The Neoliberal turn of late capitalism [1] rules our world. Quinn Slobodian has become the voice of our time in explaining how this has happened and why. In Globalists The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2020), he described, among other things, how the Liberals of Central Europe who became Neoliberals were most interested in making the market safe from democracy. Neoliberals are anything but anti-government. They need active government to provide the unlevel playing field necessary to realize their ambitions. The needs of the people or planet Earth are not considered particularly important in the Neoliberal world, where their rising tide sinks as many boats as it lifts, most boats being more akin to the rafts my childhood buddies and I constructed out of inner tubes and sheets of plywood than this vessel. Globalists is intellectual history for the general reader that repays re-reading.
Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023) followed Globalists. Whether any current nation-state of the Global North is exactly a democracy is a matter of definition and considerable dispute, but the special economic zones dotting planet Earth described in Crack-Up Capitalism are incompatible with anything approaching democracy. Milton Friedman would be pleased. The current Masters of the Universe are pleased. They will continue to accumulate billions in “net worth” and spend it how they choose, our world and our only home be damned, literally.
Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (2025) [2] completes a perfect triple axel in connecting the dots on how Neoliberals have made their world in which the rest of us live. Perhaps Friedrich Hayek was less scientistic than his bastard intellectual offspring and he may have been the “softer” neoliberal. The differences among Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises and the Cato Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution are not trivial, as is explained throughout Hayek’s Bastards. But their collective outputs are congruent by virtually every measure. Slobodian deals with the three “hards” of the Neoliberal fusionists: (1) hardwired human difference – genetic inheritance as destiny, (2) hard borders – mobile capital, captive people, and (3) hard money – gold for goldbugs with that fetish. Here we will concentrate on the first, their misuse of the science of human variation in pursuance their goals.
Slobodian begins on a high note in which he described Charles Murray as a ‘longtime thinktanker and tireless advocate of a revived race science.” The following is typical Murray, especially since publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1996), which he wrote with the Skinnerian Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein:
“For the last forty years, he said, “the battle cry of the left has been ‘equality.’” Science would deal the death blow to this demand. “The explosive growth of genetic knowledge means that within a few years science will definitively demonstrate precisely how it is that women are different from men, blacks from whites, poor from rich, of for that matter, the ways in which the Dutch are different from Italians.
Basically, Murray believes, along with many of his conservative followers of every subgroup, that the facts of genetics will explain everything human and, most importantly, determine everything in society and political economy. According to Murray et al. these “scientific” facts support the simple truth that people get what they deserve. The intelligent (i.e., those with a high IQ) will get rich, and the stupid will get virtually nothing, which is also what they deserve.
The measurement of human intelligence has a long and mostly sordid history. The Mismeasure of Man (Stephen Jay Gould, 1981; revised 1996) is a good place to begin. Eugenics has been covered recently by Aubrey Clayton in Bernoulli’s Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science. The Bell Curve is the subject of Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth, 1996. A short history begins with Alfred Binet, who developed a test that would determine how French school children with different needs might be better educated; similar use of an IQ test would be appropriate to determine the extent of brain damage after accident or illness. The Stanford-Binet and Wechsler Intelligence Scales were the eventual result of the development of IQ tests. Intelligence Quotient (IQ) became a common metric in the United States under the influence of Lewis M. Terman, whose goal was to confirm that intelligence (as in factor g for general intelligence of Charles Spearman) was real and that it is inherited. Even after Terman began to realize that his arguments for the innateness for human intelligence were weak he nevertheless wrote [quoted in Gould (1981), p. 191]:
After all, does not common observation teach us that, in the main, native qualities of intellect and character, rather than chance, determine the social class to which a family belongs? From what is already known about heredity, should we not naturally expect to find the children of the well-to-do, cultured, and successful parents better endowed that the children who have been reared in slums and poverty? An affirmative answer to the above question is suggested by nearly all the available scientific evidence (1917).
“Common observation, native qualities, intellect, character, and social class” are doing a lot of work in this passage. “All the available scientific evidence” would have come from the labors of eugenicists, who were very persuasive a hundred years ago. Included among their members was John Maynard Keynes, who had a deeper understanding of the issue. But something remarkable happened to alter Terman’s view, and he was virtually silent about his previous views in his 1937 book on the Stanford-Binet revision, which include a few words of caution about heredity and intelligence. As Gould put it:
Times had changed and intellectual fashions of jingoism and eugenics had been swamped in the morass of the Great Depression…all potential reasons for differences between groups are framed in environmental terms (in 1937).
Imagine that! But it must have been a shock for Terman to see “well-to-do, cultured, and successful” fathers lined up at a soup kitchen through no fault of their own. Chapter Two of Hayek’s Bastards is entitled “The Rock of Biology.” It naturally begins with this quote from Murray Rothbard, about Patrick Buchanan’s presidential campaign in 1995, “This is a revolution of white Euro-males.” Indeed. Lewis M. Terman was a scientist of his time who nevertheless remained a scientist who paid attention to the evidence. The scientistic protagonists of Hayek’s Bastards never got Terman’s 1937 memo. But they were not looking for it, either.
Chapter Three is entitled “Ethno-Economy,” where heritable individual differences are naturally extended to “the Other” as a group. The views of Hayek’s bastards can fairly be summed up in this passage about Peter Brimelow (NB: This is a link to an open-access article about Brimelow by Quinn Slobodian in Journal of American Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2024):
Brimelow used his perch at the Financial Post, Forbes, and Fortune, to mainstream the view that the immigration and reproduction of Brown and Black people was the new all-encompassing threat North America faced after the end of the Cold War. [3] In column after column, Brimelow built up a theory of nativism built on market logic, a mutation of conservative and libertarian thought we have come to call the alt-right: the dream of a zone in white skin.
The (lesser) native intelligence, reified as IQ, of these Brown and Black people, along with country people [4] and various additional categories of Other, became a “central category” for those in Brimelow’s wide circle of influence. In Chapter Four, the term “neurocastes” (a word of the year) is introduced to describe how intelligence correlates with human worth in the objective market economy. High-neurocaste people are intelligent and deserve the fruits of their natural endowment. Members of the lower neurocastes fill up the world and provide necessary labor so that high-neurocaste people can think while living the good life.
In the minds of “race scientists” this was undoubtedly true. And in the “race scientist” Richard Lynn, the incipient alt-right found the link between their scientism and the think tanks they needed. A few years before The Bell Curve was published Lynn wrote to Herrnstein about his plan to rehabilitate eugenics:
It seems extraordinary that basically sound principles that we need to find ways to correct genetic deterioration should have become so widely accepted in the first four decades of the (twentieth) century and subsequently have become lost…One of our most important tasks is to convince the people of the significance of heritability of intelligence and criminality, and of race differences for the social problems confronting the US. These Think Tanks have considerable influence on informed public opinion and on politicians far more than we in psychology do, and if some of them could be converted public understanding of these problems would be greatly advanced. [5]
In the words of Quinn Slobodian, IQ-centrism the perfect excrescence of “race science” in the post-industrial age:
It was built on mainstream concerns about the knowledge and information economy, national competitiveness, and analogies of human beings as information processors. Thriving on the craze for standardized outcomes, rankings, benchmarks, and indicators, IQ-centrism offers a simple and powerful story about the world that naturalizes and hardens existing hierarchies, reinforces folk understandings of difference, and disempowers efforts of collective reform. Perhaps most effectively, it does so with the elegance of a single number – IQ is a biologized credit score.
Still, one might wonder in 2025 how IQ as a biologized credit score [6] will be useful in the Age of Algorithmic Intelligence, which might well have the same effect on the employment and life chances of high-neurocaste individuals as did the Great Depression that made an impression on Lewis Terman ninety years ago.
The only problem with this “race science” is that it is not valid. The “basically sound principles” of Richard Lynn were nothing more than “folk understandings of difference.” Murray and Herrnstein constantly conflated genes with race, but in their own analysis in The Bell Curve racial status was based on self-identification rather than genetics. So, which is it? It has long been understood that genetic differences within so-called racial groups are greater than those between different groups; this has been confirmed by the recent science of the human genome. Therefore, these differences cannot account for the conclusions of these latter-day eugenicists. [7] The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (2021) by Kathryn Paige Harden is a recent restatement of the problem from the “gene’s perspective” using modern terminology. Her update to the continuo of conservative thought is reviewed here, with responses by Harden and others here. A large cup of coffee is recommended, but these links cover the relevant history well while giving voice to several common perspectives on the subject.
Yes, individuals are different, even including identical twins who may have different epigenetic markers (distinct labels attached to their DNA at different places with variable effects on gene expression) in their otherwise identical genomes. But that is not the point. Aside from superficial heritable traits, race is now and has always been a sociopolitical construct and nothing else. This was recognized by the theologian, farmer, and revolutionary pastor Clarence Jordan (pronounced Jur-den) in the early-1940s when he established Koinonia Farm in the Southwest Georgia of Jimmy Carter. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields described the significance of race eighty years later in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2022), where biology has nothing to do with race beyond the standard, and mistaken, “folk understandings of difference.”
The question remains, “Why all this?” A large part of the answer concerns the true objective of The Bell Curve:
The Bell Curve was never merely an academic undertaking. It was a counterattack on what the authors saw as the corrosive doctrine of equality as sameness, a doctrine Murray later wrote had its political roots in the ‘legal triumphs of the civil rights movement and the rise of feminism.’
We can let the evils of civil rights and women’s rights just sit there for a moment before proceeding. What most frightens (and that is the proper term) those to whom The Bell Curve provides their world view is their belief that any increase in moral, social, political, and economic equality will destroy their ideal society and lead inexorably to “equality as sameness.” In their cramped vision, any increase in equality will lead to levelling. And the key for them is that levelling is always down, never up. This is a constant theme, sometimes stated outright, sometimes implied in conservative thought. For example, in The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1985, orig. 1953), Russell Kirk in his discussion of Edmund Burke writes:
All values are not the same, nor are all impulses, nor all men. A natural gradation teaches men to hold some sentiments dear and others cheap. Levelling radicalism endeavors to put all emotions and sensations upon the same level of mediocrity, and so to erase the moral imagination which sets men apart from beasts. “On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal of not the highest order.” When Burke wrote of how “learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden under the hoofs of a swinish multitude”…(he)…was simply paraphrasing Matthew 7:6; and he meant what some eminent socialist critics are coming to dread, that the mass of men, shorn of proper intellectual leadership, “all the decent drapery of life torn rudely off,” will be indifferent, or perhaps hostile, to anything that is not flesh.
The identity of “some eminent socialist critics” remains unknown. Most of The Conservative Mind reads like this, but there is the occasional clap of thunder through the steady drizzle. Kirk would be surprised that working men and women are intelligent and have interests in the world around them. So would the protagonists described in Hayek’s Bastards. For the most part their jobs are not unskilled, and many can parse a box score as well as members of the Right and Left PMC can gloss Edmund Burke or Judith Butler. The baseball box score and Professor Butler are equally recondite. Kirk is now considered an early but minor conservative to the extent that anyone reads him, but the fear expressed by him still excites the conservative mind more than any single concern: The masses are dangerous and will swamp us, the true and necessary leaders of society, if we let them.
But it is important to remember that conservatives are not the only affinity group that thinks like this. The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) is just as afraid of the levelling they sense will come when, not if, true moral, social, political, and economic equality is achieved and the cult of the expert fades. Expertise will remain, however, and it will be found in the strangest places to Neoliberals of both the notional Right and Left as the world gets smaller in the coming inconvenient apocalypse. Besides, they should have no fear. Unless society totally collapses, admittedly a possibility, the rich will still be rich.
Finally, the approaches to science as a way of knowing among these conservatives provides an interesting contrast. It is clear throughout the book that Hayek’s bastards believe our “economy” will and must grow in perpetuity. Otherwise, capitalism, neoliberal and otherwise, cannot work for them. The impacts of human activities on the ecosphere are generally not recognized as legitimate concerns in the Neoliberal worldview. However, the hard science of limits in a closed material system says otherwise and has since the middle of the twentieth century. Their “race science,” on the other hand has proven to them beyond doubt that social stratification placing them at the top of the heap is hardwired into the human genome now and forevermore. No. Actually, the “rock of biology” upon which they have built their castle in the clouds is as hard as talc and perhaps as pernicious as it is thought to be on the basis of some scientific evidence.
One last point: Hayek’s Bastards and other books from Zone Books are built as books should be, with cloth covers, strong binding, fine paper and ink, good printing, and agreeable proportions. The craft still exists with Zone and a few other publishers!
Notes
[1] Both Neoliberalism and Late Capitalism (Ernest Mandel, 1975) can be technical terms. The primary point here is that Neoliberalism is a development of recent, i.e., late capitalism, although Ernest Mandel’s book has relevance to our world fifty years later. Anyway, the way things are going, we are perhaps very late in capitalism. It does seem that “hundred-year catastrophes” occur every few years these days.
[2] The title Hayek’s Bastards is an homage to Voltaire’s Bastards by John Ralston Saul who wrote about the “tortuous history of reason and rationality in Western philosophy and politics.”
[3] In their search for meaning and relevance, sociopolitical affinity groups often “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” This is in no way limited to the notional Right. The notional Left, especially in the form of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), does the same thing.
[4] Rural people were a subject of Terman’s IQ studies in the early twentieth century. That rural people have a lower IQ due to genetic inheritance would seem to give the lie to the entire project. But maybe not. Not long ago I read somewhere that to be a good farmer all you must do is punch a hole in the dirt and drop the seed in it. Thus, in the mind of the certified intellect, farming requires nothing approaching the brain power of the “symbolic analyst” described by Robert Reich or the member of Richard Florida’s “creative class.” Or the “high neurocaste” leader described in Hayek’s Bastards.
[5] Potential think tanks included Cato, Manhattan, and Pacific Research Institutes, the Hoover Institution, and the Institute for Humane Studies. In reaction to his turn towards “race science” the Manhattan Institute sent Murray to the American Enterprise Institute, where he has retired as the F.A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies.
[6] This might seem strange to the younger members of the community, but not so long ago “credit score” was not the ubiquitous measure of the worth of a person. And you never heard anyone brag about it.
[7] The literature of intelligence and race is littered with suspect studies done to prove a point. For example, Sir Cyril Burt infamously compared the intelligence of twins separated at birth. The heritability of intelligence in identical twins was shown in his publications to be identical in different populations of different sizes, with identical correlation coefficients to three decimal places. This never happens in the real world. At least two of his coauthors did not exist. There is no evidence for research support that would have funded the complicated and expensive studies of multiple pairs of twins raised apart. Besides, the family and socioeconomic environments of twins raised apart were very similar. Still, even though it is undeniable he was just making stuff up, he still has his defenders.
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The unstated ethos of this “class” of intellectuals of inequality is the fairness of the use of the State and it’s claimed exclusivity to the use of coercive violence to further the goals of those endowed with superior claims on the productive capacity of the society due to ‘Natural Law.’ As such, Noeliberalism, despite its many claims to scientific validity, operates as a cult. One is either an insider, with attendant perks, or an outsider, with various duties and travails pre-ordained.
The sad, and frightening aspect of this movement at the present time is that, once “consent” ceases to be ‘manufacturable,’ it is, through the logic of authoritarian movements everywhere, imposable from above, generally through violence. My observation is that we as a global culture are entering that later “coercive violence” phase of the movement.
Stay safe.
A very interesting post this. There was one part which brought me up short and it was this line-
‘One of our most important tasks is to convince the people of the significance of heritability of intelligence and criminality’
So a little history. In the 18th century Britain use to ship their criminals to the American colonies. That is, until that storm in a tea cup shut down that particular dumping ground. With the prisons rapidly filling up, somebody remembered the lands explored by Captain Cook in his reports. It was perfect. Criminals could be shipped there to provide the free labour for a new colony and would never be able to return back home. In sentencing judges would say that they were being sent to the ends of the world.
But there was an undercurrent of thought at work. The elite believed in the ‘heritability of intelligence and criminality’ and the existence of a ‘criminal class.’ I think the idea here was that if you could ship the criminal class out of the country forever, that you would have a paradise at home while that colony would eat itself in criminality as it would be their nature. But by the time of the second generation in the Colonies, the elite were befuddled by the fact that that colony was one of the most law-abiding places in the empire. They could hardly believe it. What was worse was that you often had some no-hoper being sent out there with nothing that after a decade or two would build themselves a commercial empire or have vast land holdings. They would shout that was not why they were sent there for.
Eugenics thus sounds attractive to elites as they imagine that it justifies their wealth and position in society but it doesn’t really. So suppose that we went for a Gattaca-style future and how it would play out. Gill Gates? Sorry. Bad eyesight and antisocial tendencies so he is out. Jeff Bezos? Sorry, sociopathic tendencies & male pattern baldness. You could run down the entire list of elites and eliminate the bulk majority. It may turn out that some of the best genetic material would be Pedro in the barrio, Jasmine in downtown Philadelphia and Bobby Lee in backwoods Alabama and that is something that our elites would never tolerate.
The other side to the history of the civilization ‘rejects’ is that they carried on the worst traits of their homeland. In both the colonies and Botany Bay those ‘law-abiding’ empire builders did so through genocide and ethnic cleansing – just like zionists today.
IMHO the exception to those new rulers were the pirates. Socialists par excellence, albeit with over-the-top enforcement. One reason I found the Netflix/Starz series Black Sails so fascinating to watch.
I can’t help but think of Dylan singing “Jim Jones”. Click “more” for the lyric sheet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCl1u-48HEA&list=RDWCl1u-48HEA&start_radio=1
Speaking of Captain Cook and colonies: Robert Muldoon, a former PM of New Zealand, was once asked by a reporter if he was worried about high New Zealand emigration to Australia. He said he was relaxed about it, because it would raise the IQ of both countries.
“Neoliberals of both the notional Right and Left as the world gets smaller in the coming inconvenient apocalypse. Besides, they should have no fear. Unless society totally collapses, admittedly a possibility, the rich will still be rich.”
Some people having more money than others is an eccentricity easily handled by most. The problem is when the wealthy want to be worshipped for their wealth.
Some people having more money than others is an eccentricity easily handled by most. The problem is when the wealthy want to be
worshippedobeyed for their wealth.I think it’s the blind obedience, not the blind worship, that the oligarchs want.
There’s lots to chew on here but perhaps a key sentence from the Burke quote
Levelling radicalism endeavors to put all emotions and sensations upon the same level of mediocrity, and so to erase the moral imagination which sets men apart from beasts.
This belief that we are divine beings touched by God’s finger is certainly at the core of conservative thinking, where religion plays a major part, but it has nothing to do with “science.” But at the same time the liberal belief that our “moral imagination” can be awakened by good liberal arts education and all will be well is also profoundly faith based. Here’s suggesting that we do have non trivial inherited characteristics and that we may be more touched by the beasts than the divine and that this could indeed be science.
What does separate us from those other beasts is our intelligence and surely this is more easily awakened in some individuals than others. And of course life experience plays a huge role in forming “social intelligence,” something our sociopathic oligarchs clearly lack whatever their academic qualifications.
And finally since faith seems bound to take a role at some point not all religions are created equal. Some have “social intelligence” and some don’t. IMO
“What does separate us from those other beasts is our intelligence and surely this is more easily awakened in some individuals than others.”
Is it our intelligence or our ambition? I think it’s hard to draw a sharp line between us and many of our fellow mammals, and maybe some birds, when it comes to aspects of intelligence. The main evidence for greater intelligence are the products of homo faber: pyramids and chariots; cathedrals and cannons; skyscrapers and H-bombs; sports stadiums that look like spaceships and AI. Maybe the elephants and whales and dolphins and chimps just have the good sense and lack of hubris not to head down a path that leads to a cliff.
They don’t have opposable thumbs. They are very limited in tool-making. That is the biggest difference.
Lister: Love is what separates us from animals
Rimmer: No, Lister — what separates us from animals is that we don’t use our tongues to clean our own genitals.
From Illuminatus!:
We are all gorillas now…
‘The only problem with this “race science” is that it is not valid. The “basically sound principles” of Richard Lynn were nothing more than “folk understandings of difference.”’
What I don’t understand is why the propagators of “race science” enjoy any more credence than does the “science” of phrenology?
I think the versions of race science that survived were those that require scientific apparatus and statistics. Phrenology was too easily falsifiable, even to a non-scientist.
The more interesting question to me is why the demand for some type of race science continues to be so strong, causing new variants or new names for the old variants to spring up constantly.
I run into the same race “science” when reading about 19th and early 20th century history. Almost word for word at times, which is disturbing. I think that it is supported by the elite because such thinking can be used to justify their wealth and power because of their supposed superiority while excusing their creation of an environment that permits their profitable and abusive exploitation of the poor. It also assuages the guilt of those who believe that they benefit from not paying the taxes or the resources needed to end poverty or at least the extremes of homelessness and hunger that are present.
“Race science” provides a base for dehumanization of anyone that is not of your liking. Dehumanization is a step in justification of any evil done towards the targeted group. Slaughtering and exploiting cattle is socially acceptable, and doing the same to fellow humans is not. “Race science” is a tool for recategorization of some humans as livestock.
No mention of Steve Sailer?
Oh no …. here we go again…. back to Townsend’s mis-citing of goats and dogs in his “Dissertation on the Poor Laws” on Juan Fernandez island; the ’survival of the fittest’; and then Spencer’s Social Darwinism.. that dire 19thC pseudo scientific apology for power elites, greed, conservatism, imperialism, and racism … eugenics and finally fascism.
At the time, Peter Kropotkin, in “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution” and a proper scientist as well as an anarchist thinker, highlighted the role of mutual aid and cooperation and demolished Spencer.
That the top carnivore position, ‘red in tooth and claw’ is inherently superior is evidently ridiculous.
“Survival of the fittest ” is about adaptability and fitting within environmental niches and capacities at a species (or biological class) level.
Food webs are not inherently hierarchical, with species of increasing superiority, despite the pyramidal model too often presented, which was Spencer’s social class based position. A wolf is not necessarily “superior” to an elk, as the relationship is interdependent within their sub arctic arboreal forest ecosystem. Neither would necessarily do well in a Tropical Rain Forest. That’s niches for you.
Kropotkin debunked Spencer from his own research in Siberia on co-operation within and between species (especially herbivores). Natural selection is about adaptability, not some elitist ‘superiority’.
“It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value”. Arthur C. Clarke
Thanks for bringing up Kropotkin. Maybe we should talk about the survival of those species best able to fit in with their ecosphere(s). On that metric, the human future doesn’t look too bright.
I guess I have a “realist” view of human nature. It is not that people necessarily HAVE to be selfish and violent but evolution has selected for many psychological traits that do push people in these sorts of directions particularly with the survival and reproductive strategies of the great apes. Looking at our closet relative, the chimpanzee, they are quite territorial and hierarchical and frequently engage in “lethal raids” against rival troupes. I know people like to point to the bonobo as an example of what we could be like, but the bonobo seems to have split off from chimpanzees after the common ancestor behind humans and chimpanzees diverged. Basically, evolution has given us a behavioural pattern similar to that of the chimpanzee rather than the more peaceful bonobo and we are stuck with it.
Now, I want to be very clear, we should not be looking to “nature” for our source of morality, and chimpanzees are no more or less “evil” than any other creature on Earth as as what we call “moral” is a human concept. The problem is that I think that we have to recognize humanity’s innate psychological predilection for hierarchical, selfish, and violent behavior in order to understand how to prevent these traits from leading us to destroy ourselves. It is not that humans are “evil” but we evolved these behaviours as a survival trait in a world that was very different from the world we have now and we are stuck with them because evolution works very slowly. Denying our innate tendencies for the former will not help us learn how to defuse these behaviours in the long run.
The issue, though, is that while people can choose to not be selfish and try and be peaceful and fair-minded, these are conscious decisions against the subconscious backdrop of our territorial ape mindset. As most people will take the path of least-resistance, I am not hopeful that this is something that we can necessarily overcome.
I would caution against reductiveness when making observations about human impulses — it might be safer to consider a spectrum of possibilities not unlike the distribution in the population of neurotypical behaviours.
So we’re asked to believe that human variation can be judged against a single criterion, revealing the true ranking of what individuals and groups of people are worth to society? That’s exactly the type of homogenization the Burkeans protested.
Try imagining the testing and policing institutions necessary to keep everyone in their place, which would rapidly become a huge sclerotic bureaucracy — these guys are the totalitarians they claim to oppose.
It would just be easier to manufacture humans for different castes and follow up the genetics with Skinnerian conditioning from conception. Only then will cleanliness be next to Fordliness.
Thanks KLG, this was very helpful. Sad to find that Slobodian is not carried by any local bookstores so I will have to order him from the internet.
Just to add another dimension to this convo, I’m quite certain Jordan Peterson has lifted entire arguments against equity and equality from Hayek, and without attribution. For example when he argues against equality of outcome (which is not what equality or equity are). Thus there is widespread circulation of these ideas among Peterson fans, only they think he’s the genius behind them, don’t realize they’re paying to snort lines of 98% pure Hayek on a mirror.
It’s interesting to think about where and when key influential figures are being hooked.
re footnote [2]: I’d wondered if the title of Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards was a nod to John Ralston Saul’s 1992 Voltaire’s Bastards. Although I haven’t gotten around to HB yet, based on Slobodian’s Globalists and a bunch of his papers and journalism, he’s a much better writer than Saul. Saul is smart and obviously well-read, but he needs a ruthless editor to carve away a ridiculous amount of prose-bloat. I once owned a copy of VB, and really tried hard to read it and like it, but gave up after a couple of attempts. His much shorter The Unconscious Civilization is much more focused and pithy, but since it was written to fit the confines of a lecture series format, he had no choice but to get to the point. But I realize that other’s tastes may differ!
From KLG’s introduction:
Neoliberals are anything but anti-government. They need active government to provide the unlevel playing field necessary to realize their ambitions. The needs of the people or planet Earth are not considered particularly important in the Neoliberal world, where their rising tide sinks as many boats as it lifts, most boats being more akin to the rafts my childhood buddies and I constructed out of inner tubes and sheets of plywood.
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As a counter-point, here’s something I happened to read last night in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday:
You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.
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I don’t think the two statements really contradict, as the interests of neoliberals seem to be controlling the government such that they are not subject to it.
I think the influence of Ortega y Gassett’s Revolt of the Masses within this camp is underappreciated.
WHat about the Greater Male Variability Theory?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has pretty thoroughly dismantled Charles Murray, arguments assuming a “bell curve” as widely applicable in economics and other social sciences, and the whole concept of IQ. IQ tests measure two things (according to Taleb): how well you perform on IQ tests (which predicts nothing else in life usefully) and whether you are totally hopeless at IQ tests (because of intellectual or sensory disabilities). IQ has nothing to do with what you contribute to the rest of humanity, or even to whether you can manage to muddle through your own life without making a total hash of it. Yes, very few people want to live in a society with total equality of outcomes assured to everyone, because they want to see some tie between one’s accomplishments and one’s efforts and the social rewards one accrues. But even fewer want to live in a society where a self-selected elite hoards all the rewards by gaming the system to define themselves as uniquely meritorious and deserving, while defining everyone else as inferiors.
Retired and separated from many colleagues in medicine, KLG’s posts are always of interest, His notation of Voltaire’s Bastards by John Ralston Saul pointed in a different direction for me, having read most of his writings. In Equilibrium he quotes chemist John Polonyi saying, “equilibrium is what makes life possible”. After an analysis Saul notes: the “qualities are most effective in a society when they are recognized as of equal universal value and so are integrated into our normal life”. These are COMMON SENSE, ETHICS, IMAGINATION, INTUITION, MEMORY AND REASON. For Saul the tension of these qualities forms a dynamic equilibrium.
Gold and entrepreneurship didn’t make the cut.
Another person of interest is the Brit John Gray who has debunked the idea of progress in the areas of ethics and morality specifically and progress in general except in the technological sense with all its attendant side-effects. In Strawdogs he makes the observation: “Epidemiology and microbiology are better guides to our future than any of our hopes or plans.” The increasing number of bacterial and fungal infections that are resistant to treatment and are lethal is concerning and the dismantlement of our public health system will eventually provide a disaster.