Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Philip Mirowski
us all.”141 Most commentators tend to interpret this as an appeal to ignorance as some kind of primal state of mankind; but I think they need to expand their horizons. The distinction begins to bite when we take note that Hayek harbored a relatively low opinion of the role of education and discussion in the process of learning, and notoriously, an even lower opinion of the powers of ratiocination of those he disparaged as “the intellectuals.” These, of course, were the mirror image of his belief in the market as a superior information processor:
Nor is the process of forming majority opinion entirely, or even chiefly, a matter of discussion, as the overintellectualized conception would have it . . . Though discussion is essential, it is not the main process by which people learn. Their views and desires are formed by individuals acting according to their own designs . . . It is because we normally do not know who knows best that we leave the decision to a process we do not control.142
For Hayek and other advocates of “emergent” social cognition, true rational thought is impersonal, but can occur only between and beyond the individual agents who putatively do the thinking. As he wrote in The Constitution of Liberty, “to act rationally we often find it necessary to be guided by habit rather than reflection.” As Christian Arnsperger so aptly put it, for Hayek, “rational judgment can only be uttered by a Great Nobody.”143 That may seem odd in someone superficially tagged as a methodological individualist supporter of freedom; but it just goes to show how far ignorance has become ingrained in American political discourse. The trick lies in comprehending how Hayek could harbor such a jaundiced view of the average individual, while simultaneously elevating “knowledge” to pride of place in the economic pantheon:
Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority.144
For Hayek, “Knowledge is perhaps the chief good that can be had at a price,” but difficult to engross and accumulate, because it “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” You might think this would easily be handled by delegating its collection and winnowing to some middlemen, say to academic experts, but you would be mistaken, according to Hayek. He takes the position that all human personal abilities to evaluate the commodity are weak, at best. And this is not a matter of differential capacities or distributions of innate intelligence: “the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.” Experts are roundly disparaged by Hayek, and accused of essentially serving as little more than apologists for whomever employs them.145 On the face of it, it thus seems somewhat ironic that Hayek would be touted as the premier theorist of the New Knowledge Economy. But the irony dissolves once we realize that central to neoliberalism is a core conviction that the market really does know better than any one of us what is good for ourselves and for society, and that includes the optimal allocation of ignorance within the populace: “There is not much reason to believe that, if at any one time the best knowledge which some possess were made available to all, the result would be a much better society. Knowledge and ignorance are relative concepts.”146
What purportedly rescues Hayek’s system from descending into some relativist quagmire is the precept that the market does the thinking for us that we cannot. The real danger to humanity resides in the character who mistakenly believes he can think for himself:
It was men’s submission to the impersonal forces of the market that in the past has made possible the growth of civilization . . . It does not matter whether men in the past did submit from beliefs which some now regard as superstition . . . The refusal to yield to forces which we neither understand nor can recognize as the conscious decisions of an intelligent being is the product of an incomplete and therefore erroneous rationalism. It is incomplete because it fails to comprehend that co-ordination of the multifarious individual efforts in a complex society must take account of facts no individual can completely survey. And it also fails to see that . . . the only alternative to submission to the impersonal and seemingly irrational forces of the market is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men.147
There you have Hobson’s choice: either the abject embrace of ignorance or abject capitulation to slavery. The Third Way of the nurturing and promotion of individual wisdom is for Hayek a sorry illusion.148 The Market works because it fosters cooperation without dialogue; it works because the values it promotes are noncognitive. The job of education for neoliberals like Hayek is not so much to convey knowledge per se as it is to foster passive acceptance in the hoi polloi toward the infinite wisdom of the Market: “general education is not solely, and perhaps not even mainly, a matter of the communication of knowledge. There is a need for certain common standards of values.” Interestingly, science is explicitly treated in the same fashion: if you were to become an apprentice scientist, you would learn deference and the correct attitudes toward the enterprise, rather than facts and theories. Of course, Hayek rarely capitalizes or anthropomorphizes the Market, preferring to refer instead to euphemistic concepts like “higher, supraindividual wisdom” of “the products of spontaneous social growth.” Formal political processes where citizens hash out their differences and try to convince one another are uniformly deemed inferior to these “spontaneous processes,” wherein, it must be noted, insight seems to descend out of the aether to inhabit individual brains like the tongues of the Holy Ghost: this constitutes one major source of the neoliberal hostility to democratic governments. But the quasi-economistic language testifies that the nature of the epiphany is not otherworldly but more mundane and pecuniary: “civilization begins when the individual in pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he himself has acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge that he does not himself possess.”149
This language of “use and profit from knowledge you don’t actually possess” might seem a bit mysterious until we unpack its implications for ignorance as a status to be produced rather than a state to be mitigated. I second the analysis of Louis Schneider that Hayek should be read as one of a long line of social theorists who praise the unanticipated and unintended consequences of social action as promoting the public interest, but who take it one crucial step further by insisting upon the indispensable role of ignorance in guaranteeing that the greater good is served.150 For Hayek, the conscious attempt to conceive of the nature of public interest is the ultimate hubris, and to concoct stratagems to achieve it is to fall into Original Sin. True organic solidarity can obtain only when everyone believes (correctly or not) they are just following their own selfish idiosyncratic ends, or perhaps don’t have any clear idea whatsoever of what they are doing, when in fact they are busily (re)producing beneficent evolutionary regularities beyond their ken and imagination. Thus, ignorance helps promote social order, or as he said, “knowledge and ignorance are relative concepts.”
The major point to be savored here is that individual ignorance fostered and manufactured by corporations, think tanks and other market actors is suitably subservient to market rationality, in the sense that it “profits from the knowledge that the agent does not possess.” Paid experts should behave as apologists for the interests that hire them: this is the very quiddity of the theory of self-interest. As Schneider explains, “Organic theorists hold that while actors may cojointly achieve important ‘beneficent’ results, they do so in considerable ignorance and in ignorance of the socially transmitted behavior they are reproducing contains accumulations of ‘knowledge’ now forgotten or no longer perceived as knowledge.”151 Burkean conservatism revels in the preservation of tradition, the great unconscious disembodied wisdom of the ages. This is why cries of “teach the controversy” in the schoolroom, “sound science” in the courtroom, and stipulations of “balance” in the news media are sweet music to neoliberal ears. That is why, as we shall repeatedly observe in subsequent chapters, and especially chapter 6, neoliberals and economists have served to sow confusion and falsehoods about the causes and consequences of the crisis.