The Road to Serfdom, Session 6, Part 1: The Lowest Common Denominator
"We have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and “common” instincts and tastes prevail."
I’m splitting this Session 6 overview into two parts. Part two will be posted on Sunday.
The 2025 winter schedule for Mindset Shifts U will be posted next week.
Next Saturday, November 9th, we continue with Session 7 of The Road to Serfdom which will cover Chapters 11 and 12.
Oliver Burkeman, whose book Four Thousand Weeks we will work with in 2025 at Mindset Shifts U, made this insightful observation:
I started to notice in myself – and even more in certain friends – a tendency I've only ever managed to describe, in an awkward metaphor, as "living inside the news." It was as if more and more people were shifting their psychological centre of gravity, so the news was somehow realer to them than the concrete world of their work, family and friends. I don't just mean that they were "spending too much time online" or "addicted to social media" (although they were, and we are). I mean that the realm of presidencies, referendums and humanitarian crises had become the main drama of their daily lives, with their actual daily lives relegated to the status of a sideshow.
Burkeman cautions that “living inside the news” is not real life:
To stay sane, you need at least one foot planted firmly in your world: the world of your job and neighborhood, that letter you need to mail, the pasta you're cooking for dinner, the novel you're reading with your book group, and that guy on your street who never cleans up after his dog – the world where you can have an effect, even if I've admittedly yet to have one with the dog guy.
Last week, we witnessed MSNBC’s crazed, ahistorical juxtaposition of a Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden to a 1939 pro-Nazi rally. One can hope this marks the peak of Trump Derangement Syndrome. (Yes, I’m aware that the spreading of offensive nonsense is bipartisan.)
From inside the Trump rally, Konstantin Kisin sarcastically described the “shocking” truth of the crowd of people gathered there:
The diversity of Nazis on display was unbelievable: Black Nazis, Latino Nazis, Asian Nazis, white Nazis, female Nazis and lots and lots of Jewish Nazis were all assembled in an orderly line, chatting politely to each other and cracking jokes. It was terrifying.
One could appeal to the need for more dopamine hits to explain why people eagerly lap up MSNBC’s offensive nonsense.
People want to be right, and part of being right is listening to others express opinions that agree with their own, even when those opinions are uninformed and don’t stand up to reason. Uniformed opinions that unite the largest number of people are, in Hayek’s words, the “lowest common denominator.”
Burkeman’s concept of living inside the news is close to the spirit of Hayek and also Viktor Frankl.