Hayek's 'Fatal Conceit' Is Explained Much More In The Divine Economy Theory.

One of the things that I find interesting about the general response to some of the terminology in the divine economy theory is a disconnect - in the minds of those who act like the terminology is incomprehensible - with the essence of classical liberalism and Austrian economics in the literature. I am not sure when Hayek first mentioned 'fatal conceit' or if he is the true originator of the term but I am curious about the reaction and response that he got when he laid it out with clarity. Was the new terminology received well?

Of course Fredrich von Hayek was a renowned scholar and academic which I am sure aided in the acceptance of the idea of 'fatal conceit' but nevertheless during his career Hayek deviated from pure subjectivism. He was a socialist and an empiricist when he read Socialism by Ludwig von Mises and he immediately recognized the fact that interventionism is error-based. His occasional weakness in championing subjectivism may be attributed to his earlier ingrained ideological leanings or maybe it was the consequence of the tendency towards atheism in academia. Humans as unique creatures with the potential to mirror all the virtues or attributes of God is the true essence of their subjective nature, but academia in these - the Dark Ages of economics - has a difficult time permitting such a realization.

Back to fatal conceit, Hayek lays out the following:

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account."

The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 76

 

The delusion of 'the naïve mind' 'that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement' is driven by something. Of course there is ignorance of what reality is like but something drives the possessor of the naïve mind; something that stirs up enough arrogance to presume that a finite mind can comprehend what is relatively infinite and to presume that justice can come from such a puny comprehension. The ego (there is a duality to ego in humans) that blinds a human to his/her own limitations, and at the same time represents a denial of the All-Knowing and All-Merciful God, has always been a part of the dual nature of humans and in Scriptures of old it has been called satan.

 

In the divine economy theory fatal conceit is explained more thoroughly. All interventionism is ego-driven and all reasoning used to justify interventionism is ego-driven interpretation.

 

Ironically the moral relativism that emerged when classical liberalism was attacked by the State is also responsible for the fallacy that claims that wertfrei requires the separation of science and religion. And so hand-in-hand interventionism and atheism destroy economic science and civilization.

 

Ego-driven interventionism and ego-driven interpretation explain in much greater detail the invalidity and the immorality of the fatal conceit. What this means is that if you think that the scientific works of Fredrich von Hayek are important for the cause of liberty then the divine economy theory is at least as important! As a scholar or as a scientist or simply as a subjective human being interested in an greater understanding of human action you do not want to ignore the discoveries uncovered in the divine economy theory.

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