Ideology and Dialectic Continued

Hayek, who I quote in the previous post, has put the most convincing argument forward for the failure of what he calls a "planning" mindset.  The failure on the left on the macro scale were clear enough in the successive failure of the Soviet block in Europe and the introduction, as they say, of "socialism with Chinese characteristics."  The failures of the left were clear enough too in the successive failures of the Great Society programs to deliver on their promises.  One has to credit somewhat the conservative argument that both sets of failures stemmed from the importation of the scientist's and engineer's habits of thought into the social and economic spheres, the difficulty being, of course, that none of the social and economic engineers fully comprehended the whole of the reality they were attempting to manipulate, nor did they fully understand what might be called the Heisenbergian principle of social and economic change.  Because we do not fully comprehend the whole of the reality we are attempting to manipulate, we can know in part the current state of reality, and we can know what in that reality we would like to change, but we cannot fully predict the impact of that change on the whole of reality.  The creation of low cost subsidized housing solved one effect of poverty, but by concentrating the the unemployed and unemployable into specific locations, it served too to concentrate the effects of poverty in ways that few fully anticipated.   As Hayek put it, the result may be "the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utter different than those we had expected."   The difficulty with government solutions is not government in and of itself.  I suspect that government is no more, no less effectual than any other human organization, and big government is no more, no less effectual than the transnational corporate structures that currently exist.  If the latter have an edge on efficiency, and resist the imposition of government as an impediment to that efficiency, it's that corporate structures rarely, and never fully, provide a public account for the human costs of that efficiency.  The difficulty with big government is not that it is government, or that it is big, but rather that it is not big enough to comprehend the whole of the human endeavor it attempts to manipulate.  It fails, and the response to failure is predictable for those who are in power and who wish to hold power.   The first victim is 'truth,' which, as Hayek observes, and I think correctly, "ceases to have its old meaning."  It ceases to be an "interaction of individuals, possessing different knowledge and different views," and becomes "something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort."  The truth, with its lower-case contingency and transience, becomes Truth, once and for all.  If it begins with the scientists' and engineers' habits of thought -- where "the individual conscience [is] the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence warrants a belief" -- it ends in a faith-based commitment to a comprehensive social and economic doctrine.   It ends, as Hayek put it, in the "intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of the social process."  The history of the gulag provides the remainder of the story.