Orwell Exposed the Cowardice of Journalists and Intellectuals

Barry Brownstein

George Orwell had little hope that the lies of totalitarians would be exposed by a free press. His essay “The Freedom of the Press” was intended as the preface to Animal Farm, but was not published until 1972. Orwell revealed that the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Information (MOI) (created during the Second World War) advised Orwell’s publisher not to publish Animal Farm since it would be offensive to “Russian Soviets.”

Orwell’s thesis was that journalists, not the government, are the biggest censors:

[T]he chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.

Today’s cowardly journalists have suppressed stories of Hunter Biden’s laptop, doubts about the efficiency of masks and lockdowns, questionable safety profiles of vaccines, concerns that vaccines didn’t prevent transmission, questions about U.S. policy in Ukraine, and challenges to the global warming orthodoxy. 

While the Biden administration did twist the arms of social media companies to censor ordinary people, it didn’t have to censor journalists. Orwell wrote: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.” He explained, 

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

In the following paragraph, Orwell painted a portrait of our time. As you read, substitute vaccines, gender reassignment surgery for teens, green energy, etc., for “Soviet Russia”: 

At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to criticise the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticise our own.

Orwell was not surprised by “the servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda,” even though they had “no direct pressure to falsify their opinions.”

Big Pharma’s power was already an issue almost eighty years ago. Orwell observed, “Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed because of ‘vested interests’. The best-known case is the patent medicine racket.”

Unfortunately, despite raising the alarm, Orwell adds a qualifier to his support for freedom of speech:

If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

Today, of course, the harm to the community qualifier is used by Google and others to censor legitimate differences of opinion. 

Just as Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom, Orwell warned, “It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.”

Today, authoritarians claim they are defending democracy yet do so by illiberal means. Orwell observed these tactics and reported “a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means.” 

The enemies to be crushed included “those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines.” Today’s censors also use this misinformation argument. 

Worse, Orwell explains intellectuals justified Stalin’s purges by claiming the victims’ “heretical opinions … ‘objectively’ harmed the régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations.” 

This is not an essay to consider the cancellation of health professionals, authors, and academics. But if you believe intellectuals oppose “false accusations” in service of their perceived good cause, Orwell would say you are wrong.

Orwell observed great enthusiasm for Stalinist Russia was “only a symptom of the general weakening of the western liberal tradition.” He warned, “If you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.” 

Any tribal adoption of an “orthodoxy” is problematic. Orwell observed, “The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.”

Can Western civilization survive the illiberalism Orwell observed? Orwell had his doubts:

[I]intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. 

Orwell wrote, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Today,  journalists and intellectuals tell us that freedom of expression is not essential; rather than being a condition by which civilization progresses, freedom of expression is a menace to “democracy.” With such beliefs, Orwell would warn, we are creating our own dystopia.

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Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore.  He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership, and his essays have appeared in publications such as the Foundation for Economic Education and Intellectual Takeout.  To receive Barry’s essays in your inbox, visit mindsetshifts.com  

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The Thin Line Between Tribalism and Human Flourishing

Barry Brownstein February 20, 2023 @ American Institute for Economic Research

 

Walter Grinder, a grand champion of liberty, passed last December. While not well-published, Walter was a scholar of the literature of liberty and a leader at the Institute for Humane Studies. He was dedicated to removing barriers to human flourishing by imparting the ideals of liberty. John Hagel III, Walter’s long-time friend and collaborator, explained, “Walter was consumed by the desire to share his reading and thoughts with his network of libertarian associates and protégés in more personal ways, so that they could see more clearly how it connected with their specific work and interests.” Walter shared insights from his scholarship in the form of emails addressed to single individuals and blind copied to his network.  

In one of his emails, sent towards the end of his life, Walter wrote he had been “binging” the work of the Turkish-British author Elif Shafak. Walter marveled at “how well she sees into the human condition.” 

Walter understood insights into the human condition are crucial to understanding the mindsets that foster or hinder human flourishing. On his recommendation, I read Shafak’s well-researched novel of the Cyprus Civil War, The Island of the Missing Trees. Using the device of a Greek-Turkish couple split apart by the war, Shafak imparts poetic wisdom about the dangers of tribalism.

Shafak’s novel relates the lush island’s descent into tribal hatred as the people made more and more primitive choices. Greek and Turkish tribal fanatics worked without mercy to instill tribal identities, even turning warmhearted neighbors against each other. 

Tribalists would rather be a slave to their tribal identity than a member of a flourishing society. In his book Open: The Story of Human Progress, Johan Norberg quoted Peruvian novelist and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa:

The ‘call of the tribe’ – of that form of existence in which individuals enslave themselves […] is heard time after time by nations and peoples and, even within open societies, by individuals and collectivities that struggle tirelessly to negate the culture of freedom.” Authoritarian mindsets don’t end with tribal matters. 

Norberg added, 

My firm conviction is that it is precisely because we are so tribalist that we need an open, cosmopolitan world. If we did not regularly meet and communicate and exchange with individuals from other groups, they would forever remain the mysterious, dangerous outgroup, the barbarians at the gates.

In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek pointed out “the primitive man… was bound by an elaborate ritual in almost every one of his daily activities… was limited by innumerable taboos and… could scarcely conceive of doing things different from his fellows.” The growth of civilization, and thus human flourishing, depends on transcending such primitive limits.  

Before tribal conflict erupted into civil war, Shafak described Cyprus as a society with a web of communication and exchange: “[T]hey used to say, Greeks and Turks are flesh and fingernail. You can’t separate your fingernail from your flesh. Seems they were wrong. It could be done. War is a terrible thing. All kinds of wars. But civil wars are the worst perhaps, when old neighbors become new enemies.”

As open conflict began in the 1950s, Shafak related, British “experts believed … there was no need to fear mayhem and bloodshed because how could there be a civil war on such a pretty, picturesque island of blooming flowers and rolling hills?” Those pundits wondered, how could “cultivated” and “civilized people…  do anything violent?” The answers to such questions, as always, point to the inculcation of mistaken ideas.

Before the conflict, Shafak explained, Greek Cypriot Christians and Turkish Cypriot Muslims had actively worked together. That changed. “Political and spiritual leaders who reached out to the other side were silenced, shunned and intimidated – and some were targeted and killed by extremists on their own side.”

Greeks and Turks murdered thousands of ordinary individuals. “Death to traitors” signs appeared. Tribalism, Shafak wrote, triumphed: “The streets were not safe. Turks had to stick with Turks, Greeks with Greeks.” Commerce ground to a halt as people stayed home.

Shafak explored how tribalists erected barriers to peaceful cooperation: “Friends selling out friends. Now that’s a different kind of evil, one that we still haven’t come to grips with as humanity. It’s a difficult subject across the world – the acts of barbarity that happen off the battlefield.” Collectivization around tribal identities fosters barbarism. Tribalists readily sacrifice themselves in pursuit of warped ideas.

When we exclude the “other,” we forgo the fruits of human cooperation. We are sure “they” are at fault, when our fanaticism is the cause of our suffering. When we free others from our hatred, we free ourselves.

Shafak wrote, “I think of fanaticism – of any type – as a viral disease. Creeping in menacingly, ticking like a pendulum clock that never winds down, it takes hold of you faster when you are part of an enclosed, homogenous unit.”  

In 1964, the island was partitioned. Eventually, in 1974, the Turks invaded Cyprus, and the partition, including the capital Nicosia, became permanent. Shafak reported,  

By the end of that interminable [1974] summer, 4,400 people were dead, thousands missing. Around 160,000 Greeks living in the north moved south, and around 50,000 Turks moved north. People became refugees in their own country. Families lost their loved ones, abandoned their homes, villages and towns; old neighbors and good friends went their separate ways, sometimes betrayed one another. 

A buffer zone as much as four miles wide ran along the permanent partition. Buildings and shops within the zone went to ruin. Shafak described the distressing situation: “Roads were blocked by coils of barbed wire, piles of sandbags, barrels full of concrete, anti-tank ditches and watchtowers. Streets ended abruptly, like unfinished thoughts, unresolved feelings.” Commerce was destroyed, Shafak explained, as a “worldwide resort… became a ghost town.” She continues:

The beaches of Varosha were cordoned off with barbed wire, cement barriers and signs ordering visitors to stay away. Slowly, the hotels disintegrated into webs of steel cables and concrete pylons; the pubs turned dank and deserted, the discotheques crumbled; the houses with flowerpots on their windowsills dissolved into oblivion. 

Tribal hatred ran through Turks and Greeks, but Shafak observed, “each side will tell only their own version of things. Narratives that run counter, without ever touching, like parallel lines that never intersect.” Insightfully, she reflected, tribalists see only their own pain: “People on both sides of the island suffered – and people on both sides would hate it if you said that aloud. Why? Because the past is a dark, distorted mirror… There is no room in there for someone else’s pain.”

When tribal hatreds take hold, there is no room to forgive, nor shed victim identities. Shafak told, “When elderly Cypriot women wish ill upon someone, they don’t ask for anything blatantly bad to befall them. They don’t pray for lightning bolts, unforeseen accidents or sudden reversals of fortune. They simply say, May you never be able to forget. May you go to your grave still remembering.”

In short, Shafak surmised, “Tribal hatreds don’t die … They just add new layers to hardened shells.” 

Shafak reflected on how poor choices lead to unimagined ruin: “If someone had told us the island would be partitioned along ethnic lines, and some day we would have to look for unmarked graves, we wouldn’t have believed them.” Tribal hatred reset expectations for Cyprus: “Now we don’t believe it can ever be united again.” Yet, because the unimaginable ruin did happen, Shafak offered hope an open society could happen when people make better choices: “What we think is impossible changes with every generation.”

Walter Grinder would have agreed that the impossible is possible because of the power of choice. The light created by human cooperation is more powerful than the darkness cast by tribal hatred.

Partitioned Cyprus might seem light years away from the United States. Yet, Norberg warns: Human beings “are wired for both tribalism and tolerance, and the intellectual atmosphere reinforces different parts of this complex personality. A culture that says the collective is everything and the individual nothing will get the individuals it asks for.” As destructive as tribal Cypriot leaders then, current politicians, educators, and others encourage Americans to adopt tribal identities. It ended badly in Cyprus. The outcome of tribalist mindsets dividing Americans may differ only in degree. 

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 Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership, and his essays have appeared in publications such as the Foundation for Economic Education and Intellectual Takeout. To receive Barry’s essays in your inbox, visit mindsetshifts.com

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It Takes a Village of Bureaucrats to Implement Despotism

Barry Brownstein  – March 17, 2022 @ American Institute for Economic Research

 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is committed to a vaccine solution for COVID-19. Bureaucrats at the CDC believe you can’t be trusted to see “critical” data on COVID hospitalizations or the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine boosters; you might “misinterpret” the findings and be less inclined to get vaccinated or boosted. The NewYork Times reports, “The performance of vaccines and boosters, particularly in younger adults, is among the most glaring omissions in data the C.D.C. has made public.” Perhaps the withheld CDC data mirrors recent Israeli data, which shows, for the second booster, vanishing efficacy. 

When the new FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, says his top priority is to fight “distortions and half-truths,” he wasn’t referring to misinformation coming from government bureaucrats. 

By withholding information, the CDC has been complicit in the firing of thousands of Americans from their jobs, many of them health professionals. You can hardly mandate something that doesn’t work as advertised and doesn’t prevent you from infecting others. 

Dr. Pierre Kory explains how edicts from politicized bureaucrats have led to hospital protocols calling “for treating [COVID] with ineffective, expensive, and potentially unsafe drugs like Remdesivir.” 

Ryan Cooper writes the “practice of shading the truth or telling straight-up falsehoods in service of some half-baked political end started from the first moments of the pandemic.”

University of California professor of medicine Dr. Vinay Prasad also decries the lies: 

Throughout the pandemic, public-health officials have omitted uncomfortable truths, made misleading statements, and advanced demonstrably false assertions. In the information era, where what one says is easily accessible and anyone may read primary literature, these falsehoods will be increasingly recognized and severely damage the field’s credibility.

Prasad writes, “We must carefully remove the power we have granted public health, which has often been misused.”

Swinish Unconstitutional Behavior

In Vasily Grossman’s great Russian novel Life and Fate, two scientists are talking about their frustration navigating the highly politicized bureaucracy where a political error could result in being purged. Of the current bureaucrat in charge of their lab, one scientist says, “he’s not such a bad type.” Grossman, through another character, adds this teaching lesson: “By the way, do you know the difference between a good type and a bad type? A good type is someone who behaves swinishly in spite of himself!” 

Generalizing the lesson, bureaucracies incentivize employees to betray the public trust. Employees may feel bad about what they do, but they do bad things, anyway.

Grossman was writing about Stalinist Russia, but his observations can be easily applied to the CDC or Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Federal regulatory agencies and the bureaucrats running them are trampling on your rights. Columbia University Law School professor Philip Hamburger is one of the leading authorities on constitutional law. According to Hamburger, writing in his short book, The Administrative Threat, “Administrative power is a preconstitutional mode of governance— the very sort of power that constitutions were most clearly expected to prevent.” American bureaucrats are not fundamentally different from their counterparts in totalitarian societies. They are both unbounded by constitutional constraints; the only difference is in degree.

Before the Supreme Court decisions on vaccine mandates, Hamburger left no doubt about where he stood: “Rather than merely evaluate the Biden administration’s misdeeds—serious as they are—the Court should reflect upon its own wayward doctrines. Its departures from the Constitution have authorized, even normalized, the government’s departures. For this, the Court is to blame.”

Hamburger is referring to the normalization of administrative power. In The Administrative Threat, he is clear: “The Constitution establishes only regular avenues of power, and thereby blocks irregular or extralegal power. To be precise it blocks extralegal lawmaking by placing legislature powers exclusively in Congress, and it prevents extralegal adjudication by placing judicial power exclusively in the courts.”

Administrative mandates and rules are unconstitutional. “Through administrative power,” Hamburger argues, there now exists a third but “unconstitutional” way by which the “the executive purports to create legal obligation.” Administrative lawmaking is not justified as “delegated power.” Congress has no power to subdelegate its responsibilities to bureaucratic administrators. In short, administrative power, Hamburger writes, is “the very sort of power that constitutions were expected to prevent.” He warns that power wielded through government bureaucracies “binds Americans and deprives them of their liberty.”

Many citizens yield to administrative power believing we need experts, such as Fauci, to guide us. Hamburger cautions, “A person with specialized expertise will tend to overestimate the importance of that area and underestimate the significance of others. As a result, although experts can be valuable for their specialized knowledge, they cannot be usually relied upon for decisions that take a balanced view of the consequences.”

Hamburger was writing before COVID. Clearly, of the administrative agencies and bureaucrats threatening our liberties today, Dr. Fauci has led the charge. Fauci is arguably one of the most powerful unelected officials in American history.

To stem the tide of rising administrative power, Hamburger recommends that we “should bar judicial deference to agencies on questions of law or fact, as this violates due process and other constitutional limitations. Further, he recommends, “Congress should remove immunity for administrators — beginning with those who have desk jobs and agencies with a track record of violating constitutional rights.”

As Hamburger explains in his book Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, “Administrative law evades not only the law but also its institutions, processes, and rights.”

The Amorality of Bureaucracies 

Among the horrifying passages in Life and Fate are those where Grossman describes in detail what went into building the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps. Hitler, Himmler, and Eichmann didn’t pluck these horrors from thin air. Gas chambers were not among products sold in the marketplace. Thousands of actions had to be coordinated by a bureaucracy and military willing to follow insane and criminal orders. Tens of thousands of highly educated individuals had to follow orders. 

Grossman has the character Obersturmbannführer Liss visit the Voss engineering works:

The Voss works had been entrusted with an important part of the order and Liss was satisfied with their work. The directors had devoted considerable thought to the project and were keeping precisely to the specifications. The mechanical engineers had improved the construction of the conveyors, and the thermal technicians had developed a more economical system for heating the ovens.

Writing in his illuminating but understated style, Grossman brings home the point that many well-educated individuals had to engage in this depraved process:

Liss refused an invitation to observe the experiments being conducted in the laboratory. He did, however, look through pages of records signed by various physiologists, chemists and biochemists. He also met the young researchers responsible for the experiments: a physiologist and a biochemist (both women), a specialist in pathological anatomy, a chemist who specialized in organic compounds with a low boiling-point, and Professor Fischer himself, the toxicologist who was in charge of the group.

Still, much more was needed. Grossman explains:

A railway track had been laid down, leading directly off the main line to the construction site. The tour of inspection began with the depots alongside the railway line. First, under an awning, was the sorting depot. This was filled with component parts of a variety of machines, tubes and pipes of every diameter, unassembled conveyor belts, fans and ventilators, ball-mills for human bones, gas and electricity meters soon to be mounted on control panels, drums of cable, cement, tip-wagons, heaps of rails, and office furniture.

Grossman continues with construction details and descriptions of people operating the camps. One such person was Private Roze, whose “job was to watch through the inspection-window; when the process was completed, he gave the order for the gas chamber to be emptied. He was also expected to check that the dentists worked efficiently and honestly.” The dentists were extracting gold dental work from those murdered:

At the end of each day one of the dentists would hand Roze a small packet containing several gold crowns. Although this represented only an insignificant fraction of the precious metal taken every day to the camp authorities, Roze had twice handed over almost a kilo of gold to his wife. This was their bright future, their dream of a peaceful old age. As a young man, Roze had been weak and timid, unable to play an active part in life’s struggle. He had never doubted that the Party had set itself one aim only: the well-being of the small and weak. He had already experienced the benefits of Hitler’s policies; life had improved immeasurably for him and his family.

The Party looked out for “the small and weak,” Roze reasoned. If Roze’s conscience was pricked, he could think, I am not a criminal; I am merely serving the “common good.” Grossman writes, “People struggling for their particular good always attempt to dress it up as a universal good. They say: my good coincides with the universal good; my good is essential not only to me but to everyone; in achieving my good, I serve the universal good.”

Complying with orders of bureaucrats to commit unimaginable atrocities, people can rationalize away their criminality. Grossman writes, “The air is full of the groans and cries of the condemned. The sky has turned black; the sun has been extinguished by the smoke of the gas ovens. And even these crimes, crimes never before seen in the Universe—even by Man on Earth—have been committed in the name of good.”

There are no gas chambers in America, and it is unlikely there will ever be. Yet, exercising extralegal power, an army of bureaucrats working for the CDC, FDA, OSHA have terrorized America, dividing Americans into the clean and unclean. As Laurie Williams writes, “An unelected government agency was allowed to classify us into ‘critical infrastructure’ and ‘nonessential,’ and confine many of us to our homes.” These bureaucrats, Williams adds, helped to teach us “to see each other as potential contagions, not potential collaborators.” These bureaucrats don’t have the terrible powers of bureaucrats in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, yet I shudder to think what would happen if they were so empowered. 

As with Private Roze, life is good for some who cooperate with COVID bureaucrats. Some have a vested interest in perpetuating the pandemic. Musa al-Gharbi, a sociology fellow at Columbia University, recently observed why academics and bureaucrats don’t want to let go of COVID:

A constellation of scholars, bureaucrats and pundits seem invested in COVID remaining a “crisis” indefinitely. As the political scientist Oren Cass put it, many have been granted more money, prestige and institutional power than they have ever had in the wake of the pandemic. For them, a “return to normal” would mean a return to being largely ignored and exerting marginal influence over society. It would mean losing new revenue streams they have grown accustomed to, and so on. In light of this reality, it is perfectly natural that many experts, administrators and “talking heads” would be disinclined to return to “normal” – loss aversion is a powerful cognitive bias. However, recognizing these impulses as banal (rather than nefarious) does not render them unproblematic. They can skew policymaking and expert advice towards continued invasive policies and a continued sense of panic in ways that are excessive and pernicious.

Ending Our Silence

The will of the voting public will often do little to reverse policies of unbridled bureaucracies. In his seminal Democracy in America, written in 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville explained that in Europe the basis of power was “the upper echelons of society,” whereas power in America began with individuals acting in associations, local governments and then states. Today Tocqueville wouldn’t recognize an America where power resides so significantly in an unconstitutional federal bureaucracy.

Yet, Tocqueville saw that centralization might one day lead to “administrative despotism:”

After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

The despotism of which Tocqueville warned is dawning. Overcoming it may seem hopeless, but the power of bureaucratic despots depends on the power we give them. Perhaps thousands of scientists working for the CDC and NIAID know they are enabling the lies of their bureaucratic leaders. Among them may be those who remain silent and do their jobs, as did Grossman’s scientists, chemists, thermal technicians, and mechanical engineers. Some will find their courage. When we find our voice and say enough is enough, perhaps Congress will restrain bureaucracies according to the recommendations of Hamburger. Some states are already acting to rein in the power of their state health bureaucracies.

Of Stalin’s crimes, Grossman shows how silence was an enabler of lies and horrors: “We remained silent in 1937 when thousands of innocent people were executed. Or rather some of us—the best of us—remained silent. Others applauded noisily. And we remained silent during the horrors of general collectivization.” Is that what the battle for freedom has come to, that the “best of us” remain silent?

As we find our voices, the pendulum of power will shift back in a Tocquevillian direction. In America today, a decentralization movement is growing, advocating greater local control. Continued erosion of public trust in federal agencies and government experts will hasten that movement. 

While we wait for others to wake up, Grossman believes we can choose “everyday human kindness.” “Ordinary people bear love in their hearts,” he wrote. “are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing. At the end of the day’s work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in the public square.” Kindness, Grossman adds, “is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!”

Life is not evil, but bureaucracies often are cruel. America is regressing back to the early seventeenth century, Hamburger observes, in the manner of King James of England who governed via edicts from his Star Chamber. Of administrative power, Hamburger warns, “It is difficult to think of a more serious civil liberties problem for the twenty-first century.”

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Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore.

He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership, and his essays have appeared in publications such as the Foundation for Economic Education and Intellectual Takeout.

To receive Barry’s essays in your inbox, visit mindsetshifts.com

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Why Totalitarians Promote Hate

Barry Brownstein  – September 20, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

 

In Upstate New York, thirty Lewis County General Hospital health clinicians resigned rather than take the mandated Covid shot. Six of those who resigned worked in the maternity unit; the hospital shut down the maternity unit until new nurses who are vaccinated can be recruited.

Other essential services may be curtailed, as 73 percent of unvaccinated clinicians have yet to decide if they will quit rather than be vaccinated. Recruitment of new nurses will not be easy, since thousands of job openings for nurses in Upstate New York are unfilled.

Are these unvaccinated nurses and other healthcare professionals the “true enemy,” as one Democratic consultant called them? In the region served by the hospital, do families soon to experience the birth of a child feel safer now that some of their formerly trusted healthcare professionals have been purged? Are some of their patients wondering why these healthcare professionals would sacrifice their careers?

Illiberal mandates violate bodily autonomy and arguably worsen health outcomes. So, why are President Biden’s advisors pushing them? Do Biden and his advisors sincerely believe mandates will end the pandemic? If so, James Harrigan explains well the logical absurdity of mandates. Or are they consolidating power by exploiting human nature and borrowing a page from the totalitarian playbook to exacerbate tribal differences?

To understand the psychological roots of tribal fractures, let’s begin with a story not about vaccine mandates.

Larry David’s Contempt

Larry David and Alan Dershowitz were close friends for 25 years until Dershowitz became one of Trump’s impeachment lawyers. In August, Dershowitz was having a cup of coffee with friends on the porch of a Martha’s Vineyard general store. David arrived and started screaming at his former friend.

Dershowitz: “We can still talk, Larry.”

David: “No. No. We really can’t. I saw you. I saw you with your arm around [former Trump Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo! It’s disgusting!”

Dershowitz: “He’s my former student [at Harvard Law]. I greet all of my former students that way. I can’t greet my former students?”

David: “It’s disgusting. Your whole enclave — it’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!”

This was not a publicity stunt for the next season of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

If you have ever watched Curb, you know feelings of disgust run through many episodes. Larry is being called disgusting, or he is calling someone or something disgusting. In art, Larry never beats his tormentors.

Larry David is 74 years old, yet like many of us, he hasn’t learned not to toss his psychological trash on the side of the road. The overwhelming sense of disgust that Larry feels for Alan is in Larry’s mind. Angrily denouncing Alan won’t solve Larry’s problem. Larry can project the idea of disgust onto Alan, but the more he projects, the more he strengthens the idea of disgust in his mind. The more Larry projects, the more he wallows in his psychological trash.

Projection is our futile attempt to absolve ourselves of responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors by denying what exists in us while finding the same qualities in other people. Dershowitz was merely a symbol for how David sees himself. In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey wrote, “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are.”

Of course, Larry’s attempt to project is universal. What we block from our awareness, what we don’t acknowledge, we seek to hurl out. Projection never works; our psychological trash does not magically leave our mind when we demonize others. Larry may have felt a temporary catharsis, but he was losing, not gaining, psychological freedom. David’s psychological freedom comes from his decision to acknowledge his mind is the causative agent of his experience of reality.

Importantly, politicians will exploit the human weakness to project. Using propaganda, they aim to drum into our minds scapegoats onto whom to project what we do not want to acknowledge in ourselves. Individuals who are psychologically free will be less susceptible to totalitarian propaganda.

Totalitarian Movements

In The True Believer, social philosopher Eric Hoffer observed: “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually, the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.”

Hoffer recounts that before the “Final Solution,” “when Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he demurred, “We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.”

Hoffer continued with the story of “a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement.” Journalist Frederick Voigt asked “a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. The visiting delegate replied, ‘It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.’”

Hoffer found, “It is perhaps true that the insight and shrewdness of the men who know how to set a mass movement in motion, or how to keep one going, manifest themselves as much in knowing how to pick a worthy enemy as in knowing what doctrine to embrace and what program to adopt.”

Nazis argued that Jews were vermin that spread disease. If you thought that most Germans saw through the propaganda and merely went along because they were intimidated, you would be wrong. German doctors claimed, “that Jews were especially responsible for outbreaks of typhus.” They “published essays claiming that Jewish people’s supposedly ‘low cultural level’ and ‘uncleanliness’ were to blame.”

Yesterday’s “low cultural level” has morphed into labeling the unvaccinated and those not in step with Covid policy as “anti-science,” who manifest villainous disregard for the safety of others.

After the invasion of Poland, “German public health officials…repeatedly urged occupation authorities to isolate Jews further from the rest of the population and deny them access to medicine.”

Anti-Semitism was not required to support the Nazis. In my essay, Safety is Found in Principles, Not Lies I tell this story:

In his book They Thought They Were Free, (Milton) Mayer tells the story of how ordinary Germans—“we little people” as they referred to themselves—became Nazis. Mayer befriended these former Nazis and also examined the historical record to verify their stories. 

Consider policeman Willy Hofmeister. Mayer relates the story of how in 1938, Hofmeister was assigned the job of rounding up Jewish males “for their own protection.” Hofmeister was no Nazi thug; he was polite and respectful as he carried out his officious but deadly deeds.

As Hofmeister was taking into custody one Jewish man, he recalled being asked why the town synagogue was blown up that day. He answered, “They blew it up as a safety measure.”

Today, medical professionals are being terminated as a safety measure. No doubt, some readers will be outraged by this historical comparison. Willy Hoffmeister was not aware of his mental blinders; similarly blinders block awareness of many today.  

Of course, not all policymakers advocating mandates have totalitarian goals, yet their good intentions don’t matter. Illiberal means will lead to destructive ends.

In the face of widespread illiberalism, if we are resigned to thinking there is little we can do, we will get the politicians we deserve. Yet, there is much we can do; understanding psychological freedom undoes the error of projection.

Watch Your Fear Response

Fear drives the primitive part of the brain, the amygdala. In his book, The Fundamentalist Mind, Steven Larsen writes, “If you wish to induce a state of compliance in your would-be-constituency it is clearly an advantage to frighten them. First, induce the amygdaloid fear response and then offer them a loaded choice: be saved or be damned.” To deploy coercive power totalitarians need your fear.

Take Back Your Projections

Hoffer explained how totalitarians use “a sense of grievance” to drive people to submit to authority. Grievances will arise in your mind, but you don’t need to hold on to them. Totalitarians can only exploit the hate in your mind that you cultivate. For a moment, forget about more significant societal issues and get personal: Take back your personal projections. Learn from Larry David’s mistake. If you remain unaware of your projections, politicians will exploit your grievances.  

Don’t Intellectually Bully People

No matter what side of an issue you are on, don’t make arguments that begin with “There is no other way,” “All sensible people know,” and the like.

Larry Cosme, the president of the nonpartisan and pro-vax Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association offered this guidance: “[Biden’s] executive order villainizes employees for reasonable concerns and hesitancies and inserts the federal government into individual medical decisions. People should not be made to feel uncomfortable for making a reasonable medical choice.”

See The Humanity in Others

As Hoffer explained, when we don’t see the humanity in others, we provide oxygen to authoritarians. Oppose authoritarianism by seeing the humanity in everyone you meet.

The Vienna-born philosopher Martin Buber fled Germany after Hitler came to power. In his best-known work, I and Thou, Buber observed that we see the world in one of two fundamental ways: “I-Thou” or “I-It.” Seeing others as important as one’s self is the “I-Thou” way. Through the “I-It” lens, others are seen as lesser objects who help us or are obstacles that get in our way.

Watch your mind as you “I-It” your way through the day. The supermarket clerk who moves slower than you would like, the customer service representative not solving your problem, the driver who cuts you off on the highway; watch how your mind turns them into “its.” Awareness of your thinking patterns helps you make different choices.

Take Responsibility

Hoffer wrote, “There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgment.” Hoffer continued,

“When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement. We find there the “right to dishonour,” which according to Dostoyevsky has an irresistible fascination.”

Hoffer taught there are high personal and societal costs when individuals renounce personal responsibility.

Respect the Extended Order

In his book The Fatal Conceit, Friedrich Hayek explored the extended order, an order that is the product of voluntary, human cooperation and not a designed order based on coercion. Hayek wrote, “Our civilization depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism.”

Jonah Goldberg has observed, “The market system is so good at getting people—from all over the world—to work together that we barely notice how much we’re cooperating.”

The residents of Upstate New York now have fewer medical options. They are noticing the impact of less human cooperation, as controls undermine the rights of individuals to make personal medical decisions.  

Most of us would perish without the extended order; the few survivors would revert to a primitive existence. Today, notice how much you depend on human cooperation for fully stocked supermarkets, UPS and FedEx deliveries, the internet, electricity, and on and on.

Totalitarians reduce human cooperation. Don’t be a cheerleader for their illiberal schemes. Cultivate your psychological freedom to be less susceptible to totalitarian propaganda. As human cooperation decreases and hatred increases, you too, not just the people the mandates are directed against, will suffer. The oxygen of capitalism is cooperation. The oxygen of totalitarians is hatred for differences.

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Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore.

He is senior contributor at Intellectual Takeout and the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership.

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The Totalitarian Roots of Vaccine Mandates

Barry Brownstein  September 2, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

  

Over the course of the pandemic, principles of what a free society means are being redefined by collectivists.  

Consider this essay, Don’t COVID Vaccine Mandates Actually Promote Freedom? Medical ethicists Kyle Ferguson and Arthur Caplan argue, “Those who oppose cracking down on the unvaccinated are getting it all wrong.” Ferguson and Caplan are sure their opponents have a “flawed view of freedom.” They argue “Passports and mandates are hardly ‘strong-arm tactics.’ These strategies are better seen as liberty inducers. They bring about freedom rather than deplete it.”

They add, “a successful COVID-19 vaccination campaign will liberate us — as individuals and as a collective — from the callous grip of a pandemic that just won’t seem to end.” Orwell’s “Party” proclaimed in 1984 that “Freedom is slavery.” Ferguson and Caplan come close to arguing “Slavery is freedom.”

Ferguson and Caplan assure us that the enlightenment view of “the unbound individual” is outdated. They want to reimagine freedom as communal, starting with “the individual’s participation in a community and the kind of community in which the individual lives.” They develop their argument:

Here, freedom is communal rather than individualistic. And rather than being unbound, individuals in the free community are bound by and to each other. Communal freedom achieves much more than the unbound individual ever could. It creates new possibilities and expands our horizons. Life is enhanced when our community is free because we can participate in communal freedom and the goods it creates.”

They want to take us back to the future with Rousseau as their guide:

“This view of freedom is like that of Rousseau’s: A society is made free by individuals cooperating, by binding themselves to each other and to the rational pursuit of common goals. From this perspective, vaccine mandates and other “strong-arm tactics” induce liberty rather than restrict it.”

Seduced by the Common Good

For some, flowery visions of the common good have always been seductive. In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek observes that even well-meaning people will ask, “If it be necessary to achieve important ends,” why shouldn’t the system “be run by decent people for the good of the community as a whole?”

Hayek challenges the axiomatic belief that wise people can tell others what the common good is. He explains why there is no such thing as the common good: “The welfare and happiness of millions cannot be measured on a single scale of less or more. The welfare of the people, like the happiness of a man, depends upon a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James Macgregor Burns recounts in his book Fire and Light how Rousseau’s ideas of the general will led to the brutality of his disciple Robespierre. Like Hayek, Burns explains that there can be no agreement about what the common good is. Claiming to rule by the common good inevitably leads to excesses. Robespierre and the other eleven men who made up the Committee of Public Safety ruled France with “unlimited power” and “terror.”

Burns explains what Rousseau did not understand: “Peaceful and democratic conflict [is] crucial to the achievement of freedom.” Instead, Rousseau imagined, like Ferguson and Caplan “a new society filled with good citizens… working selflessly and with identical minds for the common good.”

Rousseau’s ideas are mantras for censors. In Rousseau’s world, there would be no pesky “long debates, dissensions and tumult” impeding implementation of the common good.

Dr. Fauci is sure he is right, and he has had enough of those making different choices than his guidance: “I respect people’s freedom, but when you’re talking about a public health crisis, that we’ve been going through now for well over a year and a half, the time is come, enough is enough.” Let’s not hide Fauci’s plain meaning, I respect people’s freedom to do what I tell them.

The basic human right to decide what goes into your body is now being reversed.

You are to take all the vaccines Dr. Fauci and Pfizer deem necessary. They—not you—will decide the parameters of your freedom, with Ferguson and Caplan cheering them on. Rest easy, like Robespierre, the fallible decisions of Dr. Fauci, politicians, bureaucrats and cronies are for “the common good.”

With freedom redefined, there will be no need to take personal responsibility for your health decisions. Those who don’t go along with official guidance must be dealt with. Ban them from travel, from schools, and from employment. In Ferguson and Caplan’s Rousseauian view, society is merely expunging those that won’t take a knee to whatever is proclaimed the common good.

The Arrogant Jacobin Mindset

Burns explains that leaders operating from the common good mindset have the “absolute conviction” that they are right. Burns explores the French Revolution as he recounts the totalitarian tyranny of the Jacobins: “The Jacobins believed only they understood the general will of the French people, hence they were morally right.”

Burns continues, “Opposition was considered not merely mistaken but evil and traitorous and hence punishable, even lethally. The Jacobins asserted a monopoly on virtue which meant to them a license to kill those who held up other values.”

Today, health Jacobins don’t argue that they should kill the unvaccinated, but some argue that the unvaccinated should be deprived of healthcare.

In his seminal essay, “Individualism: True and False,” Hayek contrasts true individualism and the false individualism of philosophers such as Rousseau.

True individualism “is a product of an acute consciousness of the limitations of the individual mind which induces an attitude of humility toward the impersonal and anonymous social processes by which individuals help to create things greater than they know.” In contrast, false individualism “is the product of an exaggerated belief in the powers of individual reason and of a consequent contempt for anything which has not been consciously designed by it or is not fully intelligible to it.”

When Ferguson and Caplan write, “Freedom is communal rather than individualistic,” they in Hayek’s words express “the silliest of the common misunderstandings.” The adoption of such ideas, Hayek explains, has been “a source of modern socialism.”

The error made by collectivist apologists is “the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society.”

This false individualism of Rousseau and others assumes that “everything which man achieves is the direct result of, and therefore subject to, the control of individual reason.”

Masquerading as people who reason the best, Ferguson and Caplan in Hayek’s words “pretend to be able directly to comprehend social wholes like society.”

Hayek’s explanation of “true individualism” is the antidote for such hubris. Hayek’s approach is “antirationalistic” and “regards man not as a highly rational and intelligent but as a very irrational and fallible being, whose individual errors are corrected only in the course of a social process, and which aims at making the best of a very imperfect material.”

We can never make the best of “imperfect material” when those posing as having superior knowledge are allowed to coerce others. Hayek writes, “What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it.” In other words, choose to be directed by the limited power of Dr. Fauci’s mind or choose the virtually unlimited and unpredictable power of a free society.

Let’s put this together. Health collectivists, behaving like Jacobins, are sure there is one best way; they believe they are the arbiter of truth. Cloaking themselves in the holy robes of the augur of the common good, dissent is not to be tolerated. The end to the pandemic requires not that we follow the collectivists but that we are free to consider different perspectives and discover in the course of an uncoerced social process what really works.

READ MORE

Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore.  He is senior contributor at Intellectual Takeout and the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership.  Get notified of new articles from Barry Brownstein and AIER.

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The Totalitarian Roots of Vaccine Mandates

Barry Brownstein – September 2, 2021 American Institute for Economic Research 

 

 

Over the course of the pandemic, principles of what a free society means are being redefined by collectivists.  

Consider this essay, Don’t COVID Vaccine Mandates Actually Promote Freedom? Medical ethicists Kyle Ferguson and Arthur Caplan argue, “Those who oppose cracking down on the unvaccinated are getting it all wrong.” Ferguson and Caplan are sure their opponents have a “flawed view of freedom.” They argue “Passports and mandates are hardly ‘strong-arm tactics.’ These strategies are better seen as liberty inducers. They bring about freedom rather than deplete it.”

They add, “a successful COVID-19 vaccination campaign will liberate us — as individuals and as a collective — from the callous grip of a pandemic that just won’t seem to end.” Orwell’s “Party” proclaimed in 1984 that “Freedom is slavery.” Ferguson and Caplan come close to arguing “Slavery is freedom.”

Ferguson and Caplan assure us that the enlightenment view of “the unbound individual” is outdated. They want to reimagine freedom as communal, starting with “the individual’s participation in a community and the kind of community in which the individual lives.” They develop their argument:

Here, freedom is communal rather than individualistic. And rather than being unbound, individuals in the free community are bound by and to each other. Communal freedom achieves much more than the unbound individual ever could. It creates new possibilities and expands our horizons. Life is enhanced when our community is free because we can participate in communal freedom and the goods it creates.”

They want to take us back to the future with Rousseau as their guide:

“This view of freedom is like that of Rousseau’s: A society is made free by individuals cooperating, by binding themselves to each other and to the rational pursuit of common goals. From this perspective, vaccine mandates and other “strong-arm tactics” induce liberty rather than restrict it.”

Seduced by the Common Good

For some, flowery visions of the common good have always been seductive. In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek observes that even well-meaning people will ask, “If it be necessary to achieve important ends,” why shouldn’t the system “be run by decent people for the good of the community as a whole?”

Hayek challenges the axiomatic belief that wise people can tell others what the common good is. He explains why there is no such thing as the common good: “The welfare and happiness of millions cannot be measured on a single scale of less or more. The welfare of the people, like the happiness of a man, depends upon a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James Macgregor Burns recounts in his book Fire and Light how Rousseau’s ideas of the general will led to the brutality of his disciple Robespierre. Like Hayek, Burns explains that there can be no agreement about what the common good is. Claiming to rule by the common good inevitably leads to excesses. Robespierre and the other eleven men who made up the Committee of Public Safety ruled France with “unlimited power” and “terror.”

Burns explains what Rousseau did not understand: “Peaceful and democratic conflict [is] crucial to the achievement of freedom.” Instead, Rousseau imagined, like Ferguson and Caplan “a new society filled with good citizens… working selflessly and with identical minds for the common good.”

Rousseau’s ideas are mantras for censors. In Rousseau’s world, there would be no pesky “long debates, dissensions and tumult” impeding implementation of the common good.

Dr. Fauci is sure he is right, and he has had enough of those making different choices than his guidance: “I respect people’s freedom, but when you’re talking about a public health crisis, that we’ve been going through now for well over a year and a half, the time is come, enough is enough.” Let’s not hide Fauci’s plain meaning, I respect people’s freedom to do what I tell them.

The basic human right to decide what goes into your body is now being reversed.

You are to take all the vaccines Dr. Fauci and Pfizer deem necessary. They—not you—will decide the parameters of your freedom, with Ferguson and Caplan cheering them on. Rest easy, like Robespierre, the fallible decisions of Dr. Fauci, politicians, bureaucrats and cronies are for “the common good.”

With freedom redefined, there will be no need to take personal responsibility for your health decisions. Those who don’t go along with official guidance must be dealt with. Ban them from travel, from schools, and from employment. In Ferguson and Caplan’s Rousseauian view, society is merely expunging those that won’t take a knee to whatever is proclaimed the common good.

The Arrogant Jacobin Mindset

Burns explains that leaders operating from the common good mindset have the “absolute conviction” that they are right. Burns explores the French Revolution as he recounts the totalitarian tyranny of the Jacobins: “The Jacobins believed only they understood the general will of the French people, hence they were morally right.”

Burns continues, “Opposition was considered not merely mistaken but evil and traitorous and hence punishable, even lethally. The Jacobins asserted a monopoly on virtue which meant to them a license to kill those who held up other values.”

Today, health Jacobins don’t argue that they should kill the unvaccinated, but some argue that the unvaccinated should be deprived of healthcare.

In his seminal essay, “Individualism: True and False,” Hayek contrasts true individualism and the false individualism of philosophers such as Rousseau.

True individualism “is a product of an acute consciousness of the limitations of the individual mind which induces an attitude of humility toward the impersonal and anonymous social processes by which individuals help to create things greater than they know.” In contrast, false individualism “is the product of an exaggerated belief in the powers of individual reason and of a consequent contempt for anything which has not been consciously designed by it or is not fully intelligible to it.”

When Ferguson and Caplan write, “Freedom is communal rather than individualistic,” they in Hayek’s words express “the silliest of the common misunderstandings.” The adoption of such ideas, Hayek explains, has been “a source of modern socialism.”

The error made by collectivist apologists is “the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society.”

This false individualism of Rousseau and others assumes that “everything which man achieves is the direct result of, and therefore subject to, the control of individual reason.”

Masquerading as people who reason the best, Ferguson and Caplan in Hayek’s words “pretend to be able directly to comprehend social wholes like society.”

Hayek’s explanation of “true individualism” is the antidote for such hubris. Hayek’s approach is “antirationalistic” and “regards man not as a highly rational and intelligent but as a very irrational and fallible being, whose individual errors are corrected only in the course of a social process, and which aims at making the best of a very imperfect material.”

We can never make the best of “imperfect material” when those posing as having superior knowledge are allowed to coerce others. Hayek writes, “What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it.” In other words, choose to be directed by the limited power of Dr. Fauci’s mind or choose the virtually unlimited and unpredictable power of a free society.

Let’s put this together. Health collectivists, behaving like Jacobins, are sure there is one best way; they believe they are the arbiter of truth. Cloaking themselves in the holy robes of the augur of the common good, dissent is not to be tolerated. The end to the pandemic requires not that we follow the collectivists but that we are free to consider different perspectives and discover in the course of an uncoerced social process what really works.

READ MORE

Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore.  He is senior contributor at Intellectual Takeout and the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. Get notified of new articles from Barry Brownstein and AIER.

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Censorship Kills

Barry Brownstein  – June 30, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

 

Whenever I write an essay critical of expert opinion on Covid, I immediately receive indignant replies. Some assume I must be a bleach-drinking supporter of President Trump. Others label me a dangerous libertarian since, in their view, I challenge the “best” source of expert opinion.

Among my critics are well-meaning people who see no alternative but to follow the policy prescriptions of their favored experts. They do not see they are on the path of illiberal, anti-science, authoritarian thinking that is endangering the well-being of so many people today.

Karl Popper helps us understand why an “authoritarian attitude to the problem of human knowledge” hinders scientific progress. His essay “On the So-Called Sources of Knowledge” appears in his collection In Search of a Better World.  

Popper explains, “The question of the sources of our knowledge, like so many authoritarian questions, is a question about origin. It asks for the origin of our knowledge, in the belief that knowledge may be legitimate itself by its pedigree.”

Popper explains how the mistaken belief that knowledge has a pedigree leads us to seek the “‘best’ or the ‘wisest’” to be our political rulers. We make the mistake of assuming there are ultimate authorities best suited to rule because of the knowledge they possess. Popper explains that there are no such ultimate authorities, and “uncertainty clings to all assertions.”

Popper argues that instead of focusing on who should rule, our focus should be on “How can we organize our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers can do the minimum amount of damage?”

Since “ideal and infallible source of the knowledge” is as impossible as “ideal and infallible rulers,” Popper proposed a better question: “Is there a way of detecting and eliminating error?”

Dr. Fauci claims that to criticize him is to criticize science. Popper would challenge this authoritarian assertion since “pure, untainted and certain sources do not exist.”  

To detect error, Popper advises a mindset of inquiry that criticizes “the theories and conjectures of others.” Importantly, Popper suggests training ourselves to criticize “our own theories and speculative attempts to solve problems.”

Of course, human beings don’t do very well criticizing themselves. Popper says that in a free society that will not be an issue because “there will be others who will do it for us.”

What happens when we don’t criticize our theories? What happens when others are prohibited from criticizing our theories? Without critical inquiry, errors compound since “there are no ultimate sources of knowledge.”

Humility to acknowledge our ignorance motivates inquiry. Popper writes, 

“The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, clear and well-defined will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. The main source of our ignorance lies in the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must be necessarily infinite.” 

Authentic scientific inquiry is impossible when criticism is prohibited.

Covid Censorship

Evolutionary biologist Brett Weinstein is a modern-day Popper. Weinstein first came to prominence in 2017 when he was a professor at Evergreen State College in Washington State. A progressive supporter of Bernie Sanders, Weinstein became an early victim of the cancel culture when he refused to support a campus event requiring white people to stay off-campus. Evergreen State’s college president, George Bridges, declined to protect Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, then a biology professor at Evergreen, from a campus mob. 

Run out of Evergreen State, Weinstein and Heying now produce the YouTube podcast DarkHorse and depend, in part, on advertising revenue for their livelihood. As the audience of DarkHorse has grown they have become independent media stars.

Today, Big Tech is after Weinstein and Heying. Prominent free-speech advocate Matt Taibbi writes, “Weinstein is on the verge of becoming one of the more prominent casualties to a censorship movement that it’s hard not to see as part of a wider Evergreening of America.” 

Why are Weinstein and Heying so dangerous to the orthodoxy? Throughout the Covid crisis, they have considered alternative views. They were among the first to consider the hypothesis that the virus was manufactured. They have considered Ivermectin treatments. Now they are considering the evidence that Covid vaccines are more dangerous than political authorities, the media, and their anointed experts are portraying. Importantly, they have not hesitated to question the integrity of officials such as Dr. Facui.  

Consider Weinstein’s Popperian assertion that “a movement opposes science when it doesn’t want assertions tested, challenges arithmetic when its claims don’t add up, ridicules ‘merit’ when it wants to triumph by other means, seeks to censor when it fears discussion.” 

Weinstein adds, “Those who coddle such demands sow the seeds of our undoing.” Censorship means risking our economies and our lives. 

To reject scientific inquiry, Weinstein argues, “is effectively an invitation to a dark age, which means an age where progress comes to a halt… We must at all costs prevent this shift in our mindset.”

Recently YouTube removed a DarkHorse podcast panel discussion featuring Dr. Robert Malone. The podcast is now viewable at Odysee, which runs on LBRY, a blockchain file-sharing decentralized platform.  

Malone is the creator of the mRNA technology used in Covid vaccines. Malone warns that the spike proteins may be responsible for various unpredictable side effects, including blood clots and myocarditis. The latter being especially prevalent in children and young adults for whom the risk from Covid is very low. Exhibiting Popperian humility, the panelists allowed their conjectures might not be entirely accurate. Malone and Weinstein have earned this right, not to be obeyed, but to present their ideas without censorship. 

If there is evidence that the spike protein mechanism was not fully understood, to believe in science would mean that you examine the warnings of eminent physicians and scientists. 

One doesn’t have to deny the benefits of the vaccine—and Weinstein does argue the vaccine has saved lives—to realize that the costs and benefits of any medical intervention can only be assessed accurately with uncensored information. Appearing on Tucker Carlson, Malone said of the vaccines’ risks: “We don’t have the information we need to make a reasonable decision.” Malone put it this way:

“One of my concerns is the government is not being transparent with us. I’m of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept vaccines or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines. This is a fundamental right having to do with clinical research ethics.”

Dr. Joseph Ladapo and Dr. Harvey Risch are medical professors at UCLA and Yale. They too are concerned that vaccine side effects are not being fully explored. Evidence points to risks of “low platelets (thrombocytopenia); noninfectious myocarditis, or heart inflammation, especially for those under 30; deep-vein thrombosis; and death.” This failure to examine risk is being fueled by a strategy of ridiculing those who question the Covid orthodoxy. They write, 

One remarkable aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic has been how often unpopular scientific ideas, from the lab-leak theory to the efficacy of masks, were initially dismissed, even ridiculed, only to resurface later in mainstream thinking. Differences of opinion have sometimes been rooted in disagreement over the underlying science. But the more common motivation has been political.

Another reversal in thinking may be imminent. Some scientists have raised concerns that the safety risks of Covid-19 vaccines have been underestimated. But the politics of vaccination has relegated their concerns to the outskirts of scientific thinking—for now.

Ladapo and Risch warn that “political partisanship and science” don’t mix:

Public-health authorities are making a mistake and risking the public’s trust by not being forthcoming about the possibility of harm from certain vaccine side effects. There will be lasting consequences from mingling political partisanship and science during the management of a public-health crisis.

The results of such partisanship have been deadly even for groups of people supposedly receiving the most benefit from vaccines. Lapado and Risch point to the rare honesty of a report issued by the Norwegian Medicines Agency having “reviewed case files for the first 100 reported deaths of nursing-home residents who received the Pfizer vaccine.” The vaccine’s impact was not salutatory: “The agency concluded that the vaccine ‘likely’ contributed to the deaths of 10 of these residents through side effects such as fever and diarrhea, and ‘possibly’ contributed to the deaths of an additional 26.”

The CDC has acknowledged the reality of vaccine-induced myocarditis. The acknowledgment has come with a statement that the CDC believes the vaccine’s benefits exceed the costs. The FDA has issued a myocarditis warning label.

For some the CDC is the gold standard for medical guidance; for others, their guidance is dangerously flawed. Dr. Vinay Prasad, professor of epidemiology at the University of California wrote about the latest CDC guidance, “The current CDC guidelines are so poor they would recommend a 15-year old boy who recovered from documented covid19 and who got pericarditis from dose 1 go on to get dose 2.” He adds, “Can we pause a minute to contemplate how staggeringly negligent that is?” Dr. Prasad is clear, “Covid vaccines for children should not get emergency use authorization.” 

Faced with censorship in the marketplace of ideas, and faced with cronyism driving public policy, how can a parent weigh the costs and benefits of the vaccine for their child?

Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford write, “The idea that everyone must be vaccinated against COVID-19 is as misguided as the anti-vax idea that no one should. The former is more dangerous for public health.”

Kulldorff and Bhattacharya are particularly concerned about “intense [vaccination] pressure on young adults and children. They write: “Under such uncertainty [about side effects from vaccines], vaccine mandates are unethical. University presidents or business leaders should not mandate a medical intervention that could have dire consequences for the health of even a few of the people in their charge.”

Kulldorff’s and Bhattacharya’s conclusion are like those of Lapado and Risch:

Universities used to be bastions of enlightenment. Now many of them ignore basic benefit-risk analyses, a staple of the toolbox of scientists; they deny immunity from natural infection; they abandon the global international perspective for narrow nationalism; and they replace trust with coercion and authoritarianism. Mandating the COVID-19 vaccine thus threatens not only public health but also the future of science.

Weinstein, Heying, Lapado, Risch, Malone, Prasad and many more disagree with a blanket endorsement for Covid vaccinations. 

In the absence of vaccine mandates issued by colleges and schools, those who disagree with the CDC would be free to do so. The CDC/FDA position is akin to issuing a warning label on cigarettes and then mandating smoking. 

Dr. Francis Christian is a clinical professor of general surgery at the University of Saskatchewan. A self-described “very pro-vaccine physician,” he was fired for issuing a statement urging parents to exercise “informed consent” about Covid vaccines. Christian writes:

The person by whom the drug, vaccine, treatment or intervention is administered must always make the patient fully aware of the risks of the medical intervention, the benefits of the intervention and if any alternatives exist to the intervention. This should apply particularly to a new vaccine that has never before been tried in humans.

He adds, “I have not met a single vaccinated child or parent who has been adequately informed and who then understands the risks of this vaccine or its benefits.”

Dr. Christian points to alternatives. From the outset of this pandemic, Fauci, Bill Gates, and others told us that life could not get back to normal until we achieved herd immunity via vaccinations. For the FDA to issue an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Covid vaccines, there must be “no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.” 

Manufacturers of Covid vaccines are indemnified from liability, and the government has made sure they are also protected against competition. It seems to be a law of cronyism that crony greed is maximal and concern for others is minimal.

Consider Ivermectin, a generic drug with a long history of safety. Weinstein and others argue Ivermectin is not only an effective treatment but a potential prophylactic against Covid. Weinstein, Heying, and their guests have advocated for further study of Ivermectin. Matt Taibbi recently documented how the consideration and use of Ivermectin has become a political issue. 

Big Tech routinely censors reports of vaccine harm and alternatives to vaccines. Censorship is the product of an illiberal, anti-science, authoritarian mindset. Censorship kills because decision-making is distorted. 

Consider the knowledge of the disinfecting properties of soap and water. In a world where that knowledge was censored in favor of antibiotic treatment for all wounds, people would die needlessly, and antibiotics would be overused. 

Our Responsibility

Popper interprets Kant’s principle of autonomy as the “realization that we must never accept the command of an authority, however exalted, as the basis of ethics. For whenever we are faced with the command of an authority, it is always up to us to judge, critically, whether it is morally permissible to obey.” 

Popper allows, “The authority may have the power to enforce its commands, and we may be powerless to resist.” 

Today we are not yet powerless to resist the censors. We can acknowledge our ignorance and engage in inquiry. We can still seek out and find alternative views and consider disconcerting evidence. We can resist the urge to self-censor and instead share what we are observing and learning. We can reject authority as the basis for our personal ethics. Popper writes, “If it is physically possible for us to choose our conduct then we cannot escape the ultimate responsibility.” 

Lex Fridman is a research scientist at MIT and the host of a popular podcast. Recently he had Weinstein on his show to talk about censorship. Fridman said this: “Science is the striving of the human mind to understand and solve the problems of the world, but as an institution, it is susceptible to flaws of human nature, to fear, to greed, power, and ego.” To reduce uncertainty about the best solutions to Covid, Fridman argues, “No voices should have been silenced, no ideas left off the table. Open data, open science, open scientific communication, and debate is the way, not censorship.”

Censors claim the moral high road; they assure us they are coercing others for our own good. Fridman dismantles their authoritarian hubris: “There are a lot of ideas out there that are bad, wrong, dangerous. But the moment we have the hubris to say we know which ideas those are is the moment we lose our ability to find the truth, to find solutions.” The conversation he had with Weinstein is larger than Weinstein’s ideas. Fridman warns that at stake is “the very freedom to talk, to think, to share ideas.” Fridman believes, “This freedom is our only hope.”

Censorship distorts decision-making and destroys hope. For some, Covid is a matter of life or death. Censorship challenges our ability to make responsible health choices for ourselves and those in our care.

In 1644 John Milton wrote, “He who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.” Today, acknowledge the destructive consequences of censorship. Speak out now or we risk allowing Big Tech’s algorithms and community guidelines to continue to destroy reason, hinder science, and undermine hope for humanity.

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Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore.

He is senior contributor at Intellectual Takeout and the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership.

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