THE FATAL CONCEIT - The Errors of Socialism by F. A. Hayek 1988
Chapter 7 OUR POISONED LANGUAGE
When words lose their meanings, people lose their liberty. - Confucius
Words as Guides to Action
Many beliefs live only in words and may never become explicit. Thus they are never exposed to the possibility of criticism, with the result that words transmits a folly that is difficult to eradicate. It is also difficult to explain in the regular vocabulary.
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Such difficulties have driven scientists to invent new words for their own disciplines. Reformers, and especially socialists, have been driven by the same urge, and some of them have proposed reformation of language in order to better convert people to their position.
So long as we speak in language based in erroneous theory, we perpetuate error. Yet the traditional vocabulary that still shapes our perception of the world remains primitive in many ways.
Thus, we continue to use terms bearing archaic meanings as we try to express new ideas. An example is how a young child thinks that everything that moves is alive. He is happy to see a tree blowing in the wind because he thinks it is dancing. Animistic connotations cling to many basic words, and particularly to those describing occurrences producing order. 'To cause', 'coerce', 'distribute', 'prefer', and 'organize', terms indispensable in the description of impersonal processes, still evoke in many minds the idea of a personal actor.
The word 'order' itself is a clear instance of an expression which, before Darwin, would have been taken almost universally to imply a personal actor. Until the 'subjective revolution' in economic theory of the 1870's, understanding of human creation was dominated by animism - such as Adam Smith's 'invisible hand.'
The more one scrutinizes the work of socialist writers, the more one sees that they continued with animistic language. Take for instance the personification of 'society' in the historicist tradition of Hegel, Comte and Marx. Socialism, with its 'society', is an animistic interpretation of order historically represented by various religions. Imagining that order is the result of design, socialists conclude that order must be improvable by better design by some superior mind.
The continuing influence of socialism on language is evident in descriptive studies of history and anthropology. As Braudel asks: 'Who among us has not spoken about class struggle, modes of production, labour force, surplus value, relative pauperisation, alienation, infrastructure, superstructure, use value, exchange value, primitive accumulation, dialectics, the dictatorship of the proletariat?' (supposedly all derived from or popularised by Karl Marx).
To Marx especially we also owe the substitution of the term 'society' for "the state" or "the government." His term "society" suggests that we can deliberately regulate the actions of individuals by some gentler method than coercion.
I try to avoid using the terms 'society' or 'social' when I mean the state. The quotation by Confucius that stands at the head of this chapter is probably the earliest expression of this concern. An abbreviated form of the quote apparently stems from there being in Chinese no word for liberty.
'If the language is incorrect, the people will have nowhere to put hand and foot' is another translation of the same quote by Confucius.
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Ambiguity of Terms among Systems
Elsewhere we have tried to disentangle some of the confusions caused by the ambiguity of terms such as 'natural' and 'artificial', of 'genetic' and 'cultural,' and the like.
There was the deception practiced by American socialists in their appropriation of the term 'liberalism' from the system of private enterprise. The same applies to European political parties of the middle, which either, as in Britain, carry the name liberal or, as in West Germany, claim to be liberal but do not hesitate to form coalitions with openly socialist parties. It has become almost impossible for a Gladstonian liberal to describe himself as a liberal without giving the impression that he believes in socialism. Nor is this a new development: as long ago as 1911, L. T. Hobhouse published a book under the title Liberalism that would more correctly have been called Socialism, followed by his book entitled The Elements of Social Justice.
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The terms to describe two opposed principles, capitalism and socialism, are misleading and politically biased. The word 'capitalism' in particular (still unknown to Karl Marx in 1867 and never used by him) 'burst upon political debate as the natural opposite of socialism' only with Werner Sombart's explosive book Der Moderne Kapitalismus in 1902. "Capitalism" suggests a system serving the special interests of the owners of capital. It naturally provoked the opposition of those who were its main beneficiaries, the proletariat. The proletariat was enabled by the activity of owners of capital to survive and increase, and was in a sense actually called into being by them. The owners of capital made the flourishing of humanity possible. This might have led to some capitalists proudly accepting that name. It was an unfortunate development to suggest a clash of interests which does not really exist.
A better, though not perfect, name for the extended economic order of collaboration is the term 'market economy', imported from the German.
A disadvantage of the term market economy is that no convenient adjective can be made from it in English. Hence I proposed that we introduce a new term, from a Greek root that had already been used in a very similar connection. In 1838 Archbishop Whately suggested 'catallactics' as a name for the theoretical science explaining the market order, and his suggestion has been revived from time to time, most recently by Ludwig von Mises. The adjective 'catallactic' has already been used fairly widely. These terms are particularly attractive because the classical Greek word from which they stem, katalattein or katalassein, meant not only 'to exchange' but also 'to receive into the community' and 'to turn from enemy into friend', further evidence of the profound insight of the ancient Greeks in such matters. This led me to suggest that we form the term catallaxy to describe the science we generally call economics. The usefulness of such a term has been confirmed by the term already having been adopted by some of my younger colleagues. I am convinced that its adoption might contribute to the clarity of our discussion.
Our Animistic Vocabulary and the Confused Concept of 'Society'
The chief terminological barrier to understanding is the expression 'society' itself - and not only because Marx, used it to blur distinctions between government and other 'institutions'. As a word used to describe a variety of human activities, 'society' falsely suggests that all such activities are of the same kind. It is also one of the oldest terms of this kind, as for example in the Latin societas, from socius, the personally known fellow or companion. It has been used to describe both an actually existing state of affairs and a relation between individuals. It implies a common pursuit of shared purpose that usually can be achieved only by conscious collaboration.
Human cooperation is governed by abstract rules of conduct. Rules that the more we serve the needs of people whom we do not know and find our own needs similarly satisfied by unknown persons, the better.
The more the cooperation, the less the mental picture people have of what should happen in a 'society. Thus the word 'society' has become a convenient label denoting almost any group of people. Society is used for a group about whose reason for coherence nothing is known. It is a makeshift word people resort to when they do not know what they are talking about. Apparently a people, a nation, a population, a company, an association, group, horde, band, tribe, race, religion, sport, entertainment, and the inhabitants of any place, all are societies.
To use the term society for both a small fellowship and the structure formed by millions who are connected only by long chains of trade is misleading. Using the term society contains a concealed desire to pretend the millions have the same close connections as do best friends. Bertrand de Jouvenel has well described this instinctive nostalgia for the small group - 'the milieu in which man is first found, which retains for him an infinite attraction: but any attempt to graft the same features on a large society is utopian and leads to tyranny.'
Hence it is disturbing to find a serious contemporary scholar like Chapman writing that any utilitarian 'society' must appear not 'as a plurality of persons, but as a sort of single great person'.
The Weasel Word 'Social'
The noun 'society', misleading as it is, is relatively innocuous compared with the adjective 'social'. This has happened only during the past hundred years, during which time its influence has expanded from Bismarckian Germany to cover the whole world. It has increasingly been turned into an exhortation, a guide-word for rationalist morals intended to displace traditional morals. "Social," now increasingly supplants the word 'good' as a designation of what is morally right.
By the 1880's, a group of German scholars known as the historical or ethical school of economic research had increasingly substituted the term 'social policy' for the term 'political economy.' One of the few not to be swept away by this new fashion, Leopold von Wiese, remarked that only those who were young in the decades immediately before the Great War can appreciate the strength of the inclination then to regard the 'social' sphere as a surrogate for religion. One of the manifestations of this was the appearance of the so-called social pastors. But 'to be "social" ', Wiese insists, 'is not the same as being good or righteous. We owe instructive historical studies on the spreading of theterm 'social' to some of Wiese's students.
The Fontanan Dictionary of Modern Thought lists 35 thirty-five combinations of 'social' with some noun or other, from 'Social Action' to 'Social Wholes'. These examples led me to note the occurrences of 'social' that I encountered, producing this instructive list of 172 nouns qualified by the adjective 'social':
accounting action adjustment
administration affairs agreement
age animal appeal
awareness behavior being
body causation character
circle climber compact
composition comprehension concern
conception conflict conscience
consciousness consideration construction
contract control credit
cripples critic (-que) crusader
decision demand democracy
description development dimension
discrimination disease disposition
distance duty economy
end entity environment
epistemology ethics etiquette
event evil fact
factors fascism force
framework function gathering
geography goal good
graces group harmony
health history Ideal
implication inadequacy independence
inferiority institution insurance
intercourse justice knowledge
laws leader life
market economy medicine migration
mind morality morals
needs obligation opportunity
order organism orientation
outcast ownership partner
passion peace pension
person philosophy pleasure
point of view policy position
power priority privilege
problem process product
progress property psychology
rank realism realm
Rechtsstaat (rule of law) recognition reform
relations remedy research
response responsibility revolution
right role rule of law
satisfaction science security
service signals significance
Soziolekt (group speech) solidarity spirit
structure stability standing
status struggle student
studies survey system
talent teleology tenets
tension theory thinkers
thought traits usefulness
utility value views
virtue want waste
wealth will work
worker world
Many of the combinations are even more widely used in a negative, critical form: 'social adjustment' becomes 'social maladjustment', and there is 'social disorder', 'social injustice', 'social insecurity', 'social instability', and so on.
The word 'social' has acquired so many different meanings as to become largely useless as a tool of communication. And it has 3 other effects. First, it pervertedly insinuates that order which came from unplanned, spontaneous processes is instead the result of deliberate control. Second, following from this, it appeals to men to redesign what they never could have designed in the first place. And third, it also has acquired the power to empty the nouns it qualifies of their meaning.
In this last effect, it has in fact become a harmful instance of what Americans call a 'weasel word'. As read in Shakespeare's As You Like It, 'I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel suck eggs' as a weasel is alleged to be able to empty an egg without leaving
a visible sign. A weasel word can remove meaning from other words while seemingly leaving them untouched. A weasel word is used to devalue a concept one has to acknowledge but from which one wishes to eliminate all implications that challenge one's ideological premises.
Theodore Roosevelt is credited with having coined the term weasel word in 1918. This suggests that American statesmen were remarkably well educated 70 years ago. Though abuse of the word 'social' is international, it has taken perhaps its most extreme forms in West Germany where the constitution of 1949 employed the expression sozialer Rechtsstaat (social rule of law) and whence the conception of 'social market economy' has spread.
But while the rule of law and the market are fairly clear concepts, the attribute 'social' empties them of clear meaning. From these uses of the word 'social', German scholars have come to the conclusion that their government is constitutionally subject to the Sozialstaatsprinzip, (social welfare state principle) which basically means that the rule of law has been suspended. Likewise, such German scholars see a conflict between Rechtsstaat and Sozialstaat (the rule of law and the welfare state) and entrench the soziale Rechtsstaat (the social rule of law) in their constitution - one, I may perhaps say, that was written by Fabian muddle-heads inspired by the nineteenth-century inventor of 'National Socialism', Friedrich Naumann.
Similarly, the term 'democracy' used to have a fairly clear meaning; yet 'social democracy' not only served as the name for the radical Austro – Marxism of the inter-war period but now has been chosen in Britain as a label for a political party committed to a sort of Fabian socialism. Yet the traditional term for what is now called the 'social state' was 'benevolent despotism', and the very real problem of achieving such despotism democratically, i.e., while preserving individual freedom, is simply wished away by the concoction 'social democracy'.
'Social justice' and 'Social Rights'
The worst use of 'social', is in the almost universally used phrase 'social justice'. It plays an important part in arguments for and against socialism. Curran, a distinguished man more courageous than I, bluntly expressed it long ago, calling "social justice" a semantic fraud from the same stable as People's Democracy. A recent Oxford doctor's thesis shows the alarming extent to which the term social justice has perverted the thinking of the younger generation as it referred to traditional justice as 'private justice'.
I have seen it suggested that 'social' applies to everything that reduces or removes differences of income. But why call such action 'social'? Every exhortation to us to be 'social' is an appeal for a further step towards the 'social justice' of socialism. Thus use of the term 'social' becomes virtually equivalent to the call for 'distributive justice'. This is irreconcilable with a competitive market order, and with maintenance of the current population and wealth. Thus people have come, through such errors, to call 'social' what is the main obstacle to the very maintenance of 'society'. 'Social' should really be called 'anti-social'.
It is probably true that men would be happier about their economic conditions if they felt that the relative positions of individuals were just. Yet the whole idea behind distributive justice - that each individual ought to receive what he morally deserves - is meaningless in the extended order of human cooperation (or the catallaxy), because the available product depends on a morally indifferent production. Moral desserts cannot be determined objectively. 'Success is based on results, not on motivation.' A system of cooperation must adapt itself to changes in its environment, which include the life, health and strength of its members. The demand that only changes with just effect on the deserving should occur is ridiculous. Mankind could neither have reached its present population without success based on results, instead of admirable motive, effort, fairness, or moral reward. Effort of course will improve individual chances, but effort alone cannot secure results. The envy of those who have tried just as hard, although understandable, works against the common interest. Thus, if the common interest is really our goal, we must not give in to this very human trait of envy, but instead allow the market process to determine the reward. Nobody can ascertain, save through the market, the size of an individual's contribution to the overall product, nor can it otherwise be determined how much remuneration must be tendered to someone to enable him to choose the activity which will add most to the flow of goods and services offered at large.
Mankind is split into two hostile groups by promises that cannot be realized. An anti-capitalist ethic continues to develop on the basis of errors by people who condemn the wealth generating institutions to which they owe their very existence. Pretending to be lovers of freedom, they condemn several freedoms; of property, contract, competition, advertising, profit, and even money itself. Imagining that their reason can tell them how to better arrange human efforts, they themselves pose a grave threat to civilization.
768.16 Wrongful Death Act.-Sections 768.16-768.26 may be cited as the "Florida Wrongful Death Act."
768.17 Legislative intent.-It is the public policy of the state to shift the losses resulting when wrongful death occurs from the survivors of the decedent to the wrongdoer. Sections 768.16-768.26 are remedial and shall be liberally construed.
768.18 Definitions.-As used in Sections. 768.16-768.26:
(1) "Survivors" means the decedent's spouse, children, parents, and, when partly or wholly dependent on the decedent for support or services, any blood relatives and adoptive brothers and sisters. It includes the child born out of wedlock of a mother, but not the child born out of wedlock of the father unless the father has recognized a responsibility for the child's support.
(2) "Minor children" means children under 25 years of age, notwithstanding the age of majority.
(3) "Support" includes contributions in kind as well as money.
(4) "Services" means tasks, usually of a household nature, regularly performed by the decedent that will be a necessary expense to the survivors of the decedent. These services may vary according to the identity of the decedent and survivor and shall be determined under the particular facts of each case.
(5) "Net accumulations" means the part of the decedent's expected net business or salary income, including pension benefits, that the decedent probably would have retained as savings and left as part of her or his estate if the decedent had lived her or his normal life expectancy. "Net business or salary income" is the part of the decedent's probable gross income after taxes, excluding income from investments continuing beyond death, that remains after deducting the decedent's personal expenses and support of survivors, excluding contributions in kind.
768.19 Right of action.-When the death of a person is caused by the wrongful act, negligence, default, or breach of contract or warranty of any person, including those occurring on navigable waters, and the event would have entitled the person injured to maintain an action and recover damages if death had not ensued, the person or watercraft that would have been liable in damages if death had not ensued shall be liable for damages as specified in this act notwithstanding the death of the person injured, although death was caused under circumstances constituting a felony.
F.S. 768.20 Parties.-The action shall be brought by the decedent's personal representative, who shall recover for the benefit of the decedent's survivors and estate all damages, as specified in this act, caused by the injury resulting in death. When a personal injury to the decedent results in death, no action for the personal injury shall survive, and any such action pending at the time of death shall abate. The wrongdoer's personal representative shall be the defendant if the wrongdoer dies before or pending the action. A defense that would bar or reduce a survivor's recovery if she or he were the plaintiff may be asserted against the survivor, but shall not affect the recovery of any other survivor.
768.21 Damages.-All potential beneficiaries of a recovery for wrongful death, including the decedent's estate, shall be identified in the complaint, and their relationships to the decedent shall be alleged. Damages may be awarded as follows:
(1) Each survivor may recover the value of lost support and services from the date of the decedent's injury to her or his death, with interest, and future loss of support and services from the date of death and reduced to present value. In evaluating loss of support and services, the survivor's relationship to the decedent, the amount of the decedent's probable net income available for distribution to the particular survivor, and the replacement value of the decedent's services to the survivor may be considered. In computing the duration of future losses, the joint life expectancies of the survivor and the decedent and the period of minority, in the case of healthy minor children, may be considered.
(2) The surviving spouse may also recover for loss of the decedent's companionship and protection and for mental pain and suffering from the date of injury.
(3) Minor children of the decedent, and all children of the decedent if there is no surviving spouse, may also recover for lost parental companionship, instruction, and guidance and for mental pain and suffering from the date of injury. For the purposes of this subsection, if both spouses die within 30 days of one another as a result of the same wrongful act or series of acts arising out of the same incident, each spouse is considered to have been predeceased by the other.
(4) Each parent of a deceased minor child may also recover for mental pain and suffering from the date of injury. Each parent of an adult child may also recover for mental pain and suffering if there are no other survivors.
(5) Medical or funeral expenses due to the decedent's injury or death may be recovered by a survivor who has paid them.
(6) The decedent's personal representative may recover for the decedent's estate the following:(a) Loss of earnings of the deceased from the date of injury to the date of death, less lost support of survivors excluding contributions in kind, with interest. Loss of the prospective net accumulations of an estate, which might reasonably have been expected but for the wrongful death, reduced to present money value, may also be recovered:1. If the decedent's survivors include a surviving spouse or lineal descendants; or2. If the decedent is not a minor child as defined in s. 768.18(2), there are no lost support and services recoverable under subsection (1), and there is a surviving parent.(b) Medical or funeral expenses due to the decedent's injury or death that have become a charge against her or his estate or that were paid by or on behalf of decedent, excluding amounts recoverable under subsection (5).(c) Evidence of remarriage of the decedent's spouse is admissible.
(7) All awards for the decedent's estate are subject to the claims of creditors who have complied with the requirements of probate law concerning claims.
(8) The damages specified in subsection (3) shall not be recoverable by adult children and the damages specified in subsection (4) shall not be recoverable by parents of an adult child with respect to claims for medical negligence as defined by s. 766.106(1).
768.22 Form of verdict.-The amounts awarded to each survivor and to the estate shall be stated separately in the verdict.
768.23 Protection of minors and incompetents.-The court shall provide protection for any amount awarded for the benefit of a minor child or an incompetent pursuant to the Florida Guardianship Law.
768.24 Death of a survivor before judgment.-A survivor's death before final judgment shall limit the survivor's recovery to lost support and services to the date of his or her death. The personal representative shall pay the amount recovered to the personal representative of the deceased.
768.25 Court approval of settlements.-While an action under this act is pending, no settlement as to amount or apportionment among the beneficiaries which is objected to by any survivor or which affects a survivor who is a minor or an incompetent shall be effective unless approved by the court.
768.26 Litigation expenses.-Attorneys' fees and other expenses of litigation shall be paid by the personal representative and deducted from the awards to the survivors and the estate in proportion to the amounts awarded to them, but expenses incurred for the benefit of a particular survivor or the estate shall be paid from their awards.