“The liberals of the eighteenth century were filled with boundless optimism. Mankind is rational, which permits the right opinion to emerge in the end. Light will replace darkness. All the efforts of the advocates of darkness to keep them in darkness in order to rule them more easily cannot prevent progress. Thus enlightened by reason, mankind is moving toward ever greater perfection. Democracy with its freedom of thought, speech and press assures the success of the right doctrine. Let the masses decide; they will choose wisely... But we fail to understand what is involved if we expect help from the election system or public education.....Technical changes to the election systems would even deny some the right to participate in the election of a legislature and of an administration. But this would be no solution. If the masses of people oppose an administration that was formed by a minority, it cannot indefinitely survive. If it fails to yield to popular opinion it will be overthrown by revolution. We re badly deceived to believe that more schools or lectures or a popularization of books and journals could promote the right doctrine......The evil consists precisely in the peoples intellectual disqualifications to choose the means that lead to the desired objectives. The fact that facile doctrines can be foisted onto people indicates they are incapable of independent dent judgment. This is precisely the great danger. I thus had arrived at this hopeless pessimism that for a long time had burdened the best minds of Europe.... This pessimism had broken the strength of Carl Menger, and it overshadowed the life of Max Weber.... It is a matter of temperament how we shape our lives in the knowledge of an inescapable catastrophe. In high school I had chosen the verse by Virgil as my motto: Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito (“Do not yield to the bad, but always oppose it with courage”). In the darkest hours of the war, I recalled this dictum. Again and again I faced situations from which rational deliberations could find no escape. But then something unexpected occurred that brought deliverance. I could not lose courage even now. I would do everything an economist could do. I would not tire in professing what I knew to be right. I decided to write a book on socialism I had contemplated before the war.......” ~ Ludwig von Mises, in“Notes & Recollections” pp. 61-62 bit.ly/1i6Wa0H (pdf file)
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 19:14:01 +0000
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