If you knew nothing about the book, the fact that it is embraced by the usual gang of idiots would put any sensible, pro-freedom reader on his or her guard.
Re the review, however, I take exception to his dismissal of David Reisman’s LONELY CROWD. I read it long after the book’s popularity had waned, and I know people don’t often fit neatly into categories (although with the decline of individualism they fit into them more neatly than they used to); but I have found Reisman’s categories of “outer-directed, inner-directed and other-directed” reasonably on the mark.
Link appears to point to something about “big trucks hated by Obama” …
The article appears to no longer be available publicly, though google has snagged a copy of it and it is available in its cache (though with a publication date of July 1st).
In any event, a remarkably trenchant and thorough analysis of Piketty’s book, though I felt it could have hit a few of the more salient points a bit harder than it did.
What is becoming clearer and clearer over time, and Piketty’s book is a particularly good example, is that leftists have a quite wide ranging fundamental misunderstanding of even the most basic principles of economic activity. But that is topped only by the fact that when it is obvious even to themselves that their theories have a sharp separation from reality they don’t care. That makes it abundantly clear that we’re not dealing with a garden variety -ism but quite simply a new type of secular belief system or religion.
Principles such as “inequality is bad” are not derived facts in this belief system, they are axioms. Self-evident truths that can no more be challenged intellectually or scientifically than the transitive principle of algebra.
And this belief system / movement has been slowly forming, coalescing, and evolving for the better part of two centuries. It would be comforting to think that is has been evolving to avoid mistakes and errors, but rather it has been evolving to become more insular, more resistant to logical attack by shifting the debate more and more away from any area where logic and reason hold sway. Just as all religions do in order to perpetuate themselves. Lenses for viewing the world are constructed such that when using them the principles of the belief system become tautologies, and questioning those beliefs becomes an evil act so vile that it does not even justify refutation or engagement but rather shunning, censure, and condemnation. Tools we’ve seen used many a time over the past several decades (skeptical of climate science? you’re worse than Hitler; oppose some policy of the Obama administration? you’re an unconscionable racist of the worse sort; and so on).
Leftists get away with it because they suffer no consequences. If, for example, someone calls you a racist and you punch them in the nose, odds are they’ll be less likely to call you that again, at least not to your face. In this case, I am advocating violence.
One of their techniques is the manipulate the language as Orwell warned us about decades ago. If you control the definitions, you control the debate. Likewise, “political correctness” (there’s nothing correct about it) is nothing more than manipulating the language to control what can and can’t be said.
The problem with manipulating the language is that it soon loses any power it once had. Does any sensible person really worry about being called a ‘racist’ any more, when the left throw the word at just about anyone who opposes them, for any reason? The only people who seem to care are the mass media, and those who believe the mass media still has any real power.
But the real problem the left has is that it’s simply becoming irrelevant. Socialism (‘The State shall own the means of production, Brothers!’) is inherently an industrial-era philosophy, and has no place in a post-industrial world. This is why the ‘progressives’ are now working so hard to prevent progress.
If you knew nothing about the book, the fact that it is embraced by the usual gang of idiots would put any sensible, pro-freedom reader on his or her guard.
Re the review, however, I take exception to his dismissal of David Reisman’s LONELY CROWD. I read it long after the book’s popularity had waned, and I know people don’t often fit neatly into categories (although with the decline of individualism they fit into them more neatly than they used to); but I have found Reisman’s categories of “outer-directed, inner-directed and other-directed” reasonably on the mark.
Link appears to point to something about “big trucks hated by Obama” …
The article appears to no longer be available publicly, though google has snagged a copy of it and it is available in its cache (though with a publication date of July 1st).
In any event, a remarkably trenchant and thorough analysis of Piketty’s book, though I felt it could have hit a few of the more salient points a bit harder than it did.
What is becoming clearer and clearer over time, and Piketty’s book is a particularly good example, is that leftists have a quite wide ranging fundamental misunderstanding of even the most basic principles of economic activity. But that is topped only by the fact that when it is obvious even to themselves that their theories have a sharp separation from reality they don’t care. That makes it abundantly clear that we’re not dealing with a garden variety -ism but quite simply a new type of secular belief system or religion.
Principles such as “inequality is bad” are not derived facts in this belief system, they are axioms. Self-evident truths that can no more be challenged intellectually or scientifically than the transitive principle of algebra.
And this belief system / movement has been slowly forming, coalescing, and evolving for the better part of two centuries. It would be comforting to think that is has been evolving to avoid mistakes and errors, but rather it has been evolving to become more insular, more resistant to logical attack by shifting the debate more and more away from any area where logic and reason hold sway. Just as all religions do in order to perpetuate themselves. Lenses for viewing the world are constructed such that when using them the principles of the belief system become tautologies, and questioning those beliefs becomes an evil act so vile that it does not even justify refutation or engagement but rather shunning, censure, and condemnation. Tools we’ve seen used many a time over the past several decades (skeptical of climate science? you’re worse than Hitler; oppose some policy of the Obama administration? you’re an unconscionable racist of the worse sort; and so on).
Leftists get away with it because they suffer no consequences. If, for example, someone calls you a racist and you punch them in the nose, odds are they’ll be less likely to call you that again, at least not to your face. In this case, I am advocating violence.
One of their techniques is the manipulate the language as Orwell warned us about decades ago. If you control the definitions, you control the debate. Likewise, “political correctness” (there’s nothing correct about it) is nothing more than manipulating the language to control what can and can’t be said.
The problem with manipulating the language is that it soon loses any power it once had. Does any sensible person really worry about being called a ‘racist’ any more, when the left throw the word at just about anyone who opposes them, for any reason? The only people who seem to care are the mass media, and those who believe the mass media still has any real power.
But the real problem the left has is that it’s simply becoming irrelevant. Socialism (‘The State shall own the means of production, Brothers!’) is inherently an industrial-era philosophy, and has no place in a post-industrial world. This is why the ‘progressives’ are now working so hard to prevent progress.