Mises’s ‘Fight Against Error’
One of my favorite sections of Ludwig von Mises’s majestic treatise Human Action (1949) is a rather short one titled “The Fight Against Error.” Its main theme is to show how mankind’s problems come down to errors arising from flawed economic ideologies. He writes: “The main objective of…economics is to substitute consistent correct ideologies for the contradictory tenets of popular eclecticism.”
In some ways, civilization can be seen as a sort of bridge which must be engineered and understood using the proper materials and methods if it is to last and lay a foundation for a more prosperous future. A faulty understanding which just patches things only delays a future calamity. Mises writes:
Logical thinking and real life are not two separate orbits. Logic is for man the only means to master the problems of reality. What is contradictory in theory, is no less contradictory in reality. No ideological inconsistency can provide a satisfactory, i.e., working, solution for the problems offered by the facts of the world. The only effect of contradictory ideologies is to conceal the real problems and thus to prevent people from finding in time an appropriate policy for solving them. Inconsistent ideologies may sometimes postpone the emergence of a manifest conflict. But they certainly aggravate the evils which they mask and render a final solution more difficult. They multiply the agonies, they intensify the hatreds, and make peaceful settlement impossible. It is a serious blunder to consider ideological contradictions harmless or even beneficial.
Thus Mises had a laser-like focus on ideas and education. Elsewhere Mises stresses what should be obvious:
It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales.
Unfortunately, the public—and even most “i
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