A Journal for Western Man-- Issue IX
Dr. Stephen Yates
The intellectuals can't see this, of course. They want to shift the blame from themselves onto the system that rewards pop stars and romance novelists, and they blame the "stupidity" of the hopelessly ignorant masses. The more sophisticated create entire systems to rationalize their disdain for capitalism and those it rewards.
Marxism is the most obvious example. Marx predicted that capitalism would be destroyed by its own "internal contradictions." His was really a theory of history, not an economic system. He had very little to say about socialism. Most of his and more recent Marxist writings are about capitalism. These say that capitalism created great wealth but also massive poverty.
The response is that there has always been poverty. Until capitalism, everyone but a tiny, hereditary elite lived in poverty. Capitalism has lifted more and more people out of poverty. By the early decades of this century it was obvious that capitalism wasn't going to destroy itself; left to itself it would get stronger. The worker-heroes of Marxist mythology were not going to launch a revolution against the bourgeoisie because they wanted to be bourgeois.
Astute observers of capitalism such as Mises realized that many of the real problems plaguing capitalism—the "booms" and "busts" of business cycles, for example—were not caused by anything intrinsic to capitalism but by government and central bankers' interference with the market process. Marxists couldn't admit that their worldview was refuted by facts. Something must be wrong with critics' perceptions of the facts. Hence the appearance of notions like "false consciousness" and other Marxian epicycles.
Freedom vs. Power
But what Marxist intellectuals really wanted—and still want—is power: the power to impose their vision of society on everyone. This becomes clear when we consider the strategy they employed following Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who saw most clearly that there wasn't going to be any proletariat revolution. It was Gramsci's idea to capture the culture and subvert it from within—especially by subverting the Judeo-Christian morality that had always been the best guide to personal conduct whether in the marketplace or in one's personal life.
It is to Gramsci we owe the "long march through the institutions" that enabled Gramscian cultural Marxists to take control of the universities, portions of the media, the legal system, etc. Now all we have to do is look at these institutions to see what happens whenever intellectuals of this sort get their hands on institutional power. They immediately suppress points of view other than their own, and it has reached the point where not even the more intellectually honest liberals (e.g., Tammy Bruce, author of The New Thought Police) can stand it anymore.
Now I should make a few things clear. I am not defending what Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez do, or applauding the fact that superstar athletes become instant multimillionaires. But those who blame capitalism for this have picked the wrong target. The blamers should look to the various factors that have interfered with the workings of the free market and captured the culture. Government has been plundering the market for decades now, producing, e.g., the government schools that have been captured by forces hostile to individualism.
The free market, moreover, is not an animate force. It does not have a mind or will of its own. It is just the arena in which myriad exchanges take place; it is the process of exchange writ large. Markets deliver what people want; they don't guarantee that people will want the "right" things. People critical of what markets deliver should therefore look to those factors of society (tax-exempt foundations, for instance) that have funded the absurd educational fads (OBE, for example) that have dumbed down government schools, producing so many people who only want to absorb passive entertainment or indulge the prurient tastes of MTV.
The point is, the things that are wrong with contemporary American culture cannot be laid at the doorstep of capitalism. The tastes of the masses will always be lower than that of the intellectuals. That is a given. Also, in many cases, the intellectuals who have sought to control populations have no one to blame but themselves—or their antecedents—for the current sorry state of much popular culture. They instituted an agenda decades ago, and now that agenda has snowballed.
What professional intellectuals should do is to seek out ideas that work, and that really do improve society—and to realize that their own standing is improved when they set out to understand the world and human nature. They must grasp that a free economy is better than a command economy, and learn how a free economy works. Intellectuals currently see themselves as alienated souls—but this again is their own doing, for having set themselves apart and scorning those over which they would wield power.
The Role of Intellectuals
The response is that the intellectual class does have a role to play in the division of labor writ large that really would be a properly functioning capitalist society. Its alienation could be assuaged by more rigorous study of both logic and economics—the real thing, as opposed to what passes for economics in most textbooks today. They could also do with less self-absorption.
What characterizes the true intellectual is breadth of knowledge, a capacity to speak on many issues, and to have grasped the connections between them. They often have what it takes to be conceptual, "big-picture" thinkers. Intellectuals tend to know more history and more culture in some cases, more science in others, than nonintellectuals. This makes them ideal educators.
Many intellectuals, of course, are educators now. But because of their alienation and their Platonistic belief that their superior knowledge of, e.g., the history of ideas makes them more fit to rule, to use the institutions of the state to impose their values on others by the force, they are presently miseducating.
Most Americans are loyal to what many intellectuals contemptuously label bourgeois society. Bourgeois society is invariably imperfect, because acting man is imperfect. Many intellectuals tend to be perfectionists. They want Utopia and think they are qualified to be its philosopher-kings. They are surprisingly uninterested in pursuing the vastly more significant larger question of what it is about the education of the present generation that has rendered so many incapable of appreciating better music than that of Britney Spears, or better books than those of Danielle Steel.
Such an inquiry would take them right to the doorstep of what should be their real target: the omnipotent state, and those who would use it as an instrument of plunder and control. (It is interesting that James Fenimore Cooper's complex, philosophical novels, for example, sold very well in their day—in the highly literate population of the American republic of the early 1800s before the era of Horace Mann and government schools, John Dewey and progressive education, or Alfred Kinsey and sex education.)
So what should intellectually honest intellectuals be doing?
(1) They should take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves, what do I want? Or perhaps better, what are my values? Do they honestly want an improved society? Or one in ruins? I need not rehearse the damage Marxist revolutionaries have done. And the stealth subversion of Western culture surely hasn't done contemporary America any good. At one time being a radical meant going to the root. I am not saying intellectuals shouldn't do this. But they must ask the right questions before they do anything else.
(2) Making the charitable assumption that they sincerely want a better society, the second thing intellectuals should do is: learn the rules, both of economics and of culture. Learn, that is, how a free market is supposed to work. Learn what cultural factors and values lead people to support wholesome music and art and what kinds of factors subvert them.
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