dissolves once we realize that central to neoliberalism is a core conviction that the market really does know better than any one of us what is good for ourselves and for society, and that includes the optimal allocation of ignorance within the populace: “There is not much reason to believe that, if at any one time the best knowledge which some possess were made available to all, the result would be a much better society. Knowledge and ignorance are relative concepts.”146
What purportedly rescues Hayek’s system from descending into some relativist quagmire is the precept that the market does the thinking for us that we cannot. The real danger to humanity resides in the character who mistakenly believes he can think for himself:
It was men’s submission to the impersonal forces of the market that in the past has made possible the growth of civilization . . . It does not matter whether men in the past did submit from beliefs which some now regard as superstition . . . The refusal to yield to forces which we neither understand nor can recognize as the conscious decisions of an intelligent being is the product of an incomplete and therefore erroneous rationalism. It is incomplete because it fails to comprehend that co-ordination of the multifarious individual efforts in a complex society must take account of facts no individual can completely survey. And it also fails to see that . . . the only alternative to submission to the impersonal and seemingly irrational forces of the market is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men.147
There you have Hobson’s choice: either the abject embrace of ignorance or abject capitulation to slavery. The Third Way of the nurturing and promotion of individual wisdom is for Hayek a sorry illusion.148 The Market works because it fosters cooperation without dialogue; it works because the values it promotes are noncognitive. The job of education for neoliberals like Hayek is not so much to convey knowledge per se as it is to foster passive acceptance in the hoi polloi toward the infinite wisdom of the Market: “general education is not solely, and perhaps not even mainly, a matter of the communication of knowledge. There is a need for certain common standards of values.” Interestingly, science is explicitly treated in the same fashion: if you were to become an apprentice scientist, you would learn deference and the correct attitudes toward the enterprise, rather than facts and theories. Of course, Hayek rarely capitalizes or anthropomorphizes the Market, preferring to refer instead to euphemistic concepts like “higher, supraindividual wisdom” of “the products of spontaneous social growth.” Formal political processes where citizens hash out their differences and try to convince one another are uniformly deemed inferior to these “spontaneous processes,” wherein, it must be noted, insight seems to descend out of the aether to inhabit individual brains like the tongues of the Holy Ghost: this constitutes one major source of the neoliberal hostility to democratic governments. But the quasi-economistic language testifies that the nature of the epiphany is not otherworldly but more mundane and pecuniary: “civilization begins when the individual in pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he himself has acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge that he does not himself possess.”149
This language of “use and profit from knowledge you don’t actually possess” might seem a bit mysterious until we unpack its implications for ignorance as a status to be produced rather than a state to be mitigated. I second the analysis of Louis Schneider that Hayek should be read as one of a long line of social theorists who praise the unanticipated and unintended consequences of social action as promoting the public interest, but who take it one crucial step further by insisting upon the indispensable role of ignorance in guaranteeing that the greater good is served.150 For Hayek, the conscious attempt to conceive of the nature of public interest is the ultimate hubris, and to concoct stratagems to achieve it is to fall into Original Sin. True organic solidarity can obtain only when everyone believes (correctly or not) they are just following their own selfish idiosyncratic ends, or perhaps don’t have any clear idea whatsoever of what they are doing, when in fact they are busily (re)producing beneficent evolutionary regularities beyond their ken and imagination. Thus, ignorance helps promote social order, or as he said, “knowledge and ignorance are relative concepts.”
The major point to be savored here is that individual ignorance fostered and manufactured by corporations, think tanks and other market actors is suitably subservient to market rationality, in the sense that it “profits from the knowledge that the agent does not possess.” Paid experts should behave as apologists for the interests that hire them: this is the very quiddity of the theory of self-interest. As Schneider explains, “Organic theorists hold that while actors may cojointly achieve important ‘beneficent’ results, they do so in considerable ignorance and in ignorance of the socially transmitted behavior they are reproducing contains accumulations of ‘knowledge’ now forgotten or no longer perceived as knowledge.”151 Burkean conservatism revels in the preservation of tradition, the great unconscious disembodied wisdom of the ages. This is why cries of “teach the controversy” in the schoolroom, “sound science” in the courtroom, and stipulations of “balance” in the news media are sweet music to neoliberal ears. That is why, as we shall repeatedly observe in subsequent chapters, and especially chapter 6, neoliberals and economists have served to sow confusion and falsehoods about the causes and consequences of the crisis. Neoliberals strive to preserve and promote doubt and ignorance, in science as well as in daily life; evolution and the market will take the hindmost.
The second salient implication is that, from the neoliberal vantage point, “science” does not need special protection from the ignorant, be they the partisan government bureaucrat, the craven intellectual for hire, the lumpen MBA, the Bible-thumping fundamentalist, the global-cooling enthusiast, or the feckless student. In an ideal state, special institutions dedicated to the protection and pursuit of knowledge can more or less be dispensed with as superfluous; universities in particular must be weaned away from the state and put on a commercial footing, dissolving their distinctive identities as “ivory towers.” Science should essentially dissolve into other market activities, with even its “public” face held accountable to considerations of efficiency, profitability, and subservience to personal ratification. “Competition” is said to ensure the proliferation of multiple concepts and theories with the blessing of the private sector. The only thing that keeps us from enjoying this ideal state is the mistaken impression that science serves higher causes, or that it is even possible to speak truth to power, or that one can rationally plan social goals and their attainment.152 Despairing of extirpation of these doctrines from within the university in his lifetime, Hayek and his confederates formed the Mont Pèlerin Society and then forged a linked concentric shell of think tanks to proselytize for the neoliberal idea that knowledge must be rendered subordinate to the market. Little did he suspect just how successful his crusade would be after his death.
Hayek is sometimes portrayed as a postmodern figure who did not believe in Truth; but again, I don’t think that really gets to the heart of the matter. Equally misguided would be the interpretation that Hayek would only promote the production of instrumentally useful knowledge: “Science for science’s sake, art for art’s sake, are equally abhorrent to the Nazis, our socialist intellectuals, and the communists. Every activity must derive its justification from a conscious social purpose.”153 Instead, I believe he initiated an important neoliberal practice as advocating a double-truth doctrine: one for the masses, where nominally everything goes and spontaneous innovation reigns; and a different one for his small, tight-knit cadre of believers. First and foremost, neoliberalism masquerades as a radically populist philosophy, one that begins with a set of philosophical theses about knowledge and its relationship to society. It seems at first to be a radical leveling philosophy, denigrating expertise and elite pretentions to hard-won knowledge, instead praising the “wisdom of crowds.” The Malcolm Gladwells, Jimmy Waleses, and James Surowieckis of the world are its pied pipers. This movement appeals to the vanity of every self-absorbed narcissist, who would be glad to ridicule intellectuals as “professional secondhand dealers in ideas.”154 But of course it sports a predisposition to disparage intellectuals, since “knowledge and ignorance are relative concepts.” In Hayekian language, it elevates a “kosmos”—a
