases backed up in the court system. In general, participants find that “justice is served” as adequately as in the governmental coercive system, and at less cost in terms of time and money. Insofar as international legal disputes are litigated it is always in voluntary binding arbitration, because there is no legal framework between sovereign nations (the so-called world court is as powerless as the League of Nations was). All trade agreements and disputes (that do not end in violence) that are settled are a matter of contractual obligation and economic benefit rather than trans-sovereign force. The constant cry of the constructivist for an all-powerful world government based on force (presumably to be the tribal leader who parcels out everyone’s fair share) is slowly being addressed by contractual obligation resolution between conflicting ownership claims, without the disorganizational structure of coercion from governmental bureaucracy. The switch to private ownership of government services is often resisted because of the strong effect of the tribalist mentality. A case in point is the establishment of security checks for airports as a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Initially, this was handled by private security firms under contract to the federal government. As is inevitably the case, there were complaints about the incompetence and arrogance of particular security agents. What this should have occasioned was pressure upon the private contractors to fire those agents and hire and train more competent ones to take their place. What happened instead was a hue and cry for the great benevolent dictator in the sky to take over from wicked private contractors, and thus the TSA took its form. As usual,

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this placed the passengers in an even worse position: it is all but impossible to fire anyone once they have a government sanctioned job. Thus, there are probably more incompetent and arrogant TSA agents now than there were incompetent private contractors’ agents, but since the nightly news value has died down, unpleasant incidents are no longer reported in the news, and there is insufficient pressure to remove them. But the simple fact remains that market order pressures would have forced private contractors to change employees far more rapidly than anything can force a government agency to discipline or fire incompetent employees. This model may not work everywhere. But it is easy to see how and why its extension into personal service and intellectual property areas developed. And due to the inability of sovereign governmental structures to anticipate and adjust to unforeseen future developments (since they look in the rearview mirror, always based upon last year’s tax revenue and projections), those areas may soon see similar approaches. Such small and incremental adjustments away from the dictatorial model of tribal structure help prevent or slow down the acceleration of the trend toward the entitlement mentality approach. Voting with proprietary choice— with what is in one’s wallet, when you have what is referred to as “skin” in the game—in these cases is taking over from voting to fill someone else’s wallet as coerced out of yours by sovereign bungleocrats. One should notice that this provides what Rothbard wanted his anarchism to provide: property based social ordering without coercive government. It is interesting to note that this point of view has been around for a long time, but not in philosophy or economics or political theory—rather in anthropology and business (see MacCallum, 2014). MacCallum notes especially his grandfather Spencer Heath, a businessman, and the anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. All these individuals were well aware that while no coercive institutionalized structures of government was the ideal aim, it was necessary to approach this goal as a never-ending task, as Wundt had said of becoming in the individual and society. This is the point that is completely missing from the explicit rationality and conscious direction constructivist libertarian and anarchist proposals noted in Chapter 7. We need to entertain the ideal if we are ever to attain the practicality of a limited government. But we cannot succumb to the desire for instant gratification.

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While this seems to be surprising, it parallels the way living bodies have evolved. Not surprisingly, evolution has followed the liberal blueprint in the assembly of organisms from single cells to multicellular ones. As Lewis Thomas so eloquently pointed out, our cells are rented and owned—condominium structures based on proprietary ownership rights of voluntary cooperation of already existing “parts.” There has never in the history of evolution on this planet been a rationalist constructivist organism or cell—one designed by the inferior capacity of a hubris filled Comte or a socialist planning committee. Even the contemporary attempts at genetic and “bio-” tinkering fall far short of that ideal. New vaccines may be called “genetically engineered,” but they follow the model Thomas indicated—already existent structures are borrowed (snipped out) from one location and inserted into another location in the hope that they will find the new environment agreeable and decide to live there and in so doing add a desired beneficial adaptive function. And it should not be at all surprising that evolution has continued this pattern in the evolution of society.

Excursus: What Exactly Is Anarchism, and What Problem Was It Proposed to Solve? Anarchy and anarchism are weasel words: like an accordion, they expand and contract, twist and turn, double back upon themselves, and tie themselves into knots with seemingly inevitable regularity. They are square circles spinning motionlessly in the colorless blue and red landscape of political debate. It is time to realize that these terms add no content to a discussion because, since they mean all things to all people, they now mean nothing at anyone. Initially a darling term of the left, its proponents are not even sure of how to use it or how to achieve a consensus (Rooum, 1992/2016). The same can be said for the right, where the term is variously used to imply no government at all, no government that is based upon coercion, or government based upon some aspect of liberalism rather than upon others. If there is any consensus it seems to be in terms of the idea that social organization must be based upon voluntary cooperation. In that sense, probably almost everyone agrees, whether on

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the left or the right (indeed there are even those who regard themselves as “Hayekian anarchists,” although Hayek would never have endorsed the term). Like laissez-faire, the term anarchism is best left out of any discussion if one hopes to achieve clarity and avoid tangents caused by “lightening rod” implied meanings. What is at issue is the manner in which social organization should occur. The problem is that sovereign government requires two things: first, that it be a parasite, to stand outside of and supervise or control the ongoing social order, and second, that it must possess force in order to effect compliance to its supervisory control. The anarchists wish to remove government entirely, and have it be based upon their volition instead of coercion. But in making that argument (whether from the left or from the right) the problem of organization—which is really what is at issue—is not adequately discussed. What is the actual context of constraint in which impersonal social organization occurs? (Liberalism answers that, strangely enough, impersonal order arises from voluntary cooperation; progressivism, that its mere appearance is a result of taxis coercion.) What are the spontaneously evolved principles and institutions, and how do they function? Those issues are important—definitional issues surrounding anarchism are not.

Government Based on Rights and Contracts, or Entitlements? If we give in to the idea that a personified government is to supply entitlements there is little hope of turning away from a lapse back into complete taxis control. If we can foster an understanding that the forms of organization we commonly call government is based upon “grown” or conventional rights pertaining to all, not upon entitlements granted to particular groups of individuals, we may avoid the seemingly inevitable socialist dictatorship. We need to understand that governance is based upon grown or evolved rights and contracts (conventional as opposed to physical or natural) that keep the peace of the order of society by imposing a context of constraints regulating conduct in the abstract order in totally impersonal fashion. And a right comes inextricably intertwined

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with a corresponding responsibility. Rights require responsibilities, and do not entail entitlements. We need to abandon the idea of entitlements as nothing but a residual aspect of the idea of personal handouts from a benevolent agent. Government must not be considered as an independent agent in distinction from the groups of individuals who are governed. It must be an impersonal context of constraints guaranteeing that the order of society continues to function, and nothing more. We cannot anthropomorphize it. It is not a transcendent Cartesian agent, the political equivalent of a Laplacean demon, who stands outside the order of society and judges and modifies it in accordance with constructivist ideals and programs. It is from understanding that framework that we must keep government to the absolute minimum necessary for providing that impersonal structure. Our freedom requires that framework of abstract constraints that impersonally apply to all, without special exceptions. And freedom in an ever-changing world requires us to pay the price, to take responsibility, and to venture out into the unknown and unforeseen instead of being satisfied with yesterday’s security blanket. This is hard to comprehend, and incomprehensible to the constructivist. But alienation or estrangement—from nature, society, one’s fellow man, and oneself —is an essential part of growing up. And it has everything to do with freedom. We must detach from the externalized womb—from the structures and assumptions of our environment and communities— in order to become independent persons, actual autonomous individuals. In this process, we may come to look upon ourselves, others, “and the world about us as strange and perplexing—as indeed alien. Many thinkers, just like Marx, have called on man to transcend himself, his past, his origins. Yet few comprehend that it is only through something like alienation that we can do any such thing” (Bartley, 1990, p. 71). Getting that point through to the disaffected youth (of any generation) is perhaps the most difficult task that civilization has faced. Given the sorry state of our education system in the West, it is now harder than ever before. In that sense of being harder now than ever before, reforming education joins the task of whittling down the bureaucracy. It is very difficult for those who have an innate fear of the unknown and the unforeseen to realize that the freedoms provided by the abstract society can provide far more benefit to them than the limited benefits of the not

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at all benevolent dictatorship they are working so hard to bring about. There is no successful trade off in surrendering freedom to get security. What you will receive is servitude instead. What you must do is bypass that sovereignty altogether. Although usually terrifying, ignorance is indispensable in the human existential predicament. It is likewise a determining factor in adaptability: when the unforeseen is encountered it is something of which we were until then literally ignorant. If the framework of society is a rigid bureaucracy allowing the pursuit of only ends specified in advance it will, like the Incas, not be capable of rapid adaptation when a band of marauding European soldiers of fortune arrive. There will not be any adaptive mechanism—any creative or productive capability—in place, and no provision for the rapid generation of one. That is what the quotation from Bartley above gets at: if we are not already a bit alienated from the hierarchical structures of ourselves and society we will not be able to achieve anything like “transcending” our past and our present selves. We need ignorance— and a healthy response to it —it is indispensable to force us to continually adapt and readapt to the unknown, and that process requires that we “transcend” our established taxis structures and our tribal selves. Without it we are like an evolutionary dead end—quite adapted up until the point of our extinction when the econiche suddenly changes beyond the limited range of our adaptive responsivity. If government is based upon positive entitlements we are the Inca. If government is based upon conventionally arisen rights and contracts that are a framework of negative constraints which allow the spontaneous order of society to continue to function but do not limit our behaviors in advance, then we will likely survive and, hopefully, thrive.

Property Rights and the Distribution Problem: Socialism or the Free Market? Perhaps the biggest threat to the abstract society based upon private property and the operation of free markets at present is the view that it is “morally imperative” for the “rich” to give up their hard-earned gains to those who are less “fortunate.” This is the socialist idea of “caring and

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sharing,” or more accurately, the politics of greed and envy. One can call this the “rainbow fish” theory of responsibility and entitlement. Some time ago there was a progressivist children’s book about a beautiful fish with multicolored scales who made all the other fish feel so sad because of its splendor and beauty that it took off the beautiful scales and gave them, one by one, to all the other fish, until it had only one scale left. Apparently, the moral of this story was to teach how wonderful it is to share, and for everyone to be “equal” in outcome. Unfortunately, all it does is illustrate the failure of socialism: it shows that when you allow a tribal leader or dictator or even your own guilty conscience to take control of your life you will make everyone “equal” by reducing them all to the lowest common denominator rather than by creating conditions in which they can raise themselves up to higher standards and levels of achievement. While the other fish gained a single scale as a gift the net result was an “equality of outcome” in which every fish was equal in having next to nothing, and still with absolutely no incentive to do anything innovative on its own. This is the inevitable result of the politics of greed and envy in a coercive “educational” system. A similar scenario is found in the Covid-19 pandemic. Here, the “rich” are the intellectually and technologically capable nations, and the sad “poor” are those nations without either knowledge, infrastructure, or technological prowess to have developed vaccines or to have distributed them to their populations. Here, the socialist plaint begins: the rich nations are “morally obligated” to make the poor nations equal. The way to do this, they add, is to abolish intellectual property rights and allow the poorer nations to steal (they propose more pleasant sounding terms, of course) the knowledge from private companies who developed the vaccines at great cost so that they can, at no intellectual investment cost, manufacture and distribute the vaccines in their countries, and thus “end” this crisis. There are several things to note here. First, local availability of an adequate vaccine depends upon having a developed infrastructure (capable of having manufacturing plants, transportation, endpoint refrigeration, and the myriad other things in place), which simply does not exist in these countries. It is not the lack of vaccine that is their problem, it is the inability (when they have it in these countries) to provide

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trained medical personnel to administer it (in conjunction with the inability to keep it safe from theft and adequately distribute it), as well as the necessity to overcome the fear and distrust of government among their populations so that they will be willing to receive it. Thus the problem is not the rich hoarding (as the rainbow fish was falsely portrayed by socialism) intellectual-technological property so much as the logistic problems of distribution of the resultant goods, and the lack of knowledge on the part of potential providers and end users in those countries. Far more insidious and destructive to civilization is the cry to abolish intellectual property. All progress in the growth of knowledge and technology depends upon private property—in this case, intellectual property. All progress in the development of new drugs and treatments would come to a standstill, because no company can stay in business unless it makes a profit, which it cannot do if its intellectual property is taken from it. What would happen is obvious: sovereign governments, with their coercive power, would have to step in to “nationalize” all drug manufacturing (a “reluctant” sacrifice all in the name of the greater good, of course). This would mean that progress would not be the result of competitive market cooperation, but rather directed by the limited range of bureaucratic funds available for distribution to facilities based upon knowledge that was available in the past, with no possibility of responding to the newly arisen needs of today. We would “equalize” the ability to respond to new crises down to the position of the now impoverished rainbow fish and it’s now “equal” cohorts. No one would be left who was capable of the necessary innovation, nor have the motivation to do so. The situation is a mirror image of the problem of fraud in science. In place of the plaintive but appealing TV reporter we now have a US relative of, say, all the Indians unable to get drugs or vaccines for Covid in Mumbai or Delhi screaming for the abolition of intellectual property by government intervention so that they can all get the aid that is “being denied to them by the greedy capitalists in the drug industry,” with no realization on their part that it is the incompetence of the Indian government and its infrastructure that is at fault. If there is a “solution”

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here it is certainly not the “temporary” (soon to be extended to permanent) suspension of intellectual property rights that the socialist health organizations want, but rather allowing the free market to open up in those countries so that safe, tested, and not counterfeit vaccines already donated by the “greedy” manufacturers can be distributed and administered properly instead of being lost, stolen or spoiled, or badly copied by black marketers.

How to Make Progress, Slowly If we can resist the temptation to change things according to some overall or comprehensive plan, and restrict our legislation to small tasks for which we can assess the results, then it might be possible to make progress. We are never going to be able to magically remake all of society, or somehow create a “just” distribution, or render everyone equal on some arbitrarily chosen dimension. We need to make sure that we do not try to change, or usurp the power of, the abstract rules of determination that keep the peace of the order of social interactions. We will never be able to foresee the effects of our unintended consequences. The best we can do is create conditions in which we can take advantage of our inevitable ignorance rather than attempt to evade it. We are always going to tack back and forth between the extremes, as the organizational principles of rhythm or opponent process regulation require. That is why we cannot etch any particular course of action into stone— we would then find that our actions have caused a swing that would take us out into the realm of destructive disequilibrium by going beyond the borders or blurred edges of the constraints guiding our behavior. Our attempts to improve society can never be explicitly rational and totally controlled. That attempt leads to disaster—overswings becoming uncontrollable and finally going far away from the intended course—and the result will be a return to tribalism. Everything we do has to be empirical—always subject to the checks and constraints of what happens when we make small changes. That is the only framework in terms of which we can proceed if we are to achieve progress. What we will do in that situation is not to plan progress but rather to attempt to create conditions in

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which, if it is going to be able to occur, it will. In short, we need to incorporate the lesson that the study of spontaneously ordered phenomena has provided us—we need to understand that there is a context of constraints necessary for the order to have come into existence in the first place, and equally necessary for it to continue to exist as a dynamical entity. We cannot throw away that order simply because we do not like some of the things that are found within it. We have to whittle away at those things and check to see that in so doing we have not caused more harm than good.

Civilization Is Very Recent—And We Have Never Had a Liberal Civilization We must guard against the tendency to assume that there was some golden era in the past in which liberalism thrived and after which tribal and totalitarian forces regained control. That is just a variant of the myth of the Golden Age that was destroyed by Ferguson and the other Moralists. While we can certainly point to a history of developing liberal thought and understanding—as from the Athenian Greeks and the Taoists through to the Scottish moralists and then the Austrian economists—there was never a time when those liberal views reached a large enough population to create a society based wholly upon their principles. Like nearly all intellectual revolutions, they occurred in backwaters, away from the entrenched and fossilized seats of power and prestige: Athens was scrawny and ineffectual compared to the military might of Sparta; Edinburgh was an outcast smaller city at the edge of empire compared to London; Washington, DC did not even exist, but had to be created out of the swamp after the Revolutionary war; and so forth. In general it is the same as revolutionary reconceptualizations in science. Scientific revolutions rarely come from the established centers of power, with their inherent conservatism and bureaucratic normal science baggage, but rather from the fringes, where novel thought is both more likely to first arise and also to be able to spread. Seats of power—in both the political and intellectual realms—have always been taxis structures. It was not Paris or Berlin or Rome that led the jump to the market economy

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in Europe, but rather the lowly-in-comparison Netherlands, and then the isolated islands of Great Britain. Thus, it should not be surprising that the lowly Scots played an outsized role in the theory of spontaneously organized social structures and the development of classical liberalism, or that the marginal center of Vienna would then take the lead in Europe in another century. The most famous attempt to create a liberal social order came with the American Revolution. Here, many desirable ideals have been enshrined: the Locke-Montesquieu concept of a Constitution— as a fundamental limitation upon power (sovereignty); the attempt at creating a representative government or legislature based upon both population density and state sovereignty; the separation of powers between an executive, a legislative, and a judicial branch; and many other ideas. Nevertheless, this first step must be judged as a failure. The founding fathers did not (could not) foresee the way in which modern bureaucrats and power seeking politicians could corrupt their conceptions for their own uses. For example, they failed to make any provision to prevent the existence and subsequent cancerous growth of the welfare society. They failed to prevent politicians from attempting to purchase votes through promising handouts, and they failed to realize that those handouts would soon be designated as entitlements. They failed to realize that the freedoms of communication they had built into the system would still be subject to censorship by those who were in power, and they could never have anticipated new technological developments such as the telegraph, radio, or the internet as mechanisms for censorship. They failed to anticipate the extent to which the country would be divided into large center cities which would usurp power from the states and more rural areas. Unfortunately, any list such as this can go on and on, because new situations entail new challenges upon the manner in which liberal principles of government must be reinforced and reformulated in order to cope with those challenges. And the only way to cope with those emergent challenges is to utilize negative rules of order to prohibit indefinitely extended classes of behaviors that will otherwise arise to try to circumvent the ongoing order. And most important, the earlier liberal theorists did not foresee— because no human being could then have foreseen—that the conflict

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between the morality of the abstract order of impersonal cooperation and tribal benevolence would cause such a tremendous effect upon our physiological and mental functioning. No one foresaw that our cerebral CNS could adapt to and foster the abstract order while our physiological and vegetative ANS and enteric system could not. This is clearly the greatest challenge that the liberal order faces. Unless we can effect the reconciliation between these two aspects of our nervous system and bodily functioning there will not be any possibility of a well-developed liberal social order. There are enough problems of the sort mentioned in the paragraph above, pertaining to safeguards that must be instituted—through “thou shalt nots” necessary for the liberal framework of organization—that we would have to come to grips with anyway, so that if we add one more giant issue, that of our physiological and psychological alienation in the abstract society, we will not be able to effect an enduring liberal social order. So we are not in any position to simply lay out an adequate conceptual–constitutional framework—more adequate than that provided by the American experiment—and then follow the libertarian directive to just go back to basing everything on property rights. We have to begin to accomplish many goals at once: killing the welfare state and the entitlement mentality as vestiges of the most primitive forms of tribalism; reigning in the bureaucracy as much as possible; creating freedom of opportunity and choice; and all the myriad other points we have mentioned. Such issues are in addition to the crucial psychologicalphysiological problem of creating the conditions in which our gut and ANS can begin to evolve to the point of coping with our alienation and malaise from leaving the face-to-face mammalian framework. We must eventually tackle all these issues, even though it is obvious we cannot attempt to cure them all at once. As an epistemologist and sometimes psychologist, I am inclined to say that tackling the problems of our adjustment to abstract markets is of paramount importance, because for the first time in history, it might be possible to take small steps that would actually improve the situation. But such a contention is in fact an empirical issue, and as such, is subject to refutation—it may not be the best single strategy. As a sometimes philosopher familiar with the problems of economics I am inclined

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to say that providing for the safety and continued functioning of market orders is the best single thing we can do, because more and more people, whether they are aware of it or not and whether they initially like it or not, will be drawn into the competitive form of impersonal cooperation that such orders provide, and in so doing benefit themselves to a sufficient extent that they will want to continue within market systems. But that is also an empirical thesis, and therefore just as subject to refutation. And just to mention one more personal interest, familiarity with social and political philosophy and theory inclines me to want to argue for destroying momentary political correctness as the greatest single cancer presently ravaging society, closely followed by the “intellectual” attempts to defend primitivism in the form of socialism and distributive justice. Obviously this is also an empirical issue, and devoting too much attention to it alone may well be counterproductive. Your interests will be different from mine, and no doubt will suggest other priorities. We will eventually need to address them all, and that can only be done in small steps, in piecemeal fashion. Then, we must wait to see their unintended consequences and be prepared to make corrections as needed. There is another strategy, perhaps of questionable utility, but one which I chose to employ in writing these books. I would not have engaged in the considerable effort and expense to do so had I not felt that, if some of you have followed and critically thought about the issues found in the chapters above, then you will be able, in your own unique ways, to incrementally advance the cause of liberalism, if for no other reason than that now you have a framework for understanding what is wrong with the common alternatives that are perennially proposed to replace it. And following the old doctrine that to be forewarned is to be forearmed, you will now have an opportunity, if you choose to pursue it, to affect the climate of opinion of those around you. Education is a powerful tool, and even though it may take a while, it can even cut through totalitarian propaganda and advertising. You still have (at least some!) freedom of choice, and if you so choose can quietly but carefully make the case for liberal principles of order, and in so doing explain to others why constructivist and progressivist policies lead inevitably backward to more primitive forms of social and political organization. My focus in writing these chapters has been educational in the sense that the

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pernicious effect of the primitive doctrines of rationalist constructivism have to be seen for what they are and can then gradually be abandoned for the more adequate framework I have sketched. But education alone cannot be expected to do the job. If a liberal social order is to come into existence, it will require progress on all the issues noted above, and no doubt many more I have not foreseen. Survival in the abstract society requires a never-ending process of adaptation and re-education. Evolution is always a matter of small, tentative steps. Please take some.

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Index

A

academic scribblers (Keynes) 233 action, as functional and semiotic 249 adjustment, wellness approach 175 agents, defined 72 agile thinking 175 alienation and malaise, as a result of pitting evolutionary history against abstract society 153 all or none versus graded potential activity (in CNS) 49 anarchism, of left as continuous with that of right 290 anarchist society (Rothbard) 267 anarchy and anarchism, as weasel words with only emotional meaning 318 anticipatory structures, existing only in agents 75

anticipatory systems 60 arrest all change (Plato) 223 authoritarianism (Polanyi) 258 axiomatic framework, as necessary support for the market (Block) 273

B

belief, as a higher power than reason (Polanyi) 259 Bellarmino, strategy against Galileo 208 benevolence versus implicit cooperation 131 "big," as not better in government 303 binding arbitration, as supplanting government legal system 316 biofeedback, in coping strategies 167

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. B. Weimer, Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism, Volume II, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95477-2

347

348

Index

Bloomsbury group, their repudiation of authority based on authority 144 boundary conditions 45 brain processes, as like a cloud of gas 48 bureaucracies, as unstoppable 312 bureaucracy, limit of is communism 312 bureaucratic structure, produces shantytowns around centers of 313 bus schooling, as "free" babysitting 206

C

Camelot myth, in higher education 238 cancel culture, and guilt 217 capitalism, as only framework in which race is unimportant 233 care, cradle-to-grave 304 centrality of property, in morality 154 Chinese "curse" of living in interesting times 223 choice control (Abel) 277 choice, not sacrifice, in the abstract society 137 choices as leading to more possibilities 294 as related to ambiguity 294 not to necessary outcomes 294 circle of ignorance (Weaver) around knowledge 76

citizens, now existing for the benefit of government, not vice versa 314 closed society, breakdown of the 158 CNS classification, as inherently judgmental 185 coach, in therapy 173 coalitional control decentralization 39 fuzzy boundaries 39 superadditivity 39 collectivist doctrines, as inevitably resulting in totalitarianism 300 command neuron 42 command neuron hypothesis 38 competition as cooperative procedure 18 as discovery procedure 18 competitive cooperation of cells (Thomas) 150 complexity, definition (von Neumann) 4 comprehensively critical rationalism 254 Comtean positivism 206 conditions favorable to growth versus central planning of particulars 274 conditions of quantity (for measurement) 10 condominiums of cells 150 confusion of rate-independent realm with rate-dependent (Mises) 289 constitutionalism (first attempt), as now judged to be a failure 326 consumer as market driving force 120

Index

as source of information in market order 308 as source of market information not available to dictator or planner 121 consumer choices, as limiting shortages 122 context, as determining meaning (Lashley example) 54 context of constraint 246 as coming into existence simultaneously or all of a piece 304 conventionalism 208 cooperation, Adam Smith invisible hand as instance 113 correspondence rules 262 cosmic structure, as surrounding normal science taxis organization 53 "cradle-to-grave" socialism 204 creativity, as based on opponent process contrast enhancement 145 crisis, of identity and integrity 158 crisis of integrity and standards, in justificationism 233 critical race "theory" 226 critical race theory, as haunted universe doctrine 91 critical rationalism 248 as faith based (Popper) 255 cultural Marxism ix, 90, 210, 215 as haunted universe doctrine 232

349

D

deflecting criticism, academic institutions do so by forming a committee 237 desegregation (Eisenhower) 205 dictators, as skilled rhetoricians 139 division of knowledge 18 in market process 53 division of knowledge and labor 308 division of labor 18, 94, 112 downward causation (Campbell), defined 61, 93, 131 dual control (Polanyi), as higher order semantics (rules) constraining physical laws 293 duality of descriptions in science 47, 48 dynamical reality, as statistical (Schrödinger) 55

E

economic as empirical but not experimental 264 defined (Menger) 146 economy of knowledge as key to market order 20 in normal science research 87 education as guilds, cartels and fiefdoms, and protection rackets 212 as lacking in accountability 216 as prepackaged plans 206 as social phenomenon 218 failure of current progressivist approach 226 must be for the future 224 no freedom of choice in 210

350

Index

no free market in 212 employment, "caused" by deficit spending (Keynes) 28 enemies of freedom, as having taken its label (Schumpeter) 246 entitlements cost of 311 cradle-to-grave 119 definition 310 entitlements and "sacrifice" 312 entrepreneurship, in science (Kirzner) 79 equality as equity in "woke" progressivism 119 cannot be measured by physically equal distributions 126 equality as sameness versus equality under the rule of law 169 error as consequence of discrepancy between model and external input 69 detected by science 86 not politicians or news reporters 86 there is no physical concept of 294 error, well-meaning affirmative discrimination 301 greatest good 302 social justice 302 essential tension, tradition and innovation 160 ethics of autonomy (Shweder), as positive liberty 135 evolution as following the liberal blueprint (Thomas) 318

as group selection 60 not a property of individuals 60 evolutionary approach 208 evolved open endedness 138 exempted from civilization, no entitlement there to 222 existence of miracles, David Hume on 188 exosomatic evolution 62 explanation, as internal model (Craik) 62 explanation in physical sciences, covering law account 2 explanation of the principle 3 explanation of the principle versus the particular 260 Explicit rationality ix extra uterine development, as source of language 231

F

face-to-face benevolence, neural basis of 180 failure, Beckett on 177 family as an indispensable evolved social institution 228 as the source of educational responsibility (Hayek, Horwitz) 225 reconciles face-to-face and abstract societies 225 family structure, role in prosocial behavior 179 feedforward, as mechanism to compress time (Rosen) 69 found law versus legislation 123 fraud, in science 323

Index

freed intelligence (Dewey) 205 freedom as requiring paying the price of taking responsibility 320 redefined by progressivism xii "freedoms to" receive or decline, supply or withhold 308 freedom to supply and to receive 115 free enterprise, no liberal principle of 309 free speech, as determined by progressivism 209 free will and responsibility (D.S. Miller) 276 free will, requiring voluntary control 271 "frozen accidents" in evolution 151 functional agency, as dependent upon error detection 73 functional, as always physically ambiguous 263

G

Galilean revolution, not possible in social sciences 44 gatekeepers as final determiners of "knowledge" 220 as intermediaries in knowledge 211 as sainted book burners and censors 211 generation gap 162 inevitable 160 goal, defined as forward-looking functionality 66

351

good and evil, crippling burden of (Chisholm) 170 governmental interventions, as external to liberal constraints 272, 273 government, as supervision of entitlements 215 gradualism in evolution (Dawkins) 291 group selection 306 guilt individual versus collective 192 of the progressivist transferred to abstract society 193

H

hard science, laws as relations between a few phenomena 7 haunted universe doctrines, as untestable and metaphysical 90 hedonism of the moment, as end of conduct 141 helicopter parents and instructors, in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood 221 hermeneutic circle 217 heterogony of ends (Wundt) 17 hierarchical model 37 high complexity, definition (von Neumann) 5 higher order constraints, as operating by downward causation (Campbell) 277 higher order elements as functional 45 historicism, Mises argument against 288

352

Index

Hogan group research on "the deplorables" versus Haidt 149 human development, as mother-infant benevolence 231 human knowledge, as tied to symbols 230 hypothetico-deductive method (Hertz) 251

interoception, as sixth sense 181 interstate highway system 24 intervention, what constitutes, is an empirical issue 293 in the Neighborhood, no learning from failure 221 I, Pencil (Leonard Read) 139

J I

ignorance, as forcing adaptation to the unknown 321 immigration, now called "migration" 25 impossibility of experimentation, and social science 260 indeterminacy of translation (Quine) 9 individualist theory of value 126 inductive confirmation, does not exist in complex phenomena 13 inevitability of ignorance 188 as requiring general rules 111 inexorable laws of nature versus initial or boundary conditions 293 inference and expectation 61 inflation as making it cheaper to borrow 279 rampant in 1970s 278 inherent complexity, in social sciences 2 initial conditions 45 instrumentalism, defined 208 Intellectuals, as secondhand dealers in ideas xi

justice as fairness, in progressivism 20 justice as fairness (Rawls) 124 justificationism defined 281 fusions and contributions 251 justificationist rationality, breakdown of 83, 216

K

knowledge as opinion 216 as proven assertion 282 knowledge and competence incremental view of 176 versus fixed 176

L

laissez-faire, role in liberalism and libertarianism 291 language as a feedforward mechanism 89 centrality of context for meaning 89 law, as nomos, is tacit 307 law of heterogony of ends (Wundt) 30

Index

laws as "season inference tickets" 27 laws do not determine everything 46 laws of nature, as inexorable 45 learning as what mistakes to avoid 13 only from refuting instances (Popper) 220 within the lifespan 61 learning from mistakes 285 legal structure, as regulating conduct instead of "laissez-faire" 287 legislation, as thesei, are always conscious 307 Liberal, definition xiii liberalism "essence" there of 248 as based on voluntary cooperation and impersonal order 319 as ignored but never refuted 300 as requiring a context of constraint 247 as requiring defense by principles (Block) 270 as requiring incremental steps 328 utilitarian twist 248 liberal society survival, as an empirical question 120 "liberal" versus "conservative" in MFT 134 libertarian formulations, as failing to understand the complexity of evolution 300 libertarian framework anarchy 246 libertarian, imposition of liberal ideals by explicit means 247 libertarian position, as based on direct action and control 246 libertarian prescriptive social method, based on

353

nonaggression "axiom” (Rothbard) 267 liberty, as requiring a context of constraint 265 life harnesses physicality (Polanyi) 277 limitations on measurement 261 linear chaining model 37 living systems, as modeling with feedforward mechanisms 65 Lord Acton, on Adrian’s virtue 142 lower tuition and smaller bureaucracies in private funding 239

M

manifest image of common sense (Sellars) 258 market as forbidding collectivism as "class" determiners 139 as information 73 as means to opposing ends or demands 308 as merely means connected 130 as not an independent knowledge structure 78 not an anticipatory system 73 market order as arising when consumers came into existence 121 as merely means connected 19 as only unifying factor for all individuals 140 controlled by unelected bureaucrats in progressivism 287

354

Index

united by rules of property and transfer by consent 19 market participants, as ignorant of other participants and motives 20 market structure, does not anticipate—only agents anticipate 78 marriage and responsibility, as outmoded to progressivists 226 martyr for a cause, in progressivism 137 material versus formal models 4 mathematical recursion, as mechanism of productivity 50 maximization hypotheses 128 measurements as records and choices 46 freeze part of a continuous dynamics 47 medical model, as just cut out the malignancy 173 men of zeal (Justice Brandeis) 280 mental modalities, as a property of memory of the CNS 63 MFT (moral foundation theory) 132 microbiome 174, 199 mind, as product of group selection 17 modularity of the brain 39 monetarism (Friedman), as logical positivism applied to money 292 moral development (Kohlberg) 124 moral intuitionism 132 morality as higher order constraint operating by downward causation on behavior 110

as modules in MFT 146 as product of evolutionary downward causation 128 definition 108 different in abstract versus face-to-face societies 109 summarized in negative prohibitions to actions 111 moral rules as having selected us, not vice versa 111 as restraints upon individual impulses 113 we are products thereof, not producers of 309 moral versus hard sciences 26 Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood 219 as not allowing failure to happen 229 as teaching the morals of socialism 118 myth of the Golden age, as the loss of a prior liberal political state 325

N

necessary constraints, not constraints imposed by external government 275 negative constraints, as methodological rules 22 negative rules of order, Russell on 29 neojustificationism, as knowledge is merely probable assertion, not proven 283 neoteny, unique in extent in human development 229 Nomos versus thesis 16

Index

no rights without corresponding duties (Burke) 311 normal science, as paradigm-based puzzle solving 21 normal versus revolutionary research (Kuhn) 75 normal versus revolutionary science, as opponent process model 22

O

Office of Scientific Integrity, equivalent to Consumer Protection Bureau 86 on amending a plan (Burke) 218 operationalism, defined 208 opinion as creating reality for the "woke" 241 cannot confer rights or moral claims 222 opponent process regulations 310 organism as a theory of its environment 95 as theories of their environment or econiche 64 organization, ownership model of 315 orienting response, to novelty 14 origin of life, with the folding transformation 305 oscillation, as regulative or order enforcing mechanism 161 ought must imply can 286 owned property, vastly greater potential for, in abstract society 112

355

P

pancritical rationalism 194 particulars, as exemplifying abstract concepts 52 passions as inferior to reason 184 as judgments of meaning 185 as strategies for survival 186 defined 184 passions and reason, myth of inevitable opposition 184 passions and the tacit dimension 183 personality, role in science 26 physical specification, as inherently ambiguous 45 physical versus functional 125, 263 planning only for what individuals have in common 189 only subjects can, not markets 189 planning progress versus planning for conditions for progress 284 political correctness 215 politics of greed and envy as moral "imperative" of socialism 322 as requiring abolition of intellectual property 322 polycentric order 37 Popper, as economic interventionist 287 pragmatism 208 praxeology as pre-evolutionary 264 defined (Mises) 261 price mechanism, as impersonal signal 19 principles of complex orders 26

356

Index

private, as property, and as sector 304 private funding versus public aid for education 239 progress as depending entirely on an intact framework of order 301 cannot be planned xii Progressivism, as an atavism xii progressivist education 117 progress versus planning for progress 286 property as contrast enhancement or bordering 144 definition 306 related to law of liberty 114 property rights as requiring a context of constraints 266 cannot alone provide a free society 266 propositions, as derivable only from other propositions, not facts 250 proprietary contractual regulation, as based on private property 147 proprietorship, as functional form of organization 314 punctuated equilibrium in evolution, Rothbard on Gould 271 purpose of therapy, in Freud and rationalist constructivism 171

Q

Qin Shi Huang, self-designated Chinese Emperor 207

qualities, as determined by system of connections (classifications) 63

R

rainbow fish model, as theory of responsibility to supply entitlement 322 rate-independent laws as deterministic, not dynamical or rate-dependent reality 56 rate-independent versus rate-dependent 47 rationality as instantly specifiable 183 as means and not an end 188 rationality and morality, as only observable in the long run 140 rational reconstruction, as impossible in science or society 257 ratio scaling, requirements of 11 realism 208 compatible with liberalism 208 reality, as always richer than theory 219 reason as capable of disclosing complete content of economics (Mises) 261 as recent evolutionary development 187 as slave of the passions 159 reciprocal trustfulness (de Juvenel) 159 records, as inherently probabilistic 47 reflex arc 62 regulatory principles, of complex orders

Index

creativity 14 opponent process regulation 14 rhythm 14 religious hierarchy, as anointed purveyors of truth 207 rents always follow property improvement 152 responsibility, as based upon private property 112 retreat to commitment 250 retreat to commitment in faith 283 retreat to commitment (Mises) 263 revolutionary change, as scale dependent 272 rhetoric, of the left 207 rights as requiring responsibilities 320 only pertaining to participants in the social order, not freeloaders 222 road to serfdom, the new rights of socialism 285 role of authority, and rationalist constructivism 143 Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, as variant of socialism (Spangler) 289 rules of behavior, as negative constraints 51 rules of conduct, not objectively (physically) specifiable 108 rules versus laws 12

S

school boards, as unelected bureaucrats 205 school districts and eminent domain abuse 235

357

as having unlimited powers of taxation and eminent domain 205 science as advancing one funeral at a time (Planck) 256 as having no goals or expectations 77 as just an instrument in socialism 81 as search for invariants 27 cannot be "improved" any more than liberalism can be improved by interference 89 in a free society 85 scientific revolutions as reconceptualizations 80 as usually occurring in the backwaters 325 Scientism, as pretense of method x self-explanation, limit of 6 self-reproducing automata, must contain complete specification of themselves within themselves 65 similarity of youth, in the abstract society 163 social change as immediate (Feyerabend) 268 as piecemeal tinkering 254 socialism as the substitution of what sounds good for what works fairly well (Sowell) 148 socialist anarchism 248 social justice warriors 209 social physics 248 Comte 3

358

Index

social sciences, lack of measurement and therefore experimentation 8 society as cosmos, the result of action but not design 54 society, can be based on voluntary contractual obligation 314 sovereign government as looking backwards and not forwards 317 as parasitical (standing outside the order) and coercive 319 sovereign, has to finance by taxation as a non-owner 152 sovereignty, as substituting force for mutual benefit 314 span of control 307 special interest groups, voluntary association versus work or government related 165 split brain, or sectioned corpus callosum 38 spontaneously organized complex phenomena xiii standards as always subject to criticism 252 infinite regress in justificationism 253 state, defined by coercive power 267 states or countries, as community disorganization (MacCallum) 153 stress (Selye) 166 strict determinism, as metaphysical thesis 45 structural realism 64 subjects versus objects 9, 12

submission to authoritarianism, as choice of taxis followers (Fromm) 116 surface versus non-terminal elements 44 surrender of freedom for security, no possible trade off 321 sympathy, and limping before the lame 192

T

taboos and "don’t do’s" 16 tacit knowledge, as when practitioners know more than they can tell 227 taxes always precede property improvement 152 taxis, as unable to replace a cosmos 269 tenure as permanent job security rather than free speech protection 213 as perversion of property rights (Alchian) 214 the economy of knowledge explains function of superiority of market 36 the hero’s journey, in entertainment 136 the man of system (Adam Smith) 275 theory, as negative constraints 15 the "Plan," in traditional therapy 182 therapist, as life coach 168, 182, 191 therapy limited to individuals 190

Index

nature of in psychology 167 therapy client, as a consumer 173 the selfless, does indeed arise from the selfish 150 thinking, as always symbolic 63 totalitarianism, as "morally committed" governors 114 TOTE (test operate, test exit) unit 94 as an anticipatory structure 70 "transgenerational" social contract in the family (Burke) 227 tribal existence as frozen in time 195 Bakhtiari example 195 tribalism and benevolence, role of emotions in 25 tribalism, "woke" version 226 truth, constructivist approach to 209 tu quoque argument 252 as "scientific" excuse for being unscientific 284 Turing machines 42

U

umwelt 71 understanding meaning, as requiring knowledge of derivational history 55 universities, defined 213 utilitarianism 248

359

as aiming at its own obsolescence 130 failure of 129

V

vagus complex and passions or emotions 178 as judgmental 178 views in fact (Ichheiser) 133 virtues of implicit cooperation, as not those of the tribe 142 voluntary land organizations, as providing the functions of municipal authority 315 voting, with proprietary choice 317

W

weight of tradition, as slowing social change 280 welfare queen and woke student, as scapegoats to progressivists 240 welfare state and the entitlement mentality, as vestigial tribalism 327 white privilege, as illegitimate as a class concept 193

Z

Zeigarnik effect, as disruption of anticipatory structures 67