The Roots of Leftist Intellectual Dishonesty

What has puzzled me beyond measure over the years is how Western Leftists can continue to believe their core convictions. There is a plethora of empirical data spanning many years that show Leftists (progressives and socialists in the United States) are absolutely wrong in their fundamental assertions. The empirical data in question come from (mostly) credible sources. These authorities include such organizations as the World Bank, the Federal Reserve Economic Data Base (FRED), the Heritage Foundation, the United Nations, and various U.S. Government agencies. Some of these sources are more reliable (World Bank, FRED) than others (the United Nations, U.S. government agencies), but nuggets of truth can be wrested from all of them. In addition, those nuggets of truth can be tested against the modern historical record. Moreover, almost all of this empirical data is accessible to all over the internet. It would appear Leftists exhibit a great intellectual dishonesty. Why, then, do Leftists continue to foster an obviously false faith?

What Are the Basic Beliefs of Leftists?

Let us first survey the fundamental convictions of Western Leftists. In the United States, these Leftists include progressives and socialists. In other countries, they are called socialists, fascists, communists, and dirigistes. [NB: Many deluded Leftists consider fascism to be a far-right ideology. If you truly believe this, read my post Are Fascists and Communists Really Different? .] I will use the term “dirigiste” to denote the set of all Western Leftists.

What unites dirigistes of all stripes is the following primal faith: Governments have the competence, capability, and the moral duty to solve (or at least ameliorate) all social and economic problems. Their opponents, in contradistinction, generally believe such problems are more often than not caused by governments. If the opponents of dirigistes are correct, most social problems are best attacked by private individuals and organizations.

Another belief uniting dirigistes became apparent over the last century. This conviction is that people are generally simple and incapable of solving most of their problems. Moreover, dirigistes believe people change their views slowly, if at all. In the U.S. this dirigiste prejudice first became apparent a century ago during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, a one-time professor of political science at Princeton, believed the average American citizen lacked the knowledge and temperament to govern himself, much less to influence the governing of the country. Instead, he believed the country should be governed by knowledgeable technocrats. Ever since then, progressives have been taking power and freedoms away from the people. Progressives have transferred those powers to the technocratic administrative state, aka the regulatory state.

These dirigiste beliefs about the intellectual limitations of average citizens and their inability to change find an echo in dirigistes’ devotion to critical theory and critical race theory. Most people, according to American progressives, are sheep whose notions are dictated by powerful elites. This is particularly true about whites’ beliefs concerning racism. Accordingly, all white people, dominated for the entirety of their nation’s history by white elites, must necessarily be racists.

How Accurately Do Leftist Beliefs Portray Reality?

Just how accurately do these dirigiste beliefs reflect actual reality? Before we can attack Leftists for intellectual dishonesty, we should first determine they are being dishonest about something. What we should look for first is not some coherent, internally self-consistent theory to justify one side or another. It is very easy to construct a vast intellectual framework that can vindicate any side of an argument you choose. Instead, we should search for reproducible empirical data provided by organizations we can trust. Such data can be found in databases provided by such organizations as the World Bank, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and occasionally even some organizations like the United Nations we otherwise would not trust.

There are two keys to unlock our trust in a particular data source. One is if the organization follows a strict, invariable procedure for producing its data. For example, the Cato Institute annually constructs two indices for every nation on Earth for which data can be found. The indices, the Economic Freedom Index (EFI) and the Personal Freedom Index (PFI), characterize how much a country’s economy is controlled by its government and how much personal freedom is allowed by the government, respectively Both indices vary from zero to ten. If the Economic Freedom Index or the Personal Freedom Index is zero, the state totally controls the economy or allows no personal freedom, respectively. If either is 10, the EFI shows individuals and cooperative organizations of individuals, e.g. companies and charities, have total economic freedom unrestrained by the state; and the PFI denotes maximal personal freedoms for individuals. In calculating these indices, the Cato Institute follows a strict recipe. This inspires faith in the indices’ accuracy in displaying the degree of state economic or personal domination.

The second key is if the data is in agreement with other aspects of reality or other observed data. In the case of the Cato Institute’s EFI, we would expect the socialist countries of the world to have the lowest EFI scores, while the most free-market capitalist countries have the highest scores. This is generally the case, which confirms my faith in the accuracy of the EFI. Similarly, we would expect the PFI to be minimal for authoritarian nations and maximal for democratic nations. This also is the case. You can make your own decisions about how accurate the data I use are by going to the websites of the data producers. There you can evaluate their procedures and results.

All that having been said, let us finally examine the truthfulness of the Left’s most fundamental faith. There are a number of figures of merit that show how well a country’s economy fulfills that country’s needs. Among these are the country’s per capita GDP, its Gini Index, and the UN’s Human Development Index. The per capita GDP measures how much wealth per person is produced each year. The Gini Index measures how evenly that GDP is distributed across the population. The UN’s Human Development Index attempts to measure the ability individuals have to pursue a fulfilling life. If we produce scatter plots for each of these figures of merit versus the Economic Freedom Index, what will we find? If the Leftists are correct, then we would expect these figures of merit to worsen generally as the EFI rises. If the Leftists are right, we might find an optimal value for a trend line after zero for the EFI, but that optimum would be a lot closer to zero than to ten. If the Leftists’ ideological opponents have a better view of reality, the exact opposite would be true.

First, let us look at countries’ per capita GDP versus their EFI and PFI. The plots below are for the year 2018.

The dotted red curves are the best fits of exponential curves to the data. Clearly, per capita GDP tends to grow much larger as government dominance of society decreases.

Another figure of merit of great import is the Gini Index. It measures how evenly the yearly GDP is distributed across the population. A country might have a very large per capita GDP, but if it is all concentrated among a very few, the unjust, feudal country that allowed such concentrations of wealth would be unstable to revolt. Usually scaled to vary from 0 to 100, the Gini becomes smaller as the GDP becomes more evenly distributed. Below are scatter plots of the nations’ Gini indices in 2018 versus their EFI and PFI.

In both of these plots, the dotted red trend lines have a negative slope, denoting greater evenness in GDP distribution as the control of the government over the economy and society in general wanes.

The final figure of merit we will compare among all the nations is the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI). The UN’s HDI is an attempt to measure the opportunity individuals have in any particular country to lead a satisfying and fulfilling life. It is constructed as a geometric average of three subindices: a subindex measuring life expectancy relative to an optimal 85 years; a subindex measuring educational attainments; and a subindex measuring national gross national product per capita at purchasing power parity. Each of the subindices varies from 0 to 1, so the HDI will also vary over the same range. Below are plots of the nations’ HDI versus their allowed economic freedom and personal freedom.

Not only does the HDI increase rapidly with both economic and personal freedoms. If you look closely at the greater levels of the freedoms, you will see the scatter about the trend lines become much less. Again the empirical data show the dirigistes’ fundamental faith in the efficacy of greater government power to be absolutely false.

What about progressives’ subsidiary beliefs concerning the inability of most people to understand, let alone deal with most social and economic problems? What about their beliefs that all white people must necessarily be racists simply because of the color of their skin? I have rebutted those particular Leftist ideas in the following posts:

• How Did the “Woke” Become Insane?
• Is the United States a Racist Country?

So Why Do Leftists Cling to Their Beliefs?

Empirical data unambiguously tell us that leftist dirigistes possess a mostly fallacious picture of social reality. How can they continue to hold onto their most cherished beliefs? In a word, their problem is stupidity. Let me be very careful in explaining what I mean by the word “stupidity.”

Stupidity is not a lack of the biological equipment needed to think coherently and to construct self-consistent structures of ideas. A lack of biological intelligence or being dull-witted is something completely different. Let us call that condition “dumbness.” One can find many dictionary definitions that make stupidity a close synonym to dumbness. However, the problem with those definitions is that almost everyone is quite intellectually competent in many things, yet very stupid about others. That stupidity is not due to a lack of a functioning mind. Indeed, most academic Leftists are intellectually brilliant, yet at the same time very stupid about social reality.

Therefore, for the purposes of this essay, I will use the following definition for stupidity: You are stupid about something if you lack the conceptual tools needed to explain that something’s observed attributes. From the empirical data shown in the previous section, we know dirigiste Leftists are very stupid about the government’s capability to solve social and economic problems.

So what causes this stupidity in dirigistes in general, and in American progressives in particular? Human beings being very complicated creatures, we can expect several, perhaps many, explanations for Leftist social stupidity. For example, the idea that government can solve complicated problems that simple, ordinary people cannot is a seductive siren. Alexis de Tocqueville called this siren “the road to servitude.” Similarly, Friedrich Hayek called it “the road to serfdom.” Leftist academics would find the Road to Serfdom seductive since progressive politicians would give the academics power to decide what government programs would be needed. This would give the academics not only the prestige of power but contract money as well. Progressive politicians find the siren seductive because she gives them excuses to grab power, while she also whispers sweet promises about how much good they will be doing. (In this regard, one is reminded of Lord Acton’s dictum that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.) Ordinary people are seduced because they are told the government will be able to solve their problems without extensive efforts on their part. Ordinary people are even told they will not have to pay for the solutions with their taxes. Only the rich will be forced to pay.

Yet, in order to entertain such colossal stupidity, progressives’ must be willfully ignorant about an immense amount of empirical data. This continued willful incomprehension remains a great mystery to me. Mere wishful thinking cannot even begin to explain the phenomenon among intelligent progressive elites. At some point, progressives should be able to discern that reality is very different from what they suppose it to be. Corruption and a lust for power might be better explanations.

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