One of my favorite sections of Ludwig von Mises’s majestic treatise Human Action (1949) is a rather short one titled “The Fight Against Error.” Its main theme is to show how mankind’s problems come down to errors arising from flawed economic ideologies. He writes: “The main objective of…economics is to substitute consistent correct ideologies for the contradictory tenets of popular eclecticism.”
In some ways, civilization can be seen as a sort of bridge which must be engineered and understood using the proper materials and methods if it is to last and lay a foundation for a more prosperous future. A faulty understanding which just patches things only delays a future calamity. Mises writes:
Logical thinking and real life are not two separate orbits. Logic is for man the only means to master the problems of reality. What is contradictory in theory, is no less contradictory in reality. No ideological inconsistency can provide a satisfactory, i.e., working, solution for the problems offered by the facts of the world. The only effect of contradictory ideologies is to conceal the real problems and thus to prevent people from finding in time an appropriate policy for solving them. Inconsistent ideologies may sometimes postpone the emergence of a manifest conflict. But they certainly aggravate the evils which they mask and render a final solution more difficult. They multiply the agonies, they intensify the hatreds, and make peaceful settlement impossible. It is a serious blunder to consider ideological contradictions harmless or even beneficial.
Thus Mises had a laser-like focus on ideas and education. Elsewhere Mises stresses what should be obvious:
It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales.
Unfortunately, the public—and even most “intellectuals”—erroneously tend to see mankind, not in “The Fight Against Error” and economic ignorance, per Mises, but in some quixotic fight against “evil”—malicious or dumb people. In just two consecutive paragraphs, like some intellectual Jedi who calmly disarms all opposition with the wave of a hand, Mises brilliantly dismantles the “they are evil” or “mad” fallacies which dominate most discourse regardless of whether the subject matter is the economy, science, history, etc., and can only lead to “irreconcilable conflict.” He writes:
The problems involved are purely intellectual and must be dealt with as such. It is disastrous to shift them to the moral sphere and to dispose of supporters of opposite ideologies by calling them villains. It is vain to insist that what we are aiming at is good and what our adversaries want is bad. The question to be solved is precisely what is to be considered as good and what as bad. The rigid dogmatism peculiar to religious groups and to Marxism results only in irreconcilable conflict. It condemns beforehand all dissenters as evildoers, it calls into question their good faith, it asks them to surrender unconditionally. No social cooperation is possible where such an attitude prevails.
No better is the propensity, very popular nowadays, to brand supporters of other ideologies as lunatics. Psychiatrists are vague in drawing a line between sanity and insanity. It would be preposterous for laymen to interfere with this fundamental issue of psychiatry. However, it is clear that if the mere fact that a man shares erroneous views and acts according to his errors qualifies him as mentally disabled, it would be very hard to discover an individual to which the epithet sane or normal could be attributed. Then we are bound to call the past generations lunatic because their ideas about the problems of the natural sciences and concomitantly their techniques differed from ours. Coming generations will call us lunatics for the same reason. Man is liable to error. If to err were the characteristic feature of mental disability, then everybody should be called mentally disabled.
If you tell “supporters of opposite ideologies,” whether they’d be socialists or capitalists, Zionists or anti-Zionists, pro- or anti-vax, etc., that—with the best of intentions—they are simply following erroneous ideas, you avoid the potential mistake of implying malice, conspiracy, or stupidity, and put the onus on them to then explain the validity of their ideas.
Mises—being a Jewish intellectual and arguably Nazism-Socialism’s greatest intellectual opponent—was almost apprehended by the Nazis as he cautiously escaped Europe in 1940 when the Nazis quickly overran France and tried to get the Swiss government to hand him over. But regardless of Nazi tyranny, Mises’s profound understanding of the world had him blaming, not Hitler, or “evil” or “antisemitism” or “madness,” but the errors and economic ignorance that inevitably led to such tyranny given Germany’s unique historical circumstances. Mises concludes:
There are psychiatrists who call the Germans who espoused the principles of Nazism lunatics and want to cure them by therapeutic procedures. Here again we are faced with the same problem. The doctrines of Nazism are vicious, but they do not essentially disagree with the ideologies of socialism and nationalism as approved by other peoples’ public opinion. What characterized the Nazis was only the consistent application of these ideologies to the special conditions of Germany….
Now, whoever accepts the ideology of nationalism and socialism as true and as the standard of his own nation’s policy, is not in a position to refute the conclusions drawn from them by the Nazis…. There is no hope of eradicating the aggression mentality if one does not explode entirely the ideological fallacies from which it stems. This is not a task for psychiatrists, but for economists….
Man has only one tool to fight error: reason.
