The world, the United States especially, is not in a good place right now. Too many are sick, unemployed, or feel pinned to the ground with some asshole’s knee pressed against the back of their neck. Tucson is literally on fire.
This post pays tribute to the intellectual roots of this flaming dungheap by discussing some of the thinkers who helped get us here. The scholars I discuss were brilliant, original, big-picture thinkers. They were hugely influential, but catastrophically wrong. Wrong either empirically (i.e., their ideas have been falsified) or morally (i.e., their ideas have led to widespread death and suffering). To be clear: I am not a moral relativist. I believe that death and suffering are bad. Some on this list do not share this moral outlook. Perhaps it is unfair to judge scholars by a different moral standard than they themselves held, but this is my blog. And on my blog, death and suffering are worse outcomes than decadence, class injustice, or wounding somebody’s honor.
One final disclaimer. I am not an expert on these scholars. My thoughts would not pass review in a prestigious academic journal. But this is not a prestigious academic journal. It is a music blog loosely related to townie parties.
5. Karl Marx
1818-1883
I hesitate to include Marx on this list because his heart was in the right place. He wanted to improve the lives of oppressed, overworked, and underpaid laborers throughout the world. Marx was also working with limited data. Few, if any, economic measures that he could have used to test his hypotheses were available in the 19th Century, and I don’t think anyone could have foreseen how miserably his ideas would pan out in practice, even if hindsight bias tells us otherwise.
Regardless, Marx deserves a place here because his ideas directly inspired two of the deadliest regimes in modern history, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, not to mention dozens of lesser crackpot dictators from Pol Pot to Kim Jong Il.
What did Marx get wrong? Economics, psychology, and morality.
Marx argued that the economy should be controlled and carefully managed by the state, who would ensure that everyone shares in the fruit (also wheat, meat, wool, steel, and Fitbits) of their labor. Centralized economic planning hasn’t worked, as Acemoglu and Robinson explain in Why Nations Fail, and North and South illustrate in Korea:
North vs. South Korea
From The Economist
Another problem is that Marx overlooked incentives. He believed that once laborers revolted to overthrow capitalists, they would abolish private property in favor of communal ownership. At this point, they would no longer feel alienated from their work and would naturally cooperate without need for money or other competitive incentives. This too did not happen. To quote an old Soviet saying, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
My biggest qualm with Marx is that he viewed norms against violence and other humanistic morals as tools that capitalists used to oppress workers. Marx argued that creating an equitable society justified all means, including violence and “revolutionary terror.” In practice, the USSR, China, and other communist regimes were far more successful at implementing revolutionary terror than in building a happier or more equitable society.
4. Milton Friedman
1912-2006
Friedman recognized the problems with Marxist economics and swung hard in the other direction. Friedman was the face of the Chicago School of Economics, who provided the intellectual rationale for deregulating the US economy starting in the early 1970s. Friedman had complete faith in the free market. He called for cutting taxes, ending welfare programs, defunding public schools, slashing regulations, and even abolishing the Fed, ideas that became scripture for right-wing Republicans from Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan to Dick Chaney and Paul Ryan.
Friedman had a number of good ideas too. He supported legal immigration and gay rights. He successfully convinced the military to end the draft. And he was one of the first to advocate a “negative income tax,” which would redistribute money to the poor without creating bureaucratic welfare programs that encourage people to not work.
Friedman lived to see many of his ideas implemented. Initially, the results seemed promising. The economy recovered from stagflation in the 1980s, and it boomed in the 1990s. Friedman, however, did not live to see unhinged bankers fustigate the economy during the great recession nor did he see the befuddling levels of inequality that followed.
3. Michel Foucault
1926-1984
Like Marx, Foucault’s heart was in the right place. He wanted to fight the power by pointing out that a lot of what society considers “good” and “true” is really just BS that the powerful uses to justify their privileged position. He argued that science is just another ideology that the powerful use to oppress radicals, minorities, and outside-the-bourgeois thinkers. 100 years ago, for example, many scientists claimed that whites were biologically superior to other races.
The problem is that Foucault executed the baby when he saw the bathwater was dirty. Bad science may have originally claimed that whites were biologically superior, but good science later used DNA evidence to debunk this racist dribble. Unless we believe that it is possible to find an unbiased truth by weighing different beliefs against data, then it is just your word verses mine, and power is guaranteed to speak last.
We can thank Foucault, along with other likeminded post-modernist, post-structuralist, deconstructionist thinkers, for justifying anti-vaxers, conspiracy theorists, alternative facts, and the growing distrust of science from both the intellectual left and the anti-intellectual right.
2. Francis Galton
1822-1911
Galton was a genius. Wikipedia tells me that he “created the statistical concept of correlation,” which reminded me of when Dr. Evil’s father claimed to have invented the question mark. Galton left his mark on everything from statistics and anthropology to meteorology and genetics. Sadly, his biggest impact was founding the field of eugenics.
Galton read Darwin’s work and thought: what if we selectively bred humans to create a better society? He wanted the government to incentivize (i.e., pay) people with “good” genes (i.e., white aristocrats) to breed more. He wanted to discourage, or even prevent, people with “bad” genes (the poor, the dumb, the dark, etc.) from procreating. The Nazis went one step further by trying to directly exterminate Jews, Gypsies, Gays, and anyone else they thought had inferior genes.
Eugenics fell out of fashion after the holocaust, but its ideas continue to spread amongst racists, wannabe fascist dictators, snobs, or anyone who has ever uttered a phrase like “anyone that dumb shouldn’t be allowed to have children.”
Friedrich Nietzche
1844-1900
I don’t know if Nietzche was a psychopath, but his philosophy justifies psychopathology, not to mention misogyny, authoritarianism, nationalism, and racism. Once you dig through his intellectual peacockery, Nietzche basically argues that it is morally good for bullies (übermensches) to stuff weaklings into lockers and steal their lunch money, men to batter women (a direct quote: “Thou goest woman? Do not forget thy whip”), and people with “higher breeding” to “mercilessly exterminate” everyone else.
Nietzche, who wrote ““there are no facts, only interpretations,” presaged the post-truth left (see Foucault) and alternative-fact right (see Trump). He inspired fascists (see Mussolini), Nazis (see Hitler), poets (see Yeats), provocateurs (see Rand), pundits (see Bannon), and pirates (Captain Hook adored Ecce Homo). His ideas continue to validate anyone with an itch to dominate, steal, rape, kill, or otherwise exert their “will to power.”
The other thinkers on this list never intended their ideas to lead to evil and suffering. Not so for Nietzche, who entertained “the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been.” May he rest in misery.