One of the pleasures of getting into this blog world a bit is seeing, with my own eyes, how many bright people there are out there who see things the way I do. For a Boston person, that's consoling enough, but to find people in my general profession - which tends very liberal and pacifist, if not intellectual/passive - who have arrived by similar paths to a somewhat shared current thinking is plain wonderful.
If we are all wrong, at least we can be wrong and stupid together. I am thinking of such psychologically-minded folks as Neo-neocon, Shrinkwrapped, Dr. Sanity, Assistant Village Idiot, and SC&A.
And One Cosmos. Gagdad Bob's thoughts on Thomas Sowell's recent piece is an example of the kind of applied psychological take on things that gives me delight. One quote:
What most seems to annoy leftist intellectuals about the free market is that, not only is it something that they cannot control or understand, but it accomplishes its task much more effectively and efficiently than the most brilliant person -- or group of people -- ever could. Sowell cites a famous essay which pointed out that no single person knows enough to produce so much as a single lead pencil. That is, "there is no single individual anywhere who knows how to grow the wood, mine the graphite, produce the rubber, and manufacture the paint." And yet, no one need ever worry that there won't be enough pencils, so long as we don't interfere with the process: "Complex economic processes cause all these things to be done and coordinated by a wide variety of people, just in order to produce something as simple as a lead pencil. Multiply that by a hundred or a thousand when it comes to the complexity of producing a car or a computer."
Indeed, it takes a village to make a pencil, but not an African village, and not a village in Afghanistan or in the jungles of Ecuador. A special kind of village, with certain kinds of values and motivations and cultural structures, knowledge, interests, and freedom of opportunity.
I especially enjoy the famous pencil example because, as you may recall, Henry David Thoreau's family made their money from their pencil factory. Henry worked there for a while, and apparently made some significant improvements in the manufacture of the Thoreau Pencil, until he decided that he didn't want to work on Maggie's Farm no more, and decided to be a writer and a public intellectual, living off his family's money.
In addition, of course, the pencil was the original keyboard. Quill pens must have been terrible to write with, and I am sure they scratched the heck out of the monitor screen.
It has been a wonder to me that so many folks in the mind and soul-treating professions are so non-freedom-minded, when these professions are designed to free people from their inner demons which restrict their taking on life freely, cheerfully, and energetically, in the way they see fit, and taking their own chances and making their own choices - in free societies. Freedom is what they are all about, and why psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are never permitted in totalitarian states.
Does every human have a slavish, dependent side to them? Of course. Many days I wish to be nothing but a pampered pet, with a simple life - except I'd be bored in 40 minutes and begin doing something I wasn't told to do. The wonderful possibility is the possibility of governing oneself according to aspirations for higher levels of maturity and autonomy. And that, Dear Readers, is a culture-specific aspiration, rooted in Protestantism; in the notion of "every man his own King," (and every man his own priest as well).
And, with the keyboard, "every man or woman his own pamphleteer," like the wacky Sons of Liberty, pasting our visions of freedom to the walls of the alleys of the world, hoping some passerby will stop and read.
On the same subject, see our recent Liberty, Who needs it?, or, even more recently, Give me Liberty or Give me Health.
Equality is for farm animals. While Orwell remains one of my political guiding lights, Huxley really nailed the danger of "well-intentioned, rational" soul-crushing tyranny in Brave New World. Pure, soul-less logic requires tyranny, as the wise Plato said.
Our blogging shrink friends remember that psyche means "soul," not mind, as Bettelheim made so clear in Freud and Man's Soul. The soul needs space!
I will conclude today's rambling sermon with a Dylan quote from My Back Pages:
A self-ordained professor's tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
"Equality," I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.
