Everyone holds different pieces of the puzzle!
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I am endlessly fascinated  by how we all ostensibly live in the same universe, yet we all see such different realities. On the one hand, this social condition allows little room for boredom. On the other, it causes many human beings to hate, despise, and even to attempt to kill each other.

The Western Social Cauldron Is Boiling More Vigorously

As virtually everyone  in Western Civilization has taken note over the past couple of years, a great many of the Western electorates are in a state of rebellion against their ruling elites. Moreover, the reasons for this rebellion are fairly obvious and understandable by most. The Western elites have screwed up royally with policies that have choked off economic growth and threatened the civil liberties of their populations. These dirigiste policies have held sway for many decades and include the following:

• The general move by most of the world away from laissez-faire free-markets. In many countries, Keynesian economic thought has been politically dominant since the 1930s. Those countries not dominated by Keynesianism had economic doctrine even farther to the Left.
• A gradual acceptance over decades of time of the progressive idea that government must be the primary solver of social and economic problems.
• The political Left has adopted ideas about “multiculturalism”,  causing them to espouse open borders, and to deemphasize the need for assimilating immigrants. Multiculturalism is also suspect in wide spread diminishing of traditional values.
• Many progressives, influenced by multiculturalism, see other cultures’ values as equally as good as traditional Western values. In addition, feeling guilty about an imperial past, they feel that Western countries (particularly the United States) are at fault for much that is wrong in the world.

The Western World’s political and economic elites, standing in for the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, have certainly been fermenting Western discontent in their magic cauldrons. The citizens of Western countries have been urged all along to accept on faith the magic of their elites’ dirigisme and progressivism. The result has been that all over Europe and North America, electorates are seething with anger, frustration, and fear.

In the United States in particular, the progressive cauldrons are boiling over as progressives attempt to limit the damage to themselves of Donald Trump’s election. Shocked by the November elections, the progressive elites have refused to accede those who voted against them might have a point. Instead of admitting voters for Republicans have genuine and valid concerns, the progressives have generally reacted that the voters against them must be in some way fundamentally evil. According to progressives, the Republican voters must be racist to the core, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, fascist, and any other adjective describing evil properties you can imagine. Those benighted voters all belong in Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.” Such horrible people, who would vote against the paragons of progressive truth, can not be explained merely by a difference in their views about reality. Those monsters must be sick, perverted people. Why then should progressives deign to engage them in political, economic, and ethical conversation? Instead, as during Obama’s administration, progressives should be seeking ways to silence and dominate the neoliberal (aka “conservative”) opposition.

Of course, Republican neoliberals do not view themselves as sick, perverted people. Nor do they believe progressives have anywhere close to the knowledge and wisdom needed to solve all economic and social problems through government policies. In fact, neoliberals believe the nature of reality is such that government can only play a small bit role in solving our common problems. That small bit role might be absolutely necessary for supporting the social contract, but neoliberals’ view of reality dictates the largest contributions must come from outside government, from the people themselves.

How could such a complete ideological disconnect have arisen among the people of a single country, sharing not only a common history, but also ostensibly common ideals for personal liberty, and a common basic ethics?

How Can Dirigistes (Progressives) and Neoliberals See Such Different Realities?

Recently,  my wife and I went out to a dinner-theater showing of Disney’s version of The Beauty and The Beast. Our companions were a couple we have known for a long time, who were shepherding four pre-teen girls to see the show. The husband Paul is a man of solid “conservative” instincts. His wife Laurie on the other hand is a lady of definite progressive views. However, she has sufficient independence of mind to have questioned the desirability of Hillary Clinton as president and to vote for Donald Trump instead.

While we were enjoying our dinner prior to the beginning of the play, I thought I might have an opportunity to learn from Laurie why it was progressives were so convinced government had the capability to solve so many human problems. Unfortunately, I stated the question in exactly that form, and Laurie interpreted the word “capability” to mean “power”. I could have pursued the issue in that way, since it is questionable any government, especially a classically liberal government, has even the power to solve many problems. If any government seeks to amass sufficient power to solve all important social and economic problems, it will inevitably follow Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and end up as a thoroughly fascist government.

Nevertheless, the version of the question I wanted answered most was why progressives thought they had the requisite knowledge and wisdom to solve our many complicated problems. After making myself more clear, I asked Laurie to think about the question for some time before she attempted an answer. Now, I ask the same question of you, dear reader, and if you find what you consider a sufficiently compelling answer, please leave that answer as a comment to this post. The more answers to this question from progressives I can acquire, the closer we can come to understanding each other.

Dirigistes in general and progressives in particular believe they understand the modern economy well enough to generally manage it, even to allocating large amounts of economic assets for perceived economic needs. They believe they can do all this without creating significant amounts of economic damage.

Neoliberals believe quite differently, that there is an inherent complexity to social systems, particularly economies, which most usually leads to government programs being counterproductive. In the past I have tried to express this idea in terms of an analogy between human social systems and the Earth’s weather system. As it turns out, this analogy is rather precise mathematically, since both types of systems are examples of chaotic systems and they are both chaotic for precisely the same reasons. They are systems with a truly huge number of degrees of freedom that in some sense interact “locally”. In the weather system the degrees of freedom are the constituent molecules’ positions and velocities; in a modern economy they are the quantities and prices at which suppliers are willing to produce goods and services, and the quantities and prices at which customers are willing to buy. To learn more about the interactions of these degrees of freedom, see my post How is the Weather Like a Country’s Economy?.

An Alternative Point of View

A different way of seeing  how we can come to such different worldviews is provided by a recently published book on cognitive science. Cognitive science can be defined as the interdisciplinary scientific study of how human beings think, which goes far beyond just the neural circuitry of the brain. It also includes the philosophical field of epistemology, and all social effects on human thinking. The book is entitled The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach [IP1].

The authors begin by noting the knowledge of almost all human beings about their world is usually extremely superficial and limited. Even the most wise and knowledgable among us can understand in detail only a small fraction of Reality, with a capital ‘R’. As an example they cite the humble bathroom toilet. How many know its principle of operation? Yet it is a very simple apparatus that can be explained in detail in a single paragraph. However, all most people need to know is that when the lever on the reservoir tank is pulled, the toilet flushes.

And so it is with most of the rest of Reality. Most of us understand just enough to interact successfully with our environment. Concerning the human mind, Sloman and Fernbach write in their introduction,

The human mind is not like a desktop computer, designed to hold reams of information. The mind is a flexible problem solver that evolved to extract only the most useful information to guide decisions in new situations. As a consequence, individuals store very little detailed information about the world in their heads. In that sense, people are like bees and society a beehive: Our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind. To function, individuals rely not only on knowledge stored within our skulls but also on knowledge stored elsewhere: in our bodies, in the environment, and especially in other people. When you put it all together, human thought is incredibly impressive. But it is a product of a community, not of any individual alone.

The collective mind encompassing not just our knowledge, but the knowledge residing within the minds of all other humans, is also called by them the beehive mind. Much as I dislike being compared to an insect, the comparison is quite apt. We get most of our knowledge by reading in books, magazines, scholarly articles in professional journals, and in that superb accomplishment of the modern age, the internet.

The multiplicity of ideological views we see in the world arises from the enormous volume of information in the beehive mind, and the necessity of abstracting just that amount of data needed to solve the problems most immediate to us, whatever they might be. Because different people and different groups of people focus on different aspects of Reality, what they emphasize in their various ideologies is, obviously, different.

When some aspects of reality are focused upon more than others, there is always the danger of the effects of other factors being ignored, perhaps partially, perhaps totally. In this way error can enter the beehive mind as noise in the system. In the immortal words of Mark Twain (or maybe it was Josh Billings?),

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Just the attribution of this last quote illustrates part of the problem. Because abstraction of limited amounts of information on just what interests us is what often gets us into trouble, perhaps we should look more carefully at the basic assumptions of our ideological opponents. Then we should do the same for our own basic assumptions, and then compare the support that each has with available data. Careful attention must be given to contradictions in data, and those contradictions must be resolved.

This might seem to be an awful lot of work — and it is! But it is work we must all do and share with each other to strengthen our beehive mind. Luckily, in the internet we have an unparalleled and powerful tool to do such research. However, just like doing research in an old-style library, we must be careful of our sources and constantly look for consistency with everything else we know.

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