VIII. The Pattern of Failure
Across every domain—political, economic, scientific—the same pattern emerges. An elegant theory is proposed, grounded in Enlightenment premises. The theory gains acceptance among the educated, becomes institutionalized in universities and governments, and achieves the status of unquestionable orthodoxy. Objections are raised, first on logical grounds; these are dismissed as mere philosophical and religious tradition and out of touch with practical reality. Objections are raised on mathematical grounds; these are dismissed as abstract modeling, irrelevant to the empirical world. Finally, empirical evidence accumulates that directly contradicts the theory, and the evidence is ignored, or misinterpreted and woven into the theory, or suppressed.
The defenders of the orthodoxy are not stupid, nor are they uniquely corrupt. They are responding to structural incentives. The infrastructure of modern intellectual life, of academic tenure, peer review, grant funding, journal publication, awards, and media respectability, all punish dissent and reward conformity. The young scholar who challenges the paradigm does not become a celebrated revolutionary; he becomes unemployable. The established professor who admits error does not become a model of intellectual honesty; he is either sidelined or prosecuted and becomes a cautionary tale. The incentives select for defenders, and the defenders select the next generation of defenders, and the orthodoxy perpetuates itself long after its intellectual foundations have crumbled.
The abstract and aspirational character of Enlightenment ideas made them particularly resistant to refutation. A claim about the invisible hand or the general will or the arc of progress is not easily tested. For who can see this hand or walk under that arc? By the time the empirical test that the average individual can understand becomes possible, generations have passed, the idea has become institutionalized, careers have been built upon it, and far too many influential people have too much to lose from admitting error. The very abstraction that made the ideas appealing in the first place—their generality, their elegance, their apparent applicability to all times and places—also made them difficult to pin down and hold accountable.
The more concrete ideas failed first. The Terror exposed the social contract within a decade. The supply and demand curve was refuted by 1953, though few noticed. The mathematical impossibility of Neo-Darwinism was demonstrated by 1966, though the biologists failed to explore the implications. The empirical failures of free trade have accumulated for forty years, and even to this day, economists continue to prescribe the same failed remedies for the economies their measures have destroyed. The pattern of Enlightenment failure is consistent: logic first, then mathematics, then empirical evidence—and still the orthodoxy persists, funded by corruption and sustained by institutional inertia and the professional interests of its beneficiaries.