One of the most disquieting and perhaps prophetic chapters in Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944) is the one on “the end of truth.” The future Nobel economics prize winner argued that a totalitarian government or one getting there must necessarily make war on truth.
But does truth really matter? I take truth to mean the concordance between beliefs on the one hand and, on the other hand, logic and observation. Preferences are not a matter of truth: there is nothing true or false in preferring dark to white chocolate, although persuasion can lead an individual to discover things that he actually prefers. Art, faith perhaps, and Gödelian interstices between the true and the provable, not to speak of the unexplained usefulness of evolved rules of conduct (see Hayek on that), suggest that there is not a total overlap between reason and truth.
Hayek probably did not imagine how, three-fourths of a century after The Road for Serfdom, many university departments and administrations would forget that the pursuit of truth and thus free inquiry and free speech are central to their missions.
Recent political events in America show the extent of the problem. The Democrats have endorsed and often propagated flimsy economic theories as well as irrational if not laughable woke ideas. It looks as if they have outsourced censorship to Facebook and Twitter. The Republicans have been even worse enemies of truth. Before, during, and after his presidency, Donald Trump has shown an open and buffoonish disregard for the truth, not only by misrepresenting facts when he could do so at low political cost as virtually all politicians do, but also by unashamedly repeating implausible and debunked falsehoods often without even a semblance of an argument. He has required his officials and political minions to go along as a badge of loyalty. Facebook and Twitter have counteracted by trying laughingly to become arbiters of truth, further aggravating the damage.
Frank Knight, the famous University of Chicago professor who was the mentor of many great economists including Milton Friedman and James Buchanan, wrote:
The obligation to believe what is true because it is true, rather than to believe anything else or for any other reason, is the universal and supreme imperative for the critical consciousness.
The typical politician is not after “critical consciousness.” But how can one who claims to think and teach not be pursuing this ideal? It would not be surprising, in this age of non-enlightenment, to find somebody arguing that the concern for truth is just virtue signaling.
Truth and the pursuit of truth are important for at least three reasons. First, false statements, if they are believed and acted upon, will yield contradictory and absurd results, and not only in science and structural engineering. If it is believed that A and non-A are both true, the mottos of Big Brother in 1984 make sense: “War is Peace” and “Freedom is Slavery.” If it is believed that economic scarcity does not exist, everybody can have everything but, in fact, the rulers and their supporters will grab everything they can.
Second, one who does not pursue the truth will end up lying each time he can benefit from it and will be trusted only by the gullible.
Third, a generalized disregard for truth undermines the minimum social capital of trust necessary for prosperity and liberty. This last point is related to the economic literature on efficient institutions.
READER COMMENTS
MarkW
Aug 2 2021 at 7:33am
The Republicans have been even worse enemies of truth.
No, they really haven’t. Yes, Trump tells lies. In this, he may be somewhat worse the politicians in general. But Biden also tells absurd lies on a regular basis (most recently that he ‘used to drive an 18-wheeler’ and most famously via plagiarism — Here’s Slate with <a href=”https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/08/the-wacky-plagiarisms-of-joe-biden.html”>a piece that they would never publish today</a>. Is Trump worse even than Biden? You make the call (I wouldn’t and didn’t vote for either).
But the main point is, Republicans have not launched a systematic war on truth across all of the most of the most powerful communications industries and institutions in the country (universities, newspapers, broadcasters, tech/social media). Perhaps Republicans would do this too if they could, but they can’t and haven’t. Lying politicians will ever be with us. But all of those powerful organizations acting as a united front to promote big lies (‘Russian collusion!’) and squelching speech as ‘disinformation’ on particular topics (for example, the possibility that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak) — THAT is something truly novel in my lifetime and far more disturbing. I don’t think ‘bothsiderism’ is really the right strategy here.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 2 2021 at 8:27am
Mark: You write:
It is not a strategy. The truth is not whatever is most useful for the writer to say.
MarkW
Aug 2 2021 at 9:37am
What I mean by ‘bothsiderism’ is what I see in lots of libertarian publications where it’s simply not possible to criticize the left for anything at all without throwing in a n obligatory ‘Trump is just as bad or worse’ paragraph (Glen Greenwald — not a libertarian — does not seem to suffer from this problem). Trump can tell whoppers and get his political minions to go along. He can’t, for example, do anything like this:
https://research.msu.edu/the-truth-behind-racial-disparties-in-fatal-police-shootings/
(Perfectly sound research retracted because it was being cited by the ‘wrong’ people, show-trial style apologies elicited, editor forced to resign, further such research completely chilled as intended)
MarkW
Aug 2 2021 at 6:07pm
I guess after a bit more reflection, what I really want to say is this. Perhaps only out of necessity, Republicans still believe the response to ‘bad speech’ is more speech. So Trump generates his exaggerations, unfounded assertions and lies. But he makes no attempt to prevent counter-arguments from being disseminated (and how could he — he has trouble disseminating his own speech, there’s no prospect at all of suppressing the speech of his adversaries).
But the left (with the exception of relatively small group of older liberals) has rejected this fundamental liberal tenet of free speech. Most now believe that the cure for what they consider ‘bad speech’ is not more speech but rather to deplatform and cancel (and thereby intimidate les autres) to prevent ‘bad ideas’ from seeing the light of day. They realize direct government censorship is not yet legal (though they would like it to be so), so they strong-arm tech and media companies to do the censorship (of ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech’) for them — backed by the very real threats of regulatory actions (not that a great deal of arm-twisting is required since these companies are almost universally run by their political allies).
I find the politicians who seek to censor what they call <a href=”https://www.npr.org/2020/10/20/925755387/unfettered-free-speech-is-a-threat-to-democracy-journalist-says”>unfettered free speech</a> (and who have the powerful allies to effectively do so) to be a far greater threat than a politician merely generating speech that can be freely disputed and ridiculed.
Grand Rapids Mike
Aug 2 2021 at 11:10pm
Your comments cover the main points, but will add. 1. Trump did not lie about getting us into a war in Iraq etc. 2. He said he will build a border wall and he did, and one could go on and on. The left now is all in on taking away free speech one way or another. So what is a right thinking Libertarian response instead of calling out the increasely Nazi Left, any criticism of the Nazi Left must be qualified by denegrating Trump. It just illustrates the cowardly persona of Intellectual Libertarians. One thing about Hayek, he was no coward. As I recall he received a lot of criticism for Road to Serfdom, but he was not deterred, did not cower in his basement, he spoke the truth.
Jens
Aug 3 2021 at 4:42am
Two points
For one thing, it could be that for Trump, stringing together more or less successful and accurate expressions in an endless tirade was simply the most efficient way of dealing with freedom of speech. He could use media for this that made uttering chunks of text very easy and cheap and even automatically reinforced his form of reproduction. He didn’t have to write elaborate texts, edit publications or give interviews. Very time-consuming, very hard (from his point of view). He was able to use (almost) zero marginal cost processes with a long range. Dealing with counter-arguments would simply have been very, very expensive and inefficient for him. He simply used the information dissemination capabilities in a way that was very efficient for him and his abilities. Anything that would have gone beyond that simply wouldn’t have been worth it for him.
And the other point concerns the scope of freedom of speech. In many legal systems it is not controversial that one can not only murder but also incite or instigate murder. Sometimes perpetration and such a kind of participation are even punished equally severely. There are cases where the instigator pays, e.g. when he commissions a professional criminal, but sometimes it is enough to determine the person who actually does the crime in another way, e.g. by motivating him comprehensively. And there are other examples, beyond incitement, in which ones words are causal for dire consequences. All of this is nothing new and I also reckon that this is seen in the US in a very special way. But ultimately it is not a conflict-free space with regard to other rights (the fact that there are also conflicts in language and speech themselves is given anyway).
MarkW
Aug 3 2021 at 4:24pm
Dealing with counter-arguments would simply have been very, very expensive and inefficient for him.
Yes, but that’s not what I meant. What I meant is that Trump made no attempt (and had no capacity) to prevent political opponents and other critics from disseminating counter-arguments (and criticism and ridicule) against him and his speech.
In many legal systems it is not controversial that one can not only murder but also incite or instigate murder.
That is true in the U.S., too, and there is a body of law concerning what constitutes a ‘true threat’ that is criminally punishable. Note that in the U.S. it has been established that political hyperbole does not constitute a punishable true threat:
The true threats category does not encompass political hyperbole and statements uttered in jest. In Watts v. United States (1969), the Supreme Court sided with an 18-year-old anti-war protester who was being prosecuted for threatening President Lyndon B. Johnson. The defendant was arrested at an anti-war rally for telling a crowd of demonstrators, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”
And I think you’d agree that it’s a good thing that U.S. law has been settled this way or a whole lot of people would be rotting in prison for joking about the death of Donald Trump (and other presidents before him), wouldn’t they?
Weir
Aug 3 2021 at 1:37am
The 18-wheeler thing is crazy but I have to add Biden’s claim that Al Gore was the real winner of the 2000 election.
Biden said in 2013 that Gore “was elected president of the United States of America. No, no, no. He was elected president of the United States of America. But for the good of the nation, when the bad decision, in my view, was made, he did the right thing for the nation.” So Biden was Trump before Trump. Biden was the ur-Trump.
Long before Trump was bragging about being a very stable genius Biden was haranguing some voter: “I think I have a much higher IQ than you do.” He said he had “three degrees” and was “in the top half of my class.” The actual number was 76 out of 85. “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship, the only one in my class who had a full academic scholarship.” He didn’t have a scholarship.
Logically if Democrats in the Senate use the filibuster 327 times in 2020 then Biden’s beliefs about the filibuster are not fully aligned with what he’s willing to go along with. And does he genuinely believe that today’s “Jim Eagle” is worse than Jim Crow?
When he says he’s not being hyperbolic about a new Civil War, that “the Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did,” does he non-hyperbolically believe that?
And would he still claim his son’s laptop is a Russian plant? Jack Dorsey isn’t still pretending that. There are limits to what Dorsey will pretend to believe.
Likewise his “put y’all back in chains” line against Romney, and the lie that Trump never said that neo-Nazis “should be condemned totally,” and his insistence that he “didn’t lock people up in cages” even though the famous 2014 photo was from one of his cages. His supporters have to keep swallowing this stuff for the rest of the year, and next year, and the year after that.
David Seltzer
Aug 2 2021 at 12:12pm
Pierre, alas your well reasoned essay leaves us looking for other voice’s in the wilderness
to accompany yours. It seems the follow on to “history is what the victor says it is,” from those in power, is “the truth is what I say it is.” I believe the relentless pursuit of “TRUTH” endows us with humanity.
Mark Z
Aug 2 2021 at 9:09pm
Minor, pedantic correction: it’s either Gödel or alternatively Goedel if you want to spell it without the umlaut. You don’t need the ‘e’ though if you have the umlaut (and in German ‘e’ is the one vowel that never has an umlaut over it).
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 3 2021 at 12:46am
Mark: Thanks. Typo corrected.
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