The intellectuals can't see this, of course. They want to shift the blame from themselves onto the system that rewards pop stars and romance novelists, and they blame the "stupidity" of the hopelessly ignorant masses. The more sophisticated create entire systems to rationalize their disdain for capitalism and those it rewards.

Marxism is the most obvious example. Marx predicted that capitalism would be destroyed by its own "internal contradictions."  His was really a theory of history, not an economic system. He had very little to say about socialism. Most of his and more recent Marxist writings are about capitalism. These say that capitalism created great wealth but also massive poverty.

The response is that there has always been poverty. Until capitalism, everyone but a tiny, hereditary elite lived in poverty. Capitalism has lifted more and more people out of poverty. By the early decades of this century it was obvious that capitalism wasn't going to destroy itself; left to itself it would get stronger. The worker-heroes of Marxist mythology were not going to launch a revolution against the bourgeoisie because they wanted to be bourgeois.

Astute observers of capitalism such as Mises realized that many of the real problems plaguing capitalism—the "booms" and "busts" of business cycles, for example—were not caused by anything intrinsic to capitalism but by government and central bankers' interference with the market process. Marxists couldn't admit that their worldview was refuted by facts. Something must be wrong with critics' perceptions of the facts. Hence the appearance of notions like "false consciousness" and other Marxian epicycles.

Freedom vs. Power

But what Marxist intellectuals really wanted—and still want—is power: the power to impose their vision of society on everyone. This becomes clear when we consider the strategy they employed following Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who saw most clearly that there wasn't going to be any proletariat revolution. It was Gramsci's idea to capture the culture and subvert it from within—especially by subverting the Judeo-Christian morality that had always been the best guide to personal conduct whether in the marketplace or in one's personal life.

It is to Gramsci we owe the "long march through the institutions" that enabled Gramscian cultural Marxists to take control of the universities, portions of the media, the legal system, etc. Now all we have to do is look at these institutions to see what happens whenever intellectuals of this sort get their hands on institutional power. They immediately suppress points of view other than their own, and it has reached the point where not even the more intellectually honest liberals (e.g., Tammy Bruce, author of The New Thought Police) can stand it anymore.

Now I should make a few things clear. I am not defending what Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez do, or applauding the fact that superstar athletes become instant multimillionaires. But those who blame capitalism for this have picked the wrong target. The blamers should look to the various factors that have interfered with the workings of the free market and captured the culture. Government has been plundering the market for decades now, producing, e.g., the government schools that have been captured by forces hostile to individualism.

The free market, moreover, is not an animate force. It does not have a mind or will of its own. It is just the arena in which myriad exchanges take place; it is the process of exchange writ large. Markets deliver what people want; they don't guarantee that people will want the "right" things. People critical of what markets deliver should therefore look to those factors of society (tax-exempt foundations, for instance) that have funded the absurd educational fads (OBE, for example) that have dumbed down government schools, producing so many people who only want to absorb passive entertainment or indulge the prurient tastes of MTV.

The point is, the things that are wrong with contemporary American culture cannot be laid at the doorstep of capitalism. The tastes of the masses will always be lower than that of the intellectuals. That is a given. Also, in many cases, the intellectuals who have sought to control populations have no one to blame but themselves—or their antecedents—for the current sorry state of much popular culture. They instituted an agenda decades ago, and now that agenda has snowballed.

What professional intellectuals should do is to seek out ideas that work, and that really do improve society—and to realize that their own standing is improved when they set out to understand the world and human nature. They must grasp that a free economy is better than a command economy, and learn how a free economy works. Intellectuals currently see themselves as alienated souls—but this again is their own doing, for having set themselves apart and scorning those over which they would wield power.

The Role of Intellectuals

The response is that the intellectual class does have a role to play in the division of labor writ large that really would be a properly functioning capitalist society. Its alienation could be assuaged by more rigorous study of both logic and economics—the real thing, as opposed to what passes for economics in most textbooks today. They could also do with less self-absorption.

What characterizes the true intellectual is breadth of knowledge, a capacity to speak on many issues, and to have grasped the connections between them. They often have what it takes to be conceptual, "big-picture" thinkers. Intellectuals tend to know more history and more culture in some cases, more science in others, than nonintellectuals. This makes them ideal educators.

Many intellectuals, of course, are educators now. But because of their alienation and their Platonistic belief that their superior knowledge of, e.g., the history of ideas makes them more fit to rule, to use the institutions of the state to impose their values on others by the force, they are presently miseducating.

Most Americans are loyal to what many intellectuals contemptuously label bourgeois society. Bourgeois society is invariably imperfect, because acting man is imperfect. Many intellectuals tend to be perfectionists. They want Utopia and think they are qualified to be its philosopher-kings. They are surprisingly uninterested in pursuing the vastly more significant larger question of what it is about the education of the present generation that has rendered so many incapable of appreciating better music than that of Britney Spears, or better books than those of Danielle Steel.

Such an inquiry would take them right to the doorstep of what should be their real target: the omnipotent state, and those who would use it as an instrument of plunder and control. (It is interesting that James Fenimore Cooper's complex, philosophical novels, for example, sold very well in their day—in the highly literate population of the American republic of the early 1800s before the era of Horace Mann and government schools, John Dewey and progressive education, or Alfred Kinsey and sex education.) 
So what should intellectually honest intellectuals be doing?

(1) They should take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves, what do I want? Or perhaps better, what are my values? Do they honestly want an improved society? Or one in ruins?  I need not rehearse the damage Marxist revolutionaries have done. And the stealth subversion of Western culture surely hasn't done contemporary America any good. At one time being a radical meant going to the root. I am not saying intellectuals shouldn't do this. But they must ask the right questions before they do anything else.

(2) Making the charitable assumption that they sincerely want a better society, the second thing intellectuals should do is: learn the rules, both of economics and of culture. Learn, that is, how a free market is supposed to work. Learn what cultural factors and values lead people to support wholesome music and art and what kinds of factors subvert them.

Focusing just on this, intellectuals will have to accept that it is not capitalism that propels a Britney Spears to fame. Mises stated that capitalism rewards those who serve the needs and wants of the masses. He never stated that their wants would be sound, or wholesome. Economics studies the choices people do in fact make, not whatever choices they should make. Such factors lay outside the province of economics. But intellectuals can deal with them provided, again, they learn what questions to ask. (This is another way of saying: there is more to life than economics, something Mises never denied.)  

(3) Learning the rules should teach intellectuals why they must relinquish their need for control. I cannot stress this enough. Most intellectuals see themselves as superior to the masses. But could society do without stockbrokers, forklift operators, truck drivers, auto mechanics, pencil manufacturers and other mostly nonintellectual types?  Obviously not. Could intellectuals do without them?  No, unless they have mastered all the tasks that these people do in society (and of course they have not).

There is no way to list all the myriad tasks that have to get done in any functional society. Capitalism is not planned—except in the sense that we plan to keep government and those who would use government out of the way. In the end, there just isn't any way to design a planned system, because its architects would have to "see from the inside" every one of these occupations, everyone involved in them, and the constantly changing aims and values of everyone needing their services. This, as both Mises and Hayek have argued, is simply impossible.

Moreover, I have met people who work in fields like real estate, insurance and other such professions. Many have struck me as quite intelligent. Intellectuals should relinquish their contempt for those they see as outside their exclusive clubs and realize that society is a division of labor writ large that includes the intellectual work of education but also much, much more.

The masses may not understand Plato's Myth of the Cave but they usually understand their own vocation quite well, and can do it most competently when not being interfered with by those who do not understand it. Society is too complex to be controlled from a central point. The Platonist philosopher-king simply doesn't exist. He is an intellectual myth.

(4) Similarly, intellectuals should relinquish their contempt for nonintellectuals. This follows from (3). When intellectuals speak or act contemptuously toward nonintellectuals, this invites scorn, especially given that so many intellectuals can sound off on some issue of the day, and a nonintellectual can show that the intellectual does not know what he is talking about. When caught miseducating their children, whether to indoctrinate them into the fictions of political correctness or scare them to death about global warming, intellectuals invite justified resentment that gives all their number a black eye. 

(5) Recognize the benefits of freedom for all. This means doing something intellectuals should excel at: seeing the Big Picture. The intellectual class—including intellectuals who have spent their lives practicing hating capitalism—is better off under capitalism than under any other system (to the extent their spokespeople in the political system have allowed capitalism to be practiced in this country).

Capitalism raises standards of living for all who participate, not by taking wealth away from anyone but by creating it. Thus there is more for everyone. Also, capitalism creates a space for the free exchange of ideas as well as goods. Socialists everywhere clamp down on the free exchange of ideas. Intellectuals in our society who want to exempt certain ideas from criticism invite questions like, what are you afraid of? Of course, truth is more likely to emerge from free exchanges of ideas than from thought control.

(6) Recognize further that people are more likely to be generous under capitalism. Libertarian political philosopher Tibor Machan once wrote an article entitled something like, "It Usually Begins With the Poor."  The basic idea, which Professor Machan was disputing, is that capitalism inevitably leaves poor people to flounder. Beginning at least with Marx is the idea that capitalism brings out the worst in people, that it encourages greed and indifference to others. The market punishes greed, however (look at Enron).

As for indifference to others, the dichotomy between serving oneself and serving others is a false one. One must serve others in order to serve oneself. So capitalism encourages those who would succeed to find out what others need or want and then supply it: the exact opposite of indifference to others. The resulting transactions, mind you, are peaceful; none are forced. This doesn't necessitate a system that callously casts out the less-well-off and those who for some reason, say infirmity, cannot work. Again, this is cultural and moral, not economic; it involves rejecting indifference to suffering.

But when the successful have more, and are allowed to dispense with the fruits of their labors according to their own choices, as opposed to involuntarily having to fund a privileged caste of politicians and bureaucratic overlords, they are more likely to be generous—since none of us can take the fruits of our labors to our graves, anyway.

(7) Intellectuals need to strengthen, and in some cases, recover, the respect for truth, as opposed to ideology. Postmodernist academic culture has very much undermined respect for truth, replacing it with superstardom and the political agenda. The results are there for all to see. Intellectuals who proclaim their devotion to ideals like tolerance are the first to shout down those who disagree with them. Their "diversity" means a diversity of faces, not ideas. They will pen books that blatantly and transparently further political programs such as militant feminism (Catharine MacKinnon) or gun control (Michael Bellesiles).

Postmodernist intellectuals seem not to believe there is a culture-independent truth—which if true, would be a culture-independent truth (what else could it be?). In this way, postmodernism is destroyed by its own internal logic. Finally, many educational practices—going all the way down to those used on small children—are designed to instill conformity to the group (otherwise known as consensus) rather than such things as a love of reading, a love of learning what is true, and the zest for life I have observed in entrepreneurs. These are the first truths the intellectuals who can hope to contribute something to the future history of ideas need to embrace.

All of this means reversing Marx's statement above, and instead saying something like, "Marxists have only wanted to change the world, first by revolution and then by subversion; the point, however, is to understand the world and the people in it so that we know what changes to make and how to carry them through."  

The intellectual class has a job to do involving education. This job is an important one. It ranges from teaching the rules of correct thinking or reasoning to the full range of history, economics, natural sciences, and so on. The students of intellectuals rightly expect not just knowledge but honesty.

Intellectual honesty means, at the very least, acknowledging the facts that are before one's eyes: facts about the superiority of a civilization built around the concepts of individual freedom and responsibility, free enterprise, private property rights, and so on, to one built around central planning schemes that have yet to deliver anything except poverty, slavery and misery. When intellectuals teach the children of nonintellectuals to hate their own civilization and regard its achievements as acts of villainy, they only invite waves of understandable anti-intellectual reaction.

(Reprinted with permission from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.)

Steven Yates, Ph.D.,  is a Margaret "Peg" Rowley Visiting Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute where he is writing a book entitled In Defense of Logic: Against Polylogism and Conventionalism in Education, Science, Culture and Life. He is the author of a previous book, Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994) and numerous articles. He is a regular contributor to the news / commentary site LewRockwell.com. Send him MAIL.