I write largely in reaction to ideas that place a proverbial burr under my intellectual saddle. So it was when Bari Weiss’s podcast “HONESTLY” hosted Patrick Deneen and Bret Stephens to debate the merits of the concept of liberalism. I think you should listen to it if this topic is even slightly interesting to you - but also because I think both Deneen and Stephens are basically missing the point.
It doesn’t pay to recapitulate their positions very much here if you’ve done the homework on this so my preference is to dive straight into the maw of what this fight is actually about: That our society is structured in such a fashion as to maximize the ability of people with high levels of social capital - economic and especially intellectual - to enjoy the maximum benefits of what our society creates while paying minimal costs for doing so, while those who aren’t in that class pay mightily.
I. The Limitations of Intellect
Human beings have some weird, contradictory limitations. One of the things that sets us apart from animals is the concept of “a theory of mind”; i.e., we can construct inside our heads a model of what other people might think or feel in response to some stimulus or choice. This is the root of empathy, but it is, nonetheless, incredibly blinkered. That’s because we don’t (and more importantly can’t) get outside of our own perspectives via this theory of mind because we are ultimately stuck inside of our own heads. Being smart in some ways actually makes this worse: not only are we living inside of this proverbial bubble, but smart people can generate better, yet still self-serving justifications for why they’ve come to the (frequently incorrect) conclusions they reach about other people’s motivations, capabilities and interior decisions. Smart people are probably more likely to suffer from the “Like Mind Fallacy.”
Objectively, if you’re reading this you’re probably a member of a certain kind of cognitive elite - by that I mean that your IQ is probably >130, your income is probably at or possibly well above the national median or average. You, your family, your friends and the people you work with are all probably of a similar, elite (I use that term advisedly and in its clinical sense) milieu and to the extent that you interact with anybody who falls outside of that cohort it’s when you go to a store or order takeout. You basically live inside a bubble and can’t escape from it any more than you could order a not-bright person to mystically become smarter. I tell you this not because you don’t know it, but because I don’t think we appreciate just how damaging this inability to appreciate how hard life is for many people when we contemplate the question of the sort of society we try to design via policy.
And make no mistake: despite the existence and fundamental correctness of Hayek’s infamous knowledge problem, I don’t believe that he was making some sort of appeal to ignorance or anarchism. The actions we take and the policies we promote are done with the intent of designing outcomes that we find desirable in spite of Hayek. We do this unconsciously - or consciously, and then create elaborate, possibly even correct justifications for it - whether we intend to or not, but we should look at what has happened as a result of our efforts:
We have created a deeply complex society with a host of possible decisions in the decision tree.
The lower your status in financial/intellectual capital, the greater negative effect bad decisions will have on your life outcomes; especially the earlier in your life you make any given error.
The net effect of possessing higher levels of money and intelligence is to enable you to jump to a different branch of the decision tree much more easily even if you make poor-outcome oriented choices at any point.
If you aren’t a member of the cognitive/financial elite, the proliferation of choices in society may not be as much of a boon to you as much as it is a source of anxiety, frustration and ultimately disillusionment.
Keep in mind that I consider myself to be a “liberal” in the sense that I err on the side of trying to grant people greater liberty and more choices than less. But it is also true that the huge addition of choice adds a type of complexity to life that didn’t exist previously and that complexity is a subsidy to people who are highly intelligent or wealthy; a subsidy which people who aren’t have a hard time overcoming.
II. The Kind of Society We Have
Everybody that isn’t a science denier concedes that there is a more or less normal distribution for a host of characteristics in in human beings, chief among them being intelligence. Being smart is simply an undeniable advantage across the entire domain of possible life activities; that is, given the option between being smarter and less smart, there are few identifiable downsides to being smarter. Being smarter is also considerably rarer than its converse. The existence of meritocracy, and the fact that people who are intelligent or hard-working inhabit it (mostly some combination of both) is a direct consequence of this fact. It also allows people who are bright to essentially “stack the deck” in their favor, as when such people inevitably end up a the top of these competence hierarchies, they (either consciously or no) begin to implement policies that reflect their own internal biases and benefit “people like them.”
How does this emerge? How about “personal finance”? The recent Unconstitutional actions of the Biden Administration to “forgive” $10,000 of student loan debt is a prime example.
It is a well-known fact that people who graduate from College earn considerably more throughout their careers than those who don’t. People in the government (typically college-educated and frequently graduate-degreed) understand this and have an overdetermined number of reasons to want to incentivize people to go to college, ranging from “creating more people like them” to “Improving the financial outcomes of people which improves their tax-paying capacity.” This isn’t especially nefarious in my mind, as the improvement of human capital is the principal reason why America is as rich as it has become. Ignore for a moment the fact that the arrow of causation here is likely backwards: “people who go to college earn more” is the assumption when the reverse, “People who earn more go to college” is probably closer to the truth.
However: What began as a good idea for the improvement of human capital soon became a slush fund/honey trap that many people who otherwise have no prospect of meaningfully improving their skills through college attendance simply began taking huge gulps from. This has resulted in absurdities like “people who took $100K in student loans to earn a degree in education mysteriously being unable to repay them.” The person who did this is likely to end up miserable.
There’s plenty of blame to go around in a situation like this, especially for the individual who signed the paperwork, but a large share of that blame also belongs to the people who created the moral hazard and gave the money out in the first place.
While it’s true for some people that Federal Student Loans enabled them to earn a degree which allowed them to go to medical school and start making a quarter million dollars per year, for a much larger proportion of them, the Federal Student Loan system constituted a trap - a trap where large numbers of people who were probably unable to make a fully competent decision about the effects that signing that promissory note would have on their lives were nonetheless allowed to do so because an entirely separate class of well-meaning, highly-intelligent people couldn’t escape the schema of their own thought patterns and made the assumption that because they were able to handle those obligations, significant numbers of people who are actually quite dissimilar from them also could.
They were wrong. But… why?
III. A Society built for Top Performers
Rob Henderson talks about the concept of “luxury beliefs” - a set of ideas that consist of notions shared among the high status members of our society which end up being emulated by the lower class members of society yet creates wildly disparate outcomes.
A Luxury Belief of this sort might be the idea that you can have serial relationships/marriages, children from several different fathers and still live a respectable or even enviable lifestyle. Think: Kim Kardashian. KK is fabulously wealthy, sports a new beau/husband every couple of years and appears to be none the worse for the wear. What could possibly be wrong with this?
Obviously, most people don’t have the resources available to Kim. If even upper middle class people began routinely making the sorts of life decisions she engages in, it would quickly ruin them financially and reputationally - not to mention maritally. We nonetheless seem to want to avert our eyes and shut our mouths when we do see people - whether in intentional parroting or not - behaving like a Kardashian without the requisite financial and moral capital to underwrite such adventures.
There exist a variety of things that represent traps for people of lesser means that are nonetheless the playthings of wealthy, highly intelligent people. One could rattle off a list of them from the aforementioned student loans, to liberalized marijuana laws, easier access to gambling, ubiquitous pornography and even payday loan sharks.
What the dominance of society by high status individuals has accomplished is to lower the barriers to a host of things which were either previously socially illicit or even outright forbidden by law. Why? Because we’ve built society in such a fashion as to make it convenient for the high status to be able to enjoy such luxuries without being pestered by the authorities. Meanwhile, lower status individuals - frequently not possessing the sort of prior restraint common to the formation of high status people - blithely indulge in these activities in what is the the rough equivalent of performing a trapeze act without a net while their lives are on the line.
It’s as if we’ve created a set of rules and granted license to people to do as they will under the cockeyed assumption that everybody has the decisionmaking capabilities of a person with an IQ of 130 when the fact of the matter is that the average IQ (by definition) is 100. Forget about the consequences this has for the 1/6 people whose IQ is 85 or less.
When high status people view the tableau of options and choices the society we’ve designed places in front of them, they use what I’ll call a set of heuristics to quickly pare down the possibilities to a set of acceptable and unacceptable options. This is because the mere fact of possessing high intelligence allows you to quickly and accurately assess cause and effect and potential alternatives in a way that those who don’t simply can’t. Also, having a broad selection is itself pleasurable. It’s a sort of game that we play, and one we’re so good at we sometimes try to lose.
The heuristics are a rough stand-in for “morality,” which is a sort of cheat code for how to approach complex problems in life, and one we explicitly attempted to inculcate in people across the board in days gone by. Yet that doesn’t happen so much anymore.
If you place that same, huge number of choices before average people, they’re far less likely to view it as a game. It’s more likely they’ll make decisions that produce the greatest short-term pleasure or utility, irrespective of long-term consequence. Of course, it’s in the long-term that people end up being miserable.
III. Liberal/Illiberal may be the wrong schema
As I mentioned, the debate between Deneen and Stephens, while entertaining and enlightening is actually a bit of a distraction. That’s because I think the two of them aren’t advocating for what would ultimately constitute radically different societies where one would be identifiably “bad” while the other is “good.” I would characterize these positions as being “optimist” and “pessimist.”
For the most part, I regard Stephens’ position as that of a well-meaning libertarian; He wants fewer de jure and probably even fewer social constraints on peoples choices and behaviors. The benefits of this are obvious, yet I can’t help but notice that they are strangely self-serving to him and people like him. It’s a position that is optimistic that in the long run, people will make correct decisions even in the absence of prior restraint or authority.
For Deneen’s part, I find him slippery and intellectually dishonest. He argues with straw men, frequently misstating the arguments of people who are in opposition to him. My sympathies are not necessarily with him but he does himself and his position no favors by making a poor showing for his side, even though I think his pessimism about humans is somewhat well-founded. Humans are paradoxical creatures in that we love liberty but still crave rules. If that weren’t the case, human history would look far different than it has turned out. Although doing it sotto voce, Deneen is advocating for there to be more rules - at least in the social realm if not in the de jure sense - to help serve as a curative to the open-ended and seemingly nihilistic existence placed before many people that they find so immiserating.
If I had to attack the “liberal” position I would do it in the way I’ve described above and say that although the sort of liberty that we enjoy has created vast wealth and allowed the cognitive elite unprecedented freedom and power, it has nonetheless created a set of losers as well. And when the losers lose… they lose everything. We know this to be true when we look at things like the Labor Force Participation rate and the number of people who have simply “dropped out” of the labor market.
The reasons why they’ve done that are going to take some time to unravel, but another troubling statistic points to something more sinister: the quantity of overdose and so-called “deaths of despair,” which includes suicides. This is deeply troubling and tied at the hip to the rise of Trump and the sort of formless, angry populism behind him.
If you’re concerned about the nihilism inherent to some of this and the rhetoric surrounding it, consider for a moment the type of civilization we’ve chosen to build. It is the sort of society where people do get ahead by the “Sweat of their brow” and by making good decisions… but remember: if you’re a believer in the environmental behaviorial hypothesis such people will only be capable of making those good decisions if they were first fortunate enough to hail from a family that armed them with the tools to not make catastrophic errors early on which foreclose the route to the highest branches of the decision tree. And if such pedagogy didn’t come from their family, it had to come from somewhere. Should it come from the church? The state? Where should people go to receive this knowledge if they don’t have it in the first place? If they don’t receive it, what’s to prevent them from taking to the fentanyl and video games as a means of medicating the existential angst of their meaningless and ruined life?
How many such people can we have in society before the freedoms that we cherish become implicated as part of the problem in their downfall?
Deneen should just be honest about this; “We’ve built a society where there aren’t a lot of guard rails anymore; yet we encourage people to drive like maniacs in order to both get to the top of the mountain and stay ahead of every other maniac… while many of them are blindfolded.”