To Abdicate or Not; L.E. Read

Professor Ludwig von Mises arrived in America during 1940. My acquaintance with him began a year or two later when he ad dressed a luncheon meeting of the Los Angeles Chamber of Com merce of which I was General Manager. That evening he dined at my home with renowned econ omists, Dr. Benjamin M. Ander son and Professor Thomas Nixon Carver, and several businessmen This essay is from the "Mises 90th Birthday Collection," copyright by the Institute for Humane Studies. 562 such as W. C. Mullendore, all first rate thinkers in political economy. What I would not give for a re cording of that memorable dis cussion! The final question was posed at midnight: "Professor Mises, I agree with you that we are headed for troublous times. Now, let us suppose you were the dictator of these United States. What would you do?" Quick as a flash came the reply, HI would abdicate!" Here we have the renunciation side of wisdom: man knowing he should not lord it over his fellows and rejecting even the thought.

Few among us are wise enough to know how little we know. Ignor ance of limitations is to be ex pected from everyone who does not see beyond himself. The wise man, on the other hand, achieves a measure of self-transcendence: 1971 TO ABDICATE OR NOT 563 he sees beyond himself, even be yond his environment. Knowing far more than the mill run of us, he measures his knowledge against what might be known and con fesses to knowing nearly nothing. Such a rare individual weighs his finite knowledge on the scale of infinite truth, and his awareness of his limitations tells him never to lord it over others. Such a per son would renounce any position of authoritarian rulership he might be proffered or, if acciden tally finding himself in such a position, he would abdicate forthwith! Barriers to Creativity Really, no one ever rules an other. The most that is achieved by a Simon Legree, a Hitler, Stal in, or any of our own little dicta tors of economic affairs, is to keep others from being themselves.

True, there is a role for a societal agency to play in keeping others from being themselves if it be their nature to commit theft, mur der, deception, violence, and the like. I am not alluding, however, to the retarding of wrongdoing but, rather, to a person's freedom to be himself creatively. The authori tarian mentality is concerned not with inhibiting destructive actions but with the control and direction of creative actions. This no dicta tor can do; he can only suppress, deaden, destroy such actions. Cre ative actions can never be ruled but only ruled out! The wise man, regardless of his superiority among men, realizes that his knowledge is but infinites simal; that his light, however bright, is but a wee candle in the over-all luminosity; that were all others to be made precisely in his image, all would perish. To illustrate the fractional na ture of one's knowledge, sit behind the wheel of your automobile and ask yourself, what part have I had in the making of this remarkable gadget? The answer, be you the President of the United States or of General Motors, is that you have played very little part, if any.

Ask next, what do I know how to do that might have played any part in the making of this rna.. chine? Your answer remains sub stantially the same. To my point: Last year several million automo biles were· manufactured in the U.S.A. How come? From whence came the knowledge that does not exist, even incipiently, in any dis crete human being? It had to come from somewhere. The knowledge that makes the automobile possible exists in what I choose to call the over-all lumi nosity. This is composed of tril lions times trillions of tiny illumi nations, discoveries, inventions, insights, intuitive flashes, think564 THE FREEMAN September of-thats - an accumulation that had its beginning with the dawn of mankind. The cave man who discovered how to harness fire played his part. So did the Arab who invented the concept of zero. Without each of these, the auto mobile is inconceivable. These men, whoever they were, had as much a part as Charles Goodyear did in 1839 when he invented the hot vulcanization of rubber. Or those men who treated paper with a mixture of ferricyanide and am monium ferric citrate and brought forth blueprint paper. Or those who found out how to make paper!

The over-all luminosity that makes possible our automobiles, stoves, pencils, and a million or so other things by which we live and thrive is handed down or, better yet, made available to us in count less ways: memory, teaching, books, tradition, folklore, to men tion a few. It is a storehouse of unimaginable enormity; no indi vidual can perceive a trillionth of it! The wisdom in knowing that we know not is sometimes glimpsed in relation to things. For instance, it is easily demonstrable that no single person has the knowledge to make a simple pencil, let alone a jet plane or that fantastic wind shield through which the pilot peers. Even so, the realm of things is pestered with know-it-alls, persons who seem unable to relate their tiny glimmers to the over all luminosity and cannot there fore keep themselves in their place. Where Angels Fear to Tread However, it is when we move from the realm of things to the realm of humanity - man and so ciety - that authoritarians prolif erate. Even many who would con fess to an ignorance of how to make a dynamo will, with no hesi tancy whatsoever, boast of know ing how man and society should be made to perform. Failing to dis cern that men and their relation ships are vastly more complex than any thing or things, they en tertain no doubts about their com petency to rule mankind.

In the realm of humanity, as in the realm of things, an over-all luminosity presides or rules. In so cial affairs, this may be referred to as "the consensus." Professor Hayek uses "Knowledge in soci ety"; Edmund Burke called it "Immemorial heritage"; others re fer to it as "Culture" or "Custom." By whatever name, it is a body of underlying assumptions, of ideas taken for granted and held more or less in common; it is the resid ual legatee of mankind's history or, as James Coolidge Carter phrased it, "the imperishable rec ord of the wisdom of the illimit able past reaching back to the in1971 TO ABDICATE OR NOT 565 fancy of the race." It is what is handed down to us plus what we, who live on its growing edge, put into it. Professor Mises knows that he does not or cannot rule; thus, he abdicates from even the idea of rulership. Knowing what phase of life to renounce is one side of wis dom.

But knowing what phase of life to embrace - to get ever deeper into, from which never to abdi cate - is the other side of wisdom. And in this phase, as in the for mer, we have no exemplar who ex cels Mises. This being my analysis, I shall use my own rather than Mises' phrasing: the ruling consensus, I repeat, is what is handed down to us, plus what we put into it. What we put into it is the key. The improvement of the ruling consensus by you or me requires that our own thoughts and actions be, at the very least, a confirma tion of the best that has been handed down to us or, hopefully, an improvement on what the con sensus already contains. On Power IDEAS ON We who live on its growing edge can put nothing into the con sensus that is not within our selves. It follows, if we would put anything into it, that life must be devoted to the improvement of what is within us, rather than wasted on the futile attempt to re form others.

I am unaware of any individual who is less the reformer or propa gandist than Mises. To the con trary, his life is and always has been distinguished by a search for truth. His remarkable and un matched economic works are testi mony to many virtues but espe cially to his two-sided wisdom: knowing what phase of life to re nounce and what phase of life to embrace. There are numerous examples in history that lend credence to my prophecy. The seminal think ing of Mises - the improvements he has added to the consensus, manifested in his works over a span of seventy years - gives a light with so much radiance that it will penetrate the centuries mirror itself through the ages. ~ LIBEHTY POWER tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority. LORD ACTON, in letter to Creighton, April 5, 1887 A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Throttling the Railroads IF the United States were really a pragmatic country, believing that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the fate of the rail roads under the Interstate Com merce Commission would have caused an implacable uprising against government intervention in the marketplace. But, alas, we are ruled by ideologues who are put into office by romantics who do not believe in cause-and-effect relationships. So we plunge on from mistake to mistake. A possi bly "saving remnant," however, is given to seeing through the hoax of our phony pragmatism, and among the most clear-sighted of this remnant is Clarence B. Car son, whose Throttling the Rail roads, which ran serially in THE FREEMAN, has just been published by the Liberty Fund of Indianap olis, Indiana, for distribution by 566 the Foundation for Economic Ed ucation (FEE).