Gullibility

Why should one believe something to be true? It is disquieting how otherwise intelligent people believe implausible interpretations of events or grandstanding pronouncements on religion or society from the gurus of the day. Elon Musk is known for his impulsive one-liner philosophy, and his theological and political musings mentioned by Wall Street Journal columnist Tim Higgins (“Elon Musk’s Walk With Jesus,” August 17, 2024) seem to be in the same vein:

Elon Musk is publicly offering his own interpretation of Jesus’ teachings with an Old Testament twist. …

We are increasingly seeing Musk invoke religion as he discusses his worldviews on topics ranging from parenthood to freedom of speech. …

“There’s a lack of empathy for the victims of the criminals and too much empathy for the criminals,” Musk said. “That’s why you want to have deep empathy for society as a whole, not shallow empathy for criminals.”

Why should anybody attach any importance to what Mr. Musk thinks about the unicorn of “society as a whole”?

What should lead one to believe something? Scientific proof must be at the top of the justifications for beliefs. If a coherent theory forecasts a result and empirical evidence confirms it, it should be believed—until contrary empirical evidence provides a falsification.

In the field of social science—that is, economics or economic methodology—one example is the law of demand. There is no logically coherent theory implying that people will buy more of something only because its price has increased. On the contrary, economic theory proves the opposite, like a theorem in Euclidean geometry. (When a luxury good is purchased as a status symbol, it is status that is purchased, and the quantity demanded of status symbols will decrease as they become more expensive. This explains why not everybody buys Louis Vuitton baseball caps at 500€ a piece.) Casual observation and econometric evidence show that, ceteris paribus, the quantity demanded decreases when the price increases, and mutatis mutandis. Given free will, it is not impossible that an eccentric would once in a blue moon buy one more piece of bubble gum just because its price has increased, but that will not shift the market demand curve in a detectable way.

A related implication of economic theory is that an explanation must be compatible with incentives of individuals, who maximize their utility—that is, who try to improve their situations as each evaluates it according to his own preferences. For example, it would have been very surprising if the Sandy Hook massacre had been staged by the deep state because such an operation would not be incentive-compatible for individual government agents in an open society with some rule of law. (Note that Elon Musk did not believe that particular conspiracy theory.)

I have mentioned logical coherence, which is a basic condition for believing that something is true. The ancient Greek philosophers made that discovery. If a belief implies both A and non-A, it must be rejected.

In the whole wide universe, there is much that we don’t understand and that we cannot hope to understand; Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is only one indication. Perhaps we must keep a little window open for subjective faith along with music and poetry. Ten years before being awarded the 2912 Nobel Prize in medicine, French physician Alexis Carrel, an atheist, converted to Catholicism after witnessing what he could only explain as a miracle at the Lourdes pilgrimage center. (It did not help his career in France and, by 1912, he was living in the United States.) We should still maintain a dose of rational skepticism: in his book The Impossibility Principle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), statistician David Hand shows how miracles and “miraculous” coincidences can often (he would say always) be explained with probability theory.

In the realm of social behavior, as F.A. Hayek showed, we must also leave room for the meta-rationality of following social rules that have demonstrated their usefulness as an adaptation to our ignorance.

Only the gullible believe social gurus or philosopher-kings who have not demonstrated any structured knowledge and understanding of how society (including politics and the economy) works, and who pretend to know the “public good” and to dictate how others should live. Gullibility seems to seems to have the wind in its sails.

We may relate these reflections to three recent thinkers who have much advanced our knowledge of social affairs and debunked the pretensions of would-be philosopher-kings. Anthony de Jasay argued that a social convention of “live and let live,” when it involves no harm to others, “demands far less of our moral credulity” than other political principles.

In their seminal book, The Calculus of Consent, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock offer an interesting remark:

Christian idealism, to be effective in leading to a more harmonious social order, must be tempered by an acceptance of the moral imperative of individualism, the rule of equal freedom. The acceptance of the right of the individual to do as he desires so long as his action does not infringe on the freedom of other individuals to do likewise must be a characteristic trait in any “good” society. The precept “Love thy neighbor, but also let him alone when he desires to be let alone” may, in one sense, be said to be the overriding ethical principle for Western liberal society.

In Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative (Edward Elgar, 2006), James Buchanan, who was far from an elitist, strongly defended structured knowledge. Reviewing this book in Regulation, I paraphrased what he saw as one requirement of a free society:

Individuals must understand “simple principles of social interaction,” and that entails “a generalized understanding of basic economics.” Or else, Buchanan claims, they must show “a widespread willingness” to defer to others who do understand.

As far as I can see, Mr. Musk is far from any sort of structured social or philosophical knowledge. That he has demonstrated entrepreneurial intuition and talents (see Israel Kirzner, Competition and Entrepreneurship [University of Chicago Press, 1973]) gives him no special intellectual authority to pronounce on matters of theology and politics. We don’t even have to note that he seems to be also (or mainly?) an efficient political rent seeker. The most dangerous gurus are political gurus—“political” in the sense of wanting to force others to live in certain ways or pay for others’ privileges. Certainly, there is no reason to believe something only because Musk says so.

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