Kejda Gjermani

Here’s an old art class project for you. Enjoy! Reminds me I haven’t picked up the pencil for months, what a shame…

We’re just ready to get out the door…

Here is a very tired, very sleepy, very unkempt Kejda dancing with her lover at his sister’s wedding reception. Good times!

Whereas here I am putting my rusty artistic skills at work, drawing a portrait for a Québécois cousin of Lucille who has an extremely interesting face.

It quickly started looking like this. Her face is something else, isn’t it?

Modern leftist activists have usurped and perverted the meaning of words so blatantly that I wonder how they can possibly get away with it! Their coup d’état against language puts Orwell’s Newspeak dictionaries to shame. Through this persistent perversion, true liberalism has been fooled into adopting self-defeating terms for naming its key virtues:

Capitalism has ubiquitously replaced Free Enterprise in our vocabulary, tainting the latter with Marx’s flawed notions of the labor theory of value, and making it unnatural to defend as a system centered around the arbitrary possession of tangible ‘Kapital’ and the benefits accruing to its owners, not around universal individual freedom thanks to which anyone can accumulate capital among other things.

The Left labels the middle class bourgeois with elitist contempt.

It keeps a straight face while calling itself Liberal, which is a slap in the face for Classical Liberalism. The newspeak term for a true Liberal is now Libertarian, which sounds dangerously close to Libertine, especially to the profane who might Google it.

It has proclaimed itself to be Progressive: What’s so progressive about leftism? If anything its entire ideology is dreadfully regressive, pointing back to the greatest failed experiment of the 20^th century, which almost every participating country has gotten out of after incurring colossal losses of life, wealth, and liberty.

The Left prides itself for being Secular, a characterization which the moronic Right backs and exacerbates without understanding its implications. Now the Left can conveniently prey on the ever growing generation of youths and intellectuals disillusioned by corrupt Christianity but who are not yet ready to live without God. Clinging to the Left’s unchallenged label of Secularism fulfills their delusion of having succeeded in their impotent pseudo-struggle to break free.

If religion is the opiate of the masses, “secular” leftism is the crack cocaine of the half-assed apostates of organized religion. The Left recruits these useful idiots and exploits almost effortlessly what their religion has primed them for: radical altruism, mass-scale masochism, and irrational dedication to a supremacist dogma. Getting away with this might not be so easy if Leftism was exposed for the religion that it is instead of being labeled as Secular.

Let’s start claiming back the meaning of words, shall we? Start calling the Democrat base the Religious Left. Rename the Libertarian Party the “Liberal Party” to confuse Leftists and bring attention to the classic ideas of Liberalism, and stop conceding perverted definitions of notions which are key to the discussion of our political and ideological realities. How about that?

I wish I had some sort of backhanded entry into the Larry Smith phenomenon, but here I am without any tangent to get started on. After all it’s been a long time since I last showed up for his class.

I’m afraid that ramming into the topic cold-turkey in reverse might stir up my already strong ambivalence toward him to a point that I find myself unable to write a single intelligible sentence. Indeed writing about Larry Smith in any other fashion but drooling babbling adoration is a task of epic proportions and I’m afraid I am already way in over my head. However, this influential figure deserves to be followed and analyzed in the annals of his greatness by someone who wouldn’t get lost inside.

…If not now, then when? If not I, then who?

For those of you who didn’t attend my school (University of Waterloo), suffice it to say, Larry Smith is the second coming as far as whoever has taken his class is concerned. Genuine boss of charisma. Students love him. I loved him too, but I’m talking about an evangelical glow in the eyes of his worshipers.

He’s got his own sinister Politburo, roaming with zealous spies planted throughout the Fortune 500, tipping him off about the latest and greatest plots to subvert markets around the world. His courses of intro economics are a legend, probably the most likely experience for any two random Waterlooians to have in common. Every other sentence coming out of his mouth is a classic quote belonging on the wall. But what is Larry Smith’s universal appeal? What does his magic really consist of?

Two different types of people are magnetically attracted to him for different reasons, and sometimes within the same person two conflicting character traits compete for the perk-up effects of his rhetoric. For those on the margin, which of these two inner drives ends up prevailing by the time their ride in Larry’s ideological tornado is over will probably mark a turning point in their lives.

And the funny thing is I suspect Larry has no idea about the full extent of his power. Oh I know he knows he’s damn influential, but I don’t think he really understands what he does to people.

The Good: Larry’s appeal to the free spirit in all of us

This is the part I bet Larry is most aware of. It’s the reason he loves recruiting snot faced frosh into his class. He picks these comfortably confused kids, indoctrinated from their years in high school, most of whom have probably already picked a major but probably for the wrong reasons, and whose intimidation by what’s all out there has cornered them into their current pathetic expectations about life.

Larry Smith just loves bursting these kids’ haze bubble. He teaches his students that life is a friendly experience for reasoning people, and the world is an exciting and intelligible place that you can make sense of! He makes you sense it in your gut that the real world can be figured out, that you are responsible for your life.

That’s all he teaches, really. He makes you see that you don’t have to be a follower to get by, that nothing is beyond the reach of your abilities if you employ your reason and imagination, and, well, growing a pair of balls wouldn’t hurt either.

And there, suddenly nothing seems mystical about value creation. For many students that’s the first spark of the spirit of entrepreneurship right there. He’s a spectacular motivational speaker.

For those of you who find this cliché or trivial commonsense, I’d like to smack you off your pedestal so you can come down and smell the coffee: The half-baked pseudo intellectuals with a license to spread cynical and self-victimizing bullshit are the norm at universities; no-nonsense professors trying to instill a dignifying sense of life in their students are the exception. In that regard Larry has little to no competition that I know of at Waterloo. Many of his alumni make the best out of his teachings and go on to start successful multi-million-dollar enterprises: hard core entrepreneurs.

The Bad: Larry’s appeal to the little authoritarian in most of us

Now you all know this is what I’m dying to get to. After every class Larry attracts around him a little crowd of zealots who stay and talk for at least another hour about all sorts of things. Well, most of the time it’s Larry talking, and I can’t say he seems to mind the sound of his own voice.

I used to go up to listen to him too, but I usually kept my mouth shut because there was a weird vibe to that little crowd: They were all so uncritically enamored with Smith that a lot of things coming out of their mouths were just excuses to flatter him in some way, and there was something embarrassing to that.

So I felt uncomfortable engaging him in front of everyone, assuming that at least on a subconscious level, he would have expected me to pay lip service in one way or another. As much as I admired the man, I could not bring myself to have a conversation where I didn’t feel an equal.

In a way it was good though, because I focused all my attention in observing Larry’s interaction with the others instead of worrying about sounding smart. I was more comfortable talking with the zealots on the side, and I befriended a bright Serbian guy and a hysterical Taiwanese girl among others. The girl would scream at the top of her lungs that people are sheep who don’t know what they want or what’s good for them and need the government to protect and guide them. It was funny, she quoted the results of the Penn & Teller Dihydrogen Monoxide hoax, which was actually a scathing attack on environmentalists, leftists, and the type of people who generally are the first to think we need the nanny state to keep the citizenry in check.

In the “Penn & Teller” example, a fake activist asks random hippies at a hysterical environmentalist crap-fest to sign a petition to ban Dihydrogen Monoxide (H2O) and they sign in droves without even asking what it is. She saw this segment as the perfect example of how people are idiots who need a paternal government to get by in life.

Here she was, shouting this at my face, as I was trying to tell her that all her example showed was that people are quick to make idiotic policy decisions involving banning something, regulating something, or basically telling others what to do. The irony of using this example was certainly lost to her, but that was really the point of the hoax.

Policy decisions often have very considerable yet unforeseeable micro effects which are hard to discern because they get spread out across many sections of the market. Henry Hazlitt explained how we must consider the true opportunity cost of any government policy on the marketplace and society. (I preferred to talk markets; she liked ‘society’ better so I kept alternating between the two)

Typically, there is no immediate feedback loop to provide a reality-check for the ‘legislator’: deliberations are made from his office desk, often in the company of interest group lobbyists. In time, the negative effects are incrementally diffused across society, often while the public has forgotten the initial law, and the legislator is on to the next pet project. Unable to factor in the true costs of knee-jerk prescriptions to purported market problems, “corrective” market interventions are often just as bad.

So I was trying to explain her that her argument boomeranged because it showed only just how stupid people can be at making universal decisions for everyone else, i.e. being authoritarian cocks. The market has shown time and again that people are not such stupid sheep whenever it comes to budgeting for their own lives. I challenged her to repeat the experiment, only this time she should try to sell people some Dihydrogen Monoxide; then I’d be curious of the findings she’d report back: how many shelled out their cash, and how many and what kind of questions were asked.

Larry was standing a few feet away and heard some of the commotion. He said professors will usually promote levelheaded discussions, but he actually liked it better when people screamed and swore at each-other. I don’t know if he was being sarcastic. I’ve got to say, she was the one doing all the swearing, and jeez, for conversing with me, that’s noteworthy.

But I mean, these were most of the people who gloated over Larry Smith’s charisma, this is the kind of people he’d throw a bone at once in a while. They weren’t all as annoying as this girl, but there was a definite underlying pattern in their thoughts. When in doubt whether any of them belonged to this category, my test was to confront them with the flaming ones: if they were not annoyed at any significant level by the flamers’ bullshit, then they were all in it together as far as I was concerned.

I have often been asked about my libertarian epiphany and I never had a good answer. I don’t remember a specific moment. It span more across days, or actually weeks, like a slow but confident chain reaction in my brain. The first node on the chain was this particular sense I got from getting to know some of these Larry Smith zealots.

How do I say this? They just sounded so stupid! Many of them were bright kids too but there was something off about them, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. After talking candidly for a bit, something would always get on my nerves, a deep antipathy that made my lips curl up.

It was their arrogance stemming from utter lack of epistemological consideration for the prescriptive bullshit they’d spew out. Their deliberations were so cheap because they never ever considered the possibility of… Being wrong! …and the human and moral cost of that possibility. Neither did they seem to ask themselves “How do I know for sure?” The people at the bottom were fine to experiment with and apply their half-baked ideas to.

They were all signing blank petitions on Dihydrogen-Monoxidic-equivalent economic matters with total disregard for the principles of human action. In this context they were all very similarly minded, however strongly they happened to disagree on concrete matters. And at one point or another during any serious conversation most of them exhibited this distinct though subtle (sometimes not even much so) contempt for ‘people’.

I didn’t want to be one of them —that much I intuitively decided. And such people shouldn’t be the ones making decisions for everyone. I began analyzing what made them that way. I have concluded that it’s principally sheer megalomania expressed as irrational subjectivity and intellectual arrogance. I wrote an entire essay as an appetizer to this post, where I explain in detail my thoughts on the authoritarian personality. At the end of the day, people lacking even the basic sensitivities of the vigilant unpretentious mind can be found sitting on top of their own self-generated smug clouds, making outlandish deliberations with an unjustified sense of authority and appearing like utter dicks to those who do posses such sensitivities.

Intuition can be a shortcut to reason, and at the time I only loosely sensed that there was something malignantly arrogant about a lot of these Larry Smith zealots. But my formation in economics was not sufficiently robust for me to confidently rebut many propositions being thrown around which I felt were full of shit. The class was ECON 101 after all.

However I did get all stirred up because the supremacist traces of thought in the zealots’ discussions must have been inconspicuous to a noble and untainted intellect such as Larry’s. To me he was an unknowing victim. I wasn’t comfortable being in the middle of it so I stopped staying after class.

The Ugly: Maybe they are a perfect match?

About a year and a lot of econ-literature later, I returned once more to introduce my friend Saad to the joys of Larry’s inspirational rhetoric as well as to get a Larry-fix for myself, for which I had grown nostalgic.

I was in a constant state of déjà vu throughout his lectures: being an exceptional stand-up performer, Larry can effortlessly deliver a memorized speech and make it sound like he’s coming up with every line on the spot. I remembered everything from the year before, but I was absolutely shocked and overwhelmed by how much between the lines I had completely missed the first time around! The subliminal messages Larry was sending through the ether were disturbing to say the least.

In an illustration of inelastic demand Larry reveals his advocacy of the thug-state: he thinks it’s preposterous that George W. Bush does not intervene to cap the profits of pharmaceutical companies. Nonintervention in this market must be the result of the crony pharmaceutical lobbies bribing legislators into betraying their constituents’ interests. The state can and should approach the industry and be like:

Yo, bang-up job inventing and manufacturing this cool drug that’s saving people’s lives, but I’ve got citizens who can’t afford it at the market price. That’s unacceptable! I understand you’ve been making some serious monopoly profits here with your fancy little patent exploiting the inelastic demand for your good, so it’ time for us to negotiate some reasonable profits for you. We’ll get together and talk about it… What? You don’t like the sound of it? Dude, I’ve got legal monopoly over the use of force, I can jail your ass! Nah, I don’t need to do that, I can just revoke your patent so everyone else can manufacture your drug.

Stunned, I raised my hand and asked if it wouldn’t perhaps be more effective and less arbitrary to just make patents expire sooner, so the public at large would be deprived of the generic drugs for a shorter period of time, or maybe just subsidize the bottom income bracket thus making drugs affordable for all without brutalizing the market. He bit the bait, disinterestedly replying that those were all fine alternatives.

He couldn’t have meant it! Being an economics PHD, Larry must know the purpose and effects of patents. He must be aware of the colossal investment involved in R&D: entire teams of the best chemists, molecular biologists, technicians, and computer scientists that money can buy, expensive computer technologies for simulations, state-of-the-art logistics for large-scale experiments and their countless replications, legal costs, the risk of harming research participants, the risk of reaching a dead-end, the risk of sudden obsolescence from a new competitive drug entering the market, the years of accumulating interest on debt and no revenues waiting for the FDA to finally approve the product. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

We are talking about great but calculated costs and risks, which pharmaceutical companies decide to undergo based on the prediction that they will be able to sell their new drug at a markup for 20 years, or until whenever the patent is supposed to expire. Until they recuperate their colossal fixed costs through monopoly margins they won’t even see any profits, regardless of how cheap it is to actually manufacture the drug.

So would they invest billions of dollars if they knew they could keep their monopoly for only 6 months, or even 5 years? It obviously disrupts the incentive structure, so no, Larry, shortening the patent’s life would not be a long-term solution. Not if you want there to remain such a thing as a private pharmaceutical industry that will continuously take investment risks and put those drugs on the market for the government to have anything to regulate at all.

I am sure Larry knows all this, and he would either like to eventually nationalize the pharmaceutical industry to complement his beloved universal health-care, or (and this is even more sinister), he likes predatory discretionary state policies. I’d put my money on the latter: the state making rules of thumb, issuing patents and guaranteeing their enforcement, but reserving itself the right to break its own rules once in a while to ‘promote the public good’; a policy that ignores the extraordinary costs from the resulting stifling of innovation and investment…

This evokes the image of the cheetah waiting in the bushes for the antelopes to come prancing around in herds; they will run for their lives once they see the cheetah is for real, and one of them is going to get it. But the cheetah knows they will be at it again tomorrow, each feeling that the chances of being the one out of the entire herd to get clawed in the ass are small.

After all, discretionary thuggery is how central banks roll! I would argue that there’s plenty wrong with the government at large taking after central banks but that’s not even the point. What disturbs me is how liberally (deliberately?) Larry slips such controversial tidbits under the table. Blemishes of legal and moral considerations are airbrushed into irrelevance so that Larry’s conceited solution can pretend to be self-evident and logically necessary. Perhaps it is acceptable for an economist to deliberate in a moral and legal vacuum, but how can he keep a straight face giving his students a piece of mind while conveniently neglecting to mention the very economic dynamics of incentives which his ’solution’ would blast off?

He won’t tell students that companies wouldn’t keep investing in proprietary material if they knew the government would steal their hard-earned intellectual assets, so such a ’solution’ cannot work in the long run. These are subtle economic issues ECON-101 students wouldn’t need to be bothered with if Larry could manage to refrain from presenting his personal master plans for humankind in class, but since he chooses to indulge them, he has an ethical obligation to fully inform his students of the common side-effects of his prescriptions.

The student who knows nothing of economics just sits in class taking notes with the filter of criticism completely turned off, absorbing like a sponge everything coming out of the trusty instructor’s mouth. It’s upsetting to hear Larry feeding his students so many subjective prescriptions, rarely if ever hinting at the difference between fact, mainstream economic theory, and pure “Larrysmithonomics”. He polishes his value judgments with iridescent charisma until the unwitting student sees only a gem whose value and splendor are self-evident and indisputable.

Does Larry know his effect on students? If so, it’s reproachable that he instrumentalizes his influence to indoctrinate and deceive them. I am not talking about just a few odd cases, since objectivity can temporarily betray any of us. Unfortunately Larry Smith’s indulgences in pompous subjectivity are systematic. Below are just a few eyebrow-raising instances.

In his seemingly innocent recap of the industrial revolution, I caught an innuendo of the overtired Marxist theme of ‘alienation’. Although the medieval farmer lived in destitution, his sense of ‘self’ and perceived place in the world was cohesive. How romantic, but then automatized mass-scale manufacturing turned him into a brain-dead appendix of the machinery he was to operate. This notion helped Erich Fromm sell books but I don’t see how it belongs in an introductory course on economics.

In a subsequent turn of thought Larry contemplates the possibility of custom-programmable robotization replacing mass-manufacturing in the near future. His forecast is that of a classic technophobe: machines will put people out of work, this next wave of automatization will be for real, and so on and so forth. Once we have programmable robots doing customized work craftsmanship will go extinct. There will be no room for unskilled labor so only highly creative intellectual work will have any market value; the same old Marxist argument repackaged for the 21st century.

He was using this prospect as a warning that we better be prepared to use our heads very hard in our careers, which is of course good advice. However the alternative to fully using our intellects is unlikely to be starvation, like he proposes!

If anything, robotization will bring down the real cost of production in all sectors, affording abundance especially to the poor. Unskilled labor will shift to tasks involving basic cognitive operations in new industries Larry Smith or I cannot even fathom at the present day.

Man as a nano-engineered machine, which he technically is, cannot be exhaustively replicated in his full spectrum of faculties by any conceivable man-made robot. Abilities like ours come bundled with a consciousness. The duplication of our neural-network is impossible even with futuristic nano-technology.

Human reproduction as prescribed by our DNA and as implemented by coitus, is the most efficient way of generating beings with human abilities. The fully-and-creatively-using-intellect elite will certainly find innovative ways of making plain people useful: feeding, sheltering, and providing social interaction for unskilled workers will always be more cost-effective than fully replacing them by robots.

What else… Larry loves using the hint of externalities as a pretext for nationalizing industries. If fire departments worked for profit then no one would bother putting out fires in uninsured buildings which would quickly spread across insured buildings, and everybody would fry. So fire services must be owned by the state.

A bit radical, don’t you think, since a similar argument for car-insurance only dictates that insurance be mandatory, at most, not that the state must provide it. Fire departments don’t need to be state owned and operated. Simply making subscription to fire service compulsory would do: let the market actually provide it.

But even this conclusion is too radical, because the imminent possibility of fires spreading across uninsured to insured apartments in one building would be sufficient incentive for the owner to contractually mandate fire service for all tenants. Conversely, the insured tenants and buyers of individual apartments would themselves put pressure for such contracts to be extended to everyone in the building. Neighbors can treat the few remaining uninsured buildings pretty straightforwardly: they can put the fire out to prevent it from spreading to their own property, cover the immediate fire-service expenses if need be, and then demand the court to freeze the uninsured’s assets to pay through the nose for the effort and expenses they had to incur on his behalf.

Externalities find no room to emerge when third parties at risk can flex their transactional muscles to guard themselves from the eventuality. The market knows how to close such gaps all by itself. Of course externalities do exist but not in the liberal range Larry describes them to students: a lot of his examples are only plausible if property rights of third parties are not respected or enforced by law, which render his arguments straw-man attacks against free enterprise.

It’s manipulative to not provide any context on what kind of society he places his examples. If he’s talking about anarchy, then of course, almost everything is an externality in the war of all against all. But under free enterprise externalities can potentially occur only in cases where property rights are hard to define. So if he wants to keep it straight, Larry would have to shave off a lot of his examples in which state intervention doesn’t have to go any further than enforcing contracts and protecting private property.

But all of this is small potatoes compared to his ‘boo-hoo’ exposé of the supposed economic evils of collusion, natural monopolies, and predatory pricing. Antitrust legislation is championed by ‘progressive’ capitalists who see competition as a tame game which no one should lose, and therefore no one should win. It’s just an excuse for big government to orchestrate a grotesque rat-race in the big-business world for its own gain. If your prices are lower than your competitors’ then they’re predatory, if they’re the same as your competitors then you are colluding, and if you can afford to charge higher prices you must be conspiring to establish a monopoly. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!

Give me a break! The little farts who can be bled to death by the big guys deserve to go under. ‘Predatory pricing’ would be ineffective if the small competitor’s product/service was truly superior: investors would back his venture through the times of pressure until the incumbents realized they could not forever operate at a loss. The little guy would eventually succeed in tearing himself a hole in the market.

Collusion only invites newcomers. Sharks smell the blood and bite themselves a piece. There is no such thing as long-run abnormal profits for a cartel, unless of course, it owes its existence to government license.

A natural monopoly is a living testimony of great technological efficiency in a niche market: Either the upfront fixed cost (usually of buying excess capacity) is so high that the seemingly everlasting profits barely cover the initial investment if taken in perpetuity with the interest rate of capital factored in, or the monopoly is temporary and will eventually crack under competition. Some ‘monopolies’ are great because they provide a common platform in areas where a good standard is more efficient than a multitude of competing poorly-integrated differentiated products. One example is the standard keyboard design. Another one is Windows being the central node of the market for operating-systems.

…Which brings me to Larry’s scathing attack on Microsoft for being such a big bully. A lot has already been said about it and yet more remains to be said. I would wrap up my position more or less like this. Ultimately Netscape didn’t make it because its browser was crap and incompatible with Windows. It was Netscape’s responsibility to go out of its way and adapt its product to Windows, not the other way around. Look at the market for browsers today. With Microsoft off its back, where is Netscape now? And most importantly where are Microsoft’s coercive superpowers now that Firefox is taking over the internet? There has been nothing but continuous innovation online since this debate started over ten years ago.

Microsoft was very deliberate in its attempt to take over the web browser market, yet no one was ever forced to purchase Windows. What right does the state have to dictate how Microsoft should bundle its products, and how is it economically sound to prevent it from offering consumers Internet Explorer for free? Oh but it would hurt Netscape: same argument for protectionist tariffs. One thing you can’t say is that they benefit the consumer.

In a world with no legal antitrust considerations, try to imagine if Microsoft could yet get away with blocking Google, its greatest competitor, off of Internet Explorer or Windows altogether. Ask yourself if consumers would stand for it. Only shitty products and companies need antitrust protection, but to hear Larry exuberantly airbrushing the bumps and holes of his argument you wouldn’t have a clue.

He fervently supports Canada’s nationalized health-care system, but I think he talks about it only after class, which is forgivable. The economic preposterousness of backing universal health-care is perhaps not so forgivable to an economics professor. If groceries were nationalized, I’d consider it animal cruelty to not feed my cat caviar every night. Likewise, making health care ‘free’ effectively fuels the demand for it to a point where shortages are inevitable, hence the 12-hour average waiting period at Canadian hospitals. The entire industry degenerates into slack incompetence from lack of internal competition, with an extensive range of specialized services ceasing to be provided at all since they are vital to only small fractions of the population. Of course the bulk of the population would be best served by directing those funds toward more generic treatments. Universal health-care is so democratic, isn’t it? Without any alternatives to mass-scale generic health-care, no wonder so many Canadians have to travel to the U.S for proper, timely, specialized medical care every year.

Nonetheless Larry vaguely brings up this gigantic high-cost structure inherent in private health-insurance which would be crushed to a pulp if only the industry were nationalized. He couldn’t possibly be talking about the asphyxiating regulations that forbid private providers from differentiating their coverage rates according to risk, or force them in some states to include absurdities such as hair-transplant surgery in their coverage plans. Nor couldn’t he be talking about the legal cartel of pharmacies. It must be some other kind of intrinsic high-cost structure which has got nothing to do with idiotic government regulations but which is just so convoluted and puzzling that Larry doesn’t care to elaborate on what it actually is.

But perhaps the most outrageous statement Larry Smith has ever uttered, in class or otherwise, perhaps in his entire life, is that… … … Lack of foresight into the usefulness of electronic databases for central-planning applications, held the soviets back from investing into the IT sector, and because of this bad investment decision, they were unable to manage their central-planning databases once their complexity started growing out of proportion, and this was consequently responsible for the collapse of communism in the USSR.

I don’t even care to comment on the stupidity of such a theory, except that seeing a politico-economic problem and its alleged forgone solution as a technical issue, is the classic mark of an authoritarian (see my essay). Being a granddaughter of communism myself and having some personal idea of what it means, it’s distasteful to hear my economics professor present such a ‘theory’ in class. For him to even entertain such a thought seriously enough to voice it is unjustifiable. Food for crazy thought… Who knows, maybe it will stick with a few, —most likely some of the little authoritarians who drool all over him after class—and it will be up to the pointy headed software engineers among them to bring Neo-Communism into the Web 2.0 era. I’m sure it will work out much better this next time around, with slick electronic databases and all.

I have partially confronted Larry about some of this, his explanation being that his hero is Adam Smith, who was a social revolutionary. Lame… Perhaps Adam Smith was his economic-childhood hero but he found himself much more resoundingly in Keynes as a grown-up. His charismatic authoritarianism must have been yearning for an ideological shelter and Keynes’ theme of the interventionist hero perpetually saving the Capitalist day from itself was right up his alley.

I still respect Larry in many ways, but I am deeply disenchanted. His skill at making everything he says sound like common sense can be a sweet stroke to the ego for those who like the tone of what they hear. Little authoritarians adore Larry Smith because he makes them feel smart and important for having all sorts of master plans of their own for humankind, his arrogant charm validating their arrogant stupidity. They want to be just like him, prescribing solutions to everyone with effortless charisma and being listened to with awe and respect.

Identifying with him makes them feel superior to those who challenge their dogmatic ’solutions’ to world problems. They close their eyes and abandon themselves in this larger-than-life figure’s river of allure, and when that river eventually discharges in their own ocean of complacency they see only its majestic delta of intellectual aftertaste. With Larry’s holy image as a continuous source of inspiration and facilitation in their daily attempts to prescribe humankind what’s best for it, they emerge as a born-again authoritarians.

I understand now how this student walked up to Larry after class and asked with a laid-back smirk on his face: “Then why doesn’t the US government intervene? I mean, we can all absolutely see that capping pharmaceuticals’ profits is the way to go. It’s so obvious. How come they don’t see it?” Of course, everything you want to prescribe becomes oh so blatantly obvious, even though he himself didn’t see it as such until Larry Smith told him and the rest of the class that it was. I replied that the U.S constitution doesn’t allow for that kind of intervention because it was founded on libertarian ideals that are irreconcilable with one politician’s or another economist’s whim. In return Larry claimed that most constitutional scholars would disagree with me. Sure Larry, whatever.

The good in what Larry Smith has to teach is very straightforward and easy to grasp, but it is also commonly accessible to everyone who has set some time apart for reading in university. The subversive, controversial and misleading ideas he also teaches are equally easy to absorb but very hard for most students to discern for what they are.

Both the closet entrepreneur and the closet authoritarian in all of us are receptive to Larry’s magic: He is a catalytic force to be reckoned with. What’s the bottom line? I remain unconvinced one way or another whether he ultimately does more harm than good. Perhaps a more important question is: Does he subvert students on purpose or are his slips from objectivity largely subconscious? I don’t know, but I suspect that he is not aware of the full extent of his deceptiveness. It would be constructive to hear Larry’s own thoughts on the matter. We have heard great things about the entrepreneurs he has cultivated, but I dare not even imagine what kind of people his authoritarian disciples grow up to be. I know of only two:

One of them is the boring and pedantic Prof. Van de Waal who seems to have sprained an ankle in the dark basement of Plato’s Cave of Ideas. He stares at the shadows on the wall with dilated pupils, mentally masturbating at the patterns of utility curves as they vary across utility functions. He passively exercises his authoritarian streak by punishing students who try to think outside the box and who dare divert from his formulaic lecture notes ever-so-slightly. Only his way of solving what essentially are mathematical problems is legitimate. He clings to irrelevant rules, making an issue out of petty things for lack of creativity and decisiveness in devising an actual master plan for the world at large.

The other one is the malignant and deranged Prof. Picard who has desperately and embarrassingly turned his persona into a disturbing Larry Smith clown: he steals Larry Smith’s quotes, ideas, mannerisms, and lecturing approach. This man is evil, with a keloidal chip on his shoulder, having embarked on a sloppy career in economics for the sick sake of being closer to Larry, and now seeking professorship for the pure sadistic joy of harassing students. If you dare challenge him intellectually he will go after your average. And he’s not repressed or passive-aggressive about it either: his vindictiveness is so premeditated that he will openly confide in his officemate that he intends to do everything in his power to destroy you. All he really wants is to be loved like Larry Smith but it never works: the genuine allure, the beautifully-sculpted intellectual muscles, and the quirky sense of humor are simply lacking. Being loveless brings Picard down, and his impotent emotional response is to sublimate frustration into cruelty toward students.

These are examples of failures: pseudo-intellectual douche-bags who couldn’t make a decent living in the real world outside the bubble of a university environment. Who knows what the star pupils will achieve…

I understand that I am just a person, and however smart, rational, and well-guided I might be, there are others out there like me. I have changed my mind many times in life about many issues, as I explored and experimented with various currents of ideas growing up. I have abandoned many positions when I realized they were unfounded, and I don’t find it hard to conjecture that as I was mistaken in the past, I can find myself being wrong again in the future. My mind is fallible therefore I have no privileged epistemological access to universal truth.

Others around me have opinions and attitudes about everything. I agree more with some, less with others. Some I think are complete idiots. I don’t know of a single person I agree with 100% about everything there is to discuss or speculate over. I am the only person I fully agree with all the time about everything (at times even agreeing with myself goes wrong). That’s a statistically certain indicator that I am wrong at least on some counts: What are the odds that while not having any privileged access to truth in general, I am always right about everything while everyone around me is wrong at least on their point of disagreement with me?

Why can’t I tell what exactly I am wrong about right now? Just like I can push almost anyone to a point where I am certain they are being irrational about something but just can’t see themselves being foolish, I too, being just another person, must be vulnerable to the same unaware-bullshit-harboring tendency.

This makes me humble in my approach to truth. I keep the engine always running on the bulldozer of skepticism at the base of my most crucial intellectual pillars. Entire neighborhoods can turn out to be hastily-put-together public-housing-thought projects, with no business being in my metropolitan mind. While the government might have some life-long commitment to the parasitic beneficiaries of its stupid decisions, I have no intention to stick with my idiocies once I discover them to be such. Knowing that I have the guts to tear them down once I spot them, and the strength to erect new skyscrapers over their ruins, and most importantly, knowing that I can manage to know this without falling into complacency is my most effective formula for intellectual sanity.

So I constantly ask myself “How do I know?” about everything important. When something under consideration either implicitly or explicitly prescribes rules for others, my skepticism is attuned ever more so to its justification because telling others what to do is kind of a big deal! For starters, it’s almost universally backed by a looming “or else”. I don’t care who these “others” are. I am able to empathize with them, to conceive of them as people with an identity, consciousness, free will, and potentially legitimate points to the contrary. How can I possibly know that what’s being proposed is just and necessary?

What moral and epistemological authority do the proponents of this rule have, to defy the will of those to be ruled over, who might disagree? What can they properly be justified in replying to someone who tells them to just mind their own damned business? Applying this skeptical approach with fresh rigor to innumerable cases, my evaluations have historically converged to a rather consistent position which can be safely summarized as “Nothing is superior to freedom. Only negative rights are legit. Live and let live, and screw those authoritarian cocks telling you they’ve got something better figured out for everyone.”

Not everyone thinks along those lines… I wasn’t always this way either. I don’t mean so much about the pan-libertarian conclusions I have arrived at, but the actual train of thought that happened to lead me there. Most people just don’t scrutinize themselves with such modesty or skepticism and subsequently incur a high risk of screwing up.

The ThinkFuture Radio Show is my favorite podcast (sort of by default, since it’s the only one I listen to). The host, Chris Future, has this theory that almost everyone is a libertarian underneath. It goes something like this: “Do you like having other people telling you what to do, how to live your life? Do you want the government interfering with you and pulling money out of your pocket? The bottom line is that most people would like to be left alone.” So there, most of us are closet libertarians.

The crucial counter consideration to this argument is that while most people don’t like to be told what to do, they would nevertheless love to dictate others what to do. It might very well be true that most of us want the IRS out of our pockets, but we’d still love to dig our hands into others’ pockets for all sorts of reasons. We intuitively seek freedom for ourselves but find it hard to genuinely extend that courtesy to others. Accordingly, most of us are not closet libertarians but rather closet authoritarians.

But why? Don’t we know that we can’t both have our cake and eat it? I find it incredible just how eagerly most people will renounce their own freedoms just for a chance to have a say in other people’s lives. Instead of identifying with one-another and regarding arbitrary interferences with anyone as harbingers of unjust intrusions into our own lives, we usually find it intuitively easier to identify with the invasive authority. I suspect there are psychological reasons for this.

Ah, the intriguing authoritarian personality. I keep meeting these people especially at school, la crème de la crop of authoritarianism, with many passionate convictions and one or two master plans for humankind or the country. They tend to be engineers, but this might be purely coincidental given the career demographics at the University of Waterloo. They are generally pretty smart but almost always unwarrantedly smug, a sense of self probably reinforced from repeated victories in intellectual horseplay with kids not as intelligent as themselves. They think they’re hot shit, alright.

I find them reverse-engineering human nature or the global economy, with all sorts of ideas which I even might find interesting until I realize how seriously they take themselves. They are almost exclusively determinists: human relationships are exhaustively explained through caricatures of rationalized instincts, scale-free networks and intricate feedback loops. People are puppets bound by deterministic strings: their actions predictable and fully captured by reductionist analysis. Although they see free will as a naiveté, they usually are not perplexed at the corollary of their own thoughts and convictions being epiphenomenally preordained. They indeed see themselves as being above all this.

It is typically fashionable for them to have some background in economics or history, and they advertise the shit out of that knowledge. Contempt for ‘the ordinary person’ can be found bursting passively-aggressively at the seams of their statements. Of course people are like sheep, unable to cope left to their own devices.

Authoritarians hate free enterprise. They see poverty, progress, and social cohesion as a technical problem that can be fixed (by them) with top-down intervention from the natural sciences. Human institutions are mechanical organisms to be operated on with the incisive touch of a surgeon. Naturally the view that social problems are essentially technical in nature leads authoritarians to administrative solutions. The emphasis is on creative master plans as they are to be decreed at the top, with little concern for their implementation at the bottom. They simplify or ignore reality if it clashes with the effects of their ‘right interventions’.

It seems almost cognitively impossible for them to grasp the main opportunity cost of central planning: the cumulative creativity of the ‘ordinary people’ they despise so much. They can’t understand that innovation cannot be planned. They see free enterprise as doomed to fail because it’s so stupid, without a controlling intelligence behind it, but they don’t consider how stupid and myopic their “smart” planning is, doing away with the creativity of all the interconnected ‘little people’ at the bottom. The authoritarian par excellence cannot conceive of an unspecified anonymous ‘ordinary person’ to come up with an unpredictable good idea.

This kind of person might deeply disagree with a government policy but they generally regard it as a matter of trial and error before getting it right. The issue is getting the brightest leaders in power so that the best policies are implemented to make it all right. They have an elaborate plan of what everyone should be doing to achieve the greater good and they would love to tell you about it…

I know from personal experience that this kind of person tends to be very condescending to anyone who will challenge him. Persisting rational counter-arguments can easily be interpreted as a personal attack to be responded with a personal counter-attack. If you go as far as to question their authority to prescribe everyone what to do, contempt and cynicism might ooze out of their pores before they sever all ties with you.

There is a lot to be said about the authoritarian personality. My most noteworthy personal observation is that authoritarian types tend to suffer from a poor theory of mind. I am not sure whether it is a building-block of their character or merely a consequence of deeper psychological factors, but the problem of other minds is certainly problematic for them.

During early childhood we emerge from our egocentric shell and start to understand that other people are not us, that everyone has a mind of one’s own and others might have different opinions and feelings from ours. This childhood revelation is just the foundation. The theory-of-mind edifice is still shaky in most adolescents, making reality checks very difficult for them and leaving little room for objectivity. The maturation of one’s personal theory of mind is marked by the realization that one’s own mind is fallible just like everyone else’s. This is the first step toward dismantling our inherent megalomania. It results in an overall epistemological modesty, and an ability to vividly conceptualize being in other people’s shoes. We can respect the consciousness of others, perhaps even empathize with them, and interpret reality from multiple perspectives.

I vaguely remember outgrowing the authoritarian state of mind sometime in my mid-teens. I used to be very radical about everything I believed in. The truth of my convictions, whatever they were, was self-evident to me, but of course it was only so because I happened to believe in what I believed. Whoever disagreed was an idiot for not being able to see what I saw. Condescendence was a natural attitide. Only now as I think back I realize I used to be a little authoritarian girl.

Overcoming that stage was a great achievement which unfortunately is not a routine developmental milestone. A lot of teenagers never make it. In my case I suspect it had something to do with reading classic novels with great characters. Getting in the head of robust fictional personalities who can feel, think, be aware of the world around them no less intensely than I can, and plausibly convince themselves of being right when they are not, helped put other people’s minds as well as my own into perspective. Being a sucker for movies where I had to put myself in the shoes of all sorts of characters also had a strong auxiliary and catalytic effect, as certainly did the epic turmoil of the transitional period in Albania after the fall of communism. Escaping reality or my own stupidity in that environment became too dear a luxury.

Therefore I scrutinize my authoritarian friends with a certain autobiographical amusement. The subconscious assumptions underlying their thought patterns evoke these crude megalomaniacal ideas from childhood, which stripped of their innocent romanticism sound as crazy as “Maybe I will never die: so far only others have”, or “Maybe I am the only person who is ‘real’: others in the world are just cardboard-cut figures who come in and out of illusory existence as they appear and disappear from my sensory field”, or “I am always right: truth is my state of mind”, or even “Reality is all in my head: I can learn to ignore it into nonexistence or wish it into change”.

There are people who still hold on to this kind of regressive egocentric bullshit to some degree or another. Theory of mind can be a developmental precursor to a theory of reality. Some realizations need to happen for others to follow. Our inherent childish subjectivity is an obstacle to learning.

If at some level your sense of reality is still that of a colorful background encapsulated in your mind, then why should you bother challenging your beliefs? It’s not like there is an objective state of affairs outside your head on which you could possibly be missing out. Outlandish statements will find their way out of your mouth much more comfortably without any counter considerations to weigh them down. Other people? How can you truly respect them for being persons of their own if you cannot conceive that there are true minds like yours, thinking, feeling, and wrestling with life’s existential puzzles inside their skulls?… How much different from sheep are they to you?

They’re just ‘people’; they’re not ‘you’! They’re complicated figures bouncing around, bound by deterministic principles. But you’re not, you’re something else, you can see through it all, you can tell them what to do! Presenting your solutions to world problems can be done with unbelievable nonchalance if the people at the bottom are just grains of sand.

Theory of mind is important. Without its sensitivities cementing genuine interpersonal relationships, someone’s ability to build bridges across his own interests and those of others is fundamentally hampered. Such a person’s mode of dealing with people can easily degenerate into a regressive state of psychological functionality based on the instinct of domination: alpha male or alpha butch bringing down the house and putting the other inferior apes in their place, hence the ‘authority’ in ‘authoritarian’.

I would call it one psychological step backward from human nature. It makes evolutionary sense for the instinct of domination to be aggressively displayed in healthy animals, since they have to fight for their limited resources. But man has reason, creativity, and craftsmanship. Survival is not a zero-sum game for us. We can use our intellect to discover ways to manipulate nature in our favor and thus pull plentifulness out of scarcity’s ass. Trade is infinitely superior to domination. We take it for granted, but you need to acknowledge the other person’s mind in order to understand the value of what it has to offer. You need to recognize that it can think of something innovative which you might have not thought of yourself, in order to realize that you have something to gain from it. Without being able to respect other minds for their own sake, in your eyes your fellow men will be little more than potential threats, beasts of burden, or pieces of ass.

Did I take it too far? Is this too psychologically farfetched? I’m not sure…

I used to ask myself what the world must look like through the eyes of a genius. I am talented in mathematics, but there are people who can see in a few seconds what would take me minutes, as there are areas where I can just follow with a lot of effort but a few minds can lead, proving excruciating theorems and whatnot. So what about the world at large, all the complex patterns appearing chaotic to the profane, the beautiful structure of reality baring its secrets to those who can see through the superfluous? What kind of wisdom would that be? Impossible to even fathom, but I think I ultimately just wanted to establish if I had reason to be jealous.

And well, I have met people with specialized areas of intellect close to genius. To both my disappointment and relief, their minds are very fallible. An abyss of megalomaniacal subjectivity lies between their mighty intellect and the beauty of the world awaiting to be conquered. Crossing that abyss seems to be beyond the capacity of intellect alone. I know too many intelligent people who talk like idiots when their buttons are pushed. It’s disturbing to see great minds being too cocky to take things rationally, nonchalantly taking the soundness of their positions for granted, leaving indignant emotionality as the only appropriate response to any intellectual duel. In all its impressive depths and heights, the human mind seems to be chronically vulnerable to irrationality. Modesty and skepticism can mark the line between the intelligent and the wise, or that between the intelligent and the insane. Reason is a fragile and shaky hanging bridge, of which the life-long traversal can be accomplished by only the perpetually vigilant and humble mind.

Update: These select writings from Karl Popper speak truth to power; shame I didn’t learn about Popper’s ideas until very recently.

The blog had been down for so long due to server problems that I was starting to forget about it. I know I could have been writing on the side all this time and have a enough material for a full scale post attack by now. But not having the blog to post on the spot has been of huge demotivation to my writing. I have a bunch of topics coming up soon though. Looking forward to being prolific again!