Like many people, my understanding of the world has been profoundly altered by events in the last three years. My naivety about the ability and willingness of governments in western nations to supress the individual liberty of their populations, and the willingness of the populations of these nations to accept, astonishes me now.
I should not have had this naivety however, as there are thinkers who have analysed and understood these phenomena and whose lessons I should have learned. I was well-versed in classic literature such as ‘1984’ and ‘Brave New World’, but imagined that in part because of these were well-known, that tyranny could not return. One of the authors who writes powerfully about liberty versus authoritarianism is Friedrich Hayek, especially in his work ‘The Road to Serfdom’. The lessons in this book are many and apply especially to these last three years.
The ‘it couldn’t happen here’ idea is directly addressed by Hayek, who makes the point that Nazism does not reflect some specific flaw in German society, but is something that can happen anywhere. His particular focus is on the UK and what he sees as the creeping trends in UK society and political thought in the early to middle 20th century that put the country on ‘the road to serfdom’. In 2020 too many of us were quick to dismiss something like a Chinese lockdown as something that could not happen in a country like the UK or the USA, that people loved liberty too much and would not stand for it. How wrong we were.
Part of this misunderstanding of our own nations comes from the very idea of what freedom means, something which Hayek addresses from the beginning. One view of freedom is freedom from coercion and restraint by others, including by the state. But the vision of freedom sold by those who want more state power, more central planning, is the freedom from want, the freedom from necessity. This dynamic captures much of the discourse in the last three years, one side emphasising the ‘free-from’ view that resists lockdowns, masks and vaccine mandates etc. The other side emphasises the ‘free-to’ view saying we can only be free from worry and illness if the disease is ‘defeated’, if everyone abides by the rules etc.
In Hayeks’s view the effort to achieve the latter view of freedom can only impair the first, and will not succeed in its aims anyway, which in a very different context is what has happened with the pandemic. We coerced and restrained in order to control a virus to be ‘free’ and failed totally. How many times were we promised by politicians that the only way we could avoid more lockdowns and mandates in the future, was to have more lockdowns and mandates now?
Hayek is also famously disapproving of rule by experts. His Nobel prize speech is a classic (though he is far too optimistic about academic rigour in the physical sciences):
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/speech/
"there could hardly be a more unbearable – and more irrational – world than one in which the most eminent specialists in each field were allowed to proceed unchecked with the realisation of their ideals".
What would Hayek have made of Fauci, Whitty, Vallance and all the other experts given free rein in recent years and lauded for their wisdom whilst doing so?
Placing the planning of society in the hands of ‘experts’ requires submission of society to a specific goal, but not everyone will agree on that goal. It is inevitable therefore that the planners will impose their own values. Hayek argues that widespread central planning of society is incompatible with democracy, because the planning requires agreement on the goal of the plan, and democracy hinders this. Similar points in reference to Hayek from David Henderson here:
https://www.econlib.org/wisdom-from-hayek/
I believe that this is partly why political authorities in so many countries went out of their way to discredit and shame any opposition to their policies. Lockdowns and mandates had to look like the will of all ‘right-thinking’ people with only lunatics and undesirables in opposition, to disguise the fundamentally illiberal and undemocratic nature of their actions.
Hayek is also remarkably prescient on what the specifics of those actions might be:
“If,…,the state were to direct people’s actions so as to achieve particular ends, its action would have to be decided on the basis of the full circumstances of the moment and would therefore be unpredictable”
The endless litany of petty rules and laws, changing on a monthly or even weekly basis is fading in memory now, but fits perfectly to Hayek’s prediction.
This is worsened by the type of people who are in charge. It has long been a defence of specific socialist and other authoritarian systems that they only didn’t work because of the people in charge, that they can work as long as the right people are in control. But Hayek argues that bad people being in charge is a feature, not a bug.
In systems where those in charge have a lot of power, this will appeal to people who desire to hold power over other people. In systems where cruelty to individuals is required in order to meet the collectivist aim, those willing to be cruel will be successful. We therefore end up with unprincipled, cruel and power-hungry individuals in charge. I think we can all think of politicians who meet this description in recent years.
There are many more points that could be made about this book and Hayek’s work more widely. I strongly recommend a full reading:
https://mises.org/library/road-serfdom-0
Hayek presents for me one of the most compelling sets of arguments to why a society that emphasises individual liberty is of such great importance, and this has only been enhanced by the experience of the last three years. I hope that more people could be introduced to and persuaded of these ideas, and we might not make the same mistakes again (though I am not hopeful).
Next in this mini-series will be Eric Hoffer’s ‘True Believer’, another mid 20th century classic reflection on the authoritarianism of that time that has many lessons for today.
Excellent essay! I really look forward to your coverage of Hoffer. I first read True Believer last year, and it is really an impressively insightful book.
With regards to 1984 and it can't happen here, I was surprised to find how many of my college students had never read nor even heard of 1984. To wit, roughly 100%. Apparently it is entirely out of the public school reading corpus. Whether that was an intentional move or simply the result of teachers too foolish to understand why it is important I can't say, but I definitely think the lack was a blow to our social immune system.