The Road to Serfdom, Session 7: Freedom Depends on Humility
Truth "becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort."
If you missed the announcement about what is coming to Mindset Shift U, please find it here.
You might be astonished by the lack of interest some people have in questioning the use of puberty blockers in children. Throughout the COVID pandemic, you might have been taken aback by the support for lockdowns and mandates from friends and family, but Hayek would not have been surprised.
Due to social pressure, many individuals hide their real preferences and beliefs. Many are also not motivated to seek information beyond what legacy media reports.
Hayek observed,
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.
Being coaxed into a set of beliefs does not necessarily alarm people. Hayek observed, “If the feeling of oppression in totalitarian countries is in general much less acute than most people in liberal countries imagine, this is because the totalitarian governments succeed to a high degree in making people think as they want them to.”
In other words, totalitarian regimes seek to make the population embrace the government's goals as their own.
Of course, America is not a totalitarian state.
Yet, while the Biden administration claimed the First Amendment is still intact, they appealed to Google and Facebook to censor “misinformation.” Misinformation is merely a euphemism for anything that challenges edicts of bureaucrats and their politicized “science.” Hayek writes,
If all the sources of current information are effectively under one single control, it is no longer a question of merely persuading the people of this or that. The skillful propagandist then has power to mold their minds in any direction he chooses, and even the most intelligent and independent people cannot entirely escape that influence if they are long isolated from all other sources of information.
Intelligent people can lose respect for individual differences. True today is Hayek’s observation that among intellectuals “intolerance…is openly extolled”:
Perhaps the most alarming fact is that contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established but one which can be found everywhere among intellectuals who have embraced a collectivist faith and who are acclaimed as intellectual leaders even in countries still under a liberal regime.
Without acknowledging multiple sides to issues, individuals lose tolerance. Tyrants will exploit intolerance.