A fascinating passage I read today:
One economist in an unusual situation showed how the physical fallacy does not depend on any unique historical circumstance but easily arises from human psychology. He watched the entire syndrome emerge before his eyes when he spent time in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp. Every month the prisoners received identical packages from the Red Cross. A few prisoners circulated throughout the camp, trading and lending chocolates, cigarettes, and other commodities among prisoners who valued some items more than others, or who had used up their own rations before the end of the month. The middlemen made a small profit from each transaction, and as a result they were deeply resented — a microcosm of the tragedy of the middleman minority. The economist wrote: “[The middleman's] function, and his hard work in bringing buyer and seller together, were ignored; profits were not regarded as a reward for labour, but as the result of sharp practises. Despite the fact that his very existence was proof to the contrary, the middleman was held to be redundant.”1
Above all else, I am interested by the common pattern of behavior described in the last sentence, a pattern responsible for the numerous failed idealist movements in history, movements too often pursuing goals basically at odds with what experience would teach us, pursuing visions of society far too lacking in detail to be practicable.
We think changing society is far easier than it is: we fail to realize how complex the organization of modern society is and how many points of equilibria have already been reached after centuries of allowed conflicting human desires to compete. We cannot simply reconstruct society into any shape we can imagine: first, because our imagination always lacks detail; second, because our imagination is seldom bound by the complex restrictions that human nature imposes.
Too often we hate institutions we have built and sustained ourselves, institutions that do correspond to our actual desires. If we would prefer communism to capitalism, we should cease to buy iPods and the other things capitalism has given us and possibly only capitalism can give us.
To continue our growth, we must cease to allow our actions to belie our dreams.
- Steven Pinker : Blank Slate : Out Of Our Depths↩