The Smooth Face Of Evil?

Let me continue where I left off yesterday, with Carl Menger's Lectures to Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria (1876), and wonder what exactly went wrong in the 135 years since. How is it that dangerous, harmful, immoral and totalitarian ideas and ideologies held sway over much of the world, including our own country? How is it that Adam Smith is no longer the "Canon of Western civilization"? How is it that socialists, welfarists, bureaucRATS, trade unionists, warmongers and Keyenesians have taken over?

That's a very big question - and, today, I will look at just two aspects of it: Democracy and Bureaucracy.

Note that Menger was lecturing a future Emperor. The Americans brought down the Hapsburgs - in order to install "democracy." And look what happened to Austria - and the rest of that empire.

Ludwig von Mises has written about where exactly the classicals failed in their liberal project: they thought an Age of Reason had arrived. They thought they had produced all the hard knowledge. They thought that this knowledge would someday percolate down to the common people. These common people were endowed with reason, they thought. And they thus entertained high hopes for democracy. Both Smith and Hume were swayed by Rousseau - who behaved quite disgracefully with them.

Mises says the classical liberals did not consider the fact that the masses are often dullards, prone to be swayed by demagogues, prone to error - gross error. This is how the great god of Democracy failed. We got the vote, alright; but we didn't get The Market. Democracies became "illiberal." We lost the "Rule of Law"; we became slaves to Legislation. And all Legislation is produced to be enforced by bureaucracies.

Let us turn to Bureaucracy.

I wrote on Mary Midgley's book Wickedness in an earlier post. In this book, there is a chapter titled "The Elusiveness of Responsibility" where she makes some pertinent comments on Bureaucracy - quoting Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. Adolf Eichmann was one of the architects of the Nazi holocaust - see the Wikipedia entry on him here. Arendt says of Eichmann:

He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity - that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.

Midgley then goes on to say:

As she [Arendt] says, the administrative complexity of the modern world makes such cases increasingly common. Bureaucracy tends to look like 'the rule of nobody', and this obscuring of individual responsibility is one thing which makes the concept of wickedness seem hard to apply. But if we fatalistically accept that it has become impossible, we are falling for propaganda. "The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them." [quoting Arendt again.] It has not really changed their nature and removed their responsibility from them. It has certainly made it easier for them to do wrong, and harder to do right. But there have always been agencies that would do that, and in all ages much ingenuity has gone into building them for that very purpose.

Midgley takes pains to point out the error in equating wickedness with aggression. There is much wickedness that is subtle, using indirect force, or operating solely in the realm of ideas. It is the "ingenuity" of the wicked that has led us all into this morass. It is in "education" that the real evil lies.

Midgley poses an important question:

How is it that human ideals differ so much from actual human conduct?

I believe much of the problem has to do with miseducation. False ideals.

Let us now take a fresh look at Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi. Yesterday, he had a meeting with editors - and the editorial in Mint today says that whatever he proclaimed was "not credible." Is he a liar, then? Is he trying to mislead us, to confound public opinion? In which case, how can he be trusted with education?

When I was writing editorials for The Economic Times (1998-2002), one of my junior colleagues claimed to have been a student of Chacha's at the Delhi School of Economics. When pressed to reveal what Chacha had taught, he confessed that the only lecture he recalled was one in which Chacha instructed his class on how foreign exchange controls were "good" for the Indian economy!

Who is Chacha, really?

He has never won a popular election.

All he has been, his entire life, is a bureaucRAT. Sometimes a "bureaucRAT-professor" - but a bureaucRAT nevertheless. Could he be the evil genius who has worked all his life to distort the way we Indians look at the world, at ourselves, at our society, and our The State? I daresay he is. His is the smooth face of evil. It is the sort of wickedness only vast bureaucracies can produce - wherein "individual responsibility" loses all meaning to the greater goal of the good of The State. He is not a "man of the people." He is, and has always been, a man of The State.

Stay far away from his "education."

It will destroy your mind.