Magic Spells for Hubris

So, about half way through Shock Doctrine* (bathroom reading spreads it out, a bit) and I have to take a moment to comment on Hayeko-Randroidish Friedmanism:

That anyone, anywhere could ever think that they could dream up a science of human behavior will amuse me to no end, right up to my own end.

Don't get me wrong. I've long had a not-so-secret affection for Aurelius, Gracian, Montaigne, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Ibn Khaldun and Chanakya. What do you expect from a Nietzschean anarcho-agonist?

But - and yeah yeah yeah, this one has caveat written all over it - the above mentioned ancient, medieval and pre-modern sophists wrote of the art of human conduct. With alacrity, and no small measure of durability. Whether or not you prefer the world of rank and power that Gracian assumes, he understands human relations within that realm far better than Friedman could ever have done about our own, or the imagined one of his utopian futures. And Gracian - alike to the others above - never plied his craft colored by shame, as any halfwit observer can tell about Friedman. Gracian - like no small number of past observers - knew the dangers of hubris. Friedman did not.

He had too much faith in himself. Too much plodding forward elephantine self-regard. A prophet. A missionary. A true believer.

Like all paladins, strong belief required Friedman to euphemize his faith, of course. He and his believers euphemize(d) everything. Part of the hubris of their myth cycle, I imagine. Also, they have to. Or no one would buy it. The whole mythopoesis of the "free market" adds up to one giant, bloody fucking euphemism for "kill the natives, hold down the locals with violence or threats of violence, rig the deck and the game, and lock up or rape to death anyone who gets testy about it."

The free marketers, the Austro-Chicagoists and the Randroids gerrymandered Smith into an advocate of a moral and political economy that Smith himself loathed.  A cursory of reading of TWoN will convey that to anyone not afflicted with even the worst possible case of missing brain disease. Kind of like Glenn Beck taking Citizen Paine and transforming him into a flat, antidimensionally earnest, irony free inhabitant of a seventeen year old pimply virgin's Ayn Rand fan fiction.

Still...

Friedman assumed some stupid shit - right from the beginning of the mystico-moral argument onto which he glommed so long ago (the diamond on the beach, and subjective value**). He assumed that economics represents a science of human behavior. That economics can predict human outcomes, could model future behaviors with a repeatable degree of certainty.

That stupidity doesn't belong to Friedman alone, of course. Anyone who has ever thought, uttered, typed or  written out the words "natural monopoly" shares the stain of the shame, as well...

Which amuses me, without fail. If you narrow the field of study sufficiently (see Gracian's world of courtiers and kings; or Sun Tzu's, of soldiers and generals; or Machiavelli on principalities and factions) you might develop a few decently predictive models.  You might anticipate.

But, if you think that the Hari Seldon powers (yes, you too, Krugman) can embody themselves in your own person, you will get people killed.

Because, accounting for billions of connections in the human brain, and billions of human brains, only a fucking idiot with a god complex would think that price points and other numbers on a page, half conjured out of puerile fantasy, represent a science of human behavior. With all the permutations of possibility (and this treating only brains, and not all of the other complex factors, such as disease, natural events, food supply, et cetera ad infinitum) available to the impenetrably dense number of human connections and choices, a "science" of human behavior smacks of the sort of hubris that blinds the believer in it.

The very hubris currently impoverishing and murdering the human and non-human inhabitants of the planet.




* - I know, Charles, you don't like this Naomi...[cue appropriate smiley face]

** - the diamond found on the beach does not have "subjective value." If the person who wants the glittery lump of carbon doesn't expend calories to pick it up - you know, labor - that damned thing has no value. Even the feeling of desire occurs very, very physically. To feel desire, sugars must burn, hormones release, the limbic system engage. Calories get consumed. Which a person replaces with labor, even if only by picking berries, raising hand to mouth, and chewing them - or dies.