Knowledge And Decisions

As noted in Chapter 8, special interests can serve a useful social purpose in airing issues — especially when there are competing special interests and they are all recognized for what they are. The political advantages of intellectuals derive precisely from their not being recognized as interested parties. It is this difference in the public’s cost of knowledge of the personal stakes of the spokesman involved when businessmen, academic intellectuals, and others dispute that gives the intellectuals their decisive advantage. In many issues, there are no competing organized interests to challenge the intellectuals, as when it is a question of taking tax money and using it to create or support programs that intellectuals favor on ideological grounds or for personal gain. Vast governmental research funds, controlled by the very agencies whose performances and impact are being evaluated, ensure that any politically sophisticated agency can field a battalion of precommitted “experts” from among its academic grant recipients and consultants. Not all of the latter are simply “hired guns.” As long as the agency involved can select among grant recipients, they can choose people sincerely committed to their viewpoint and not those sincerely committed to opposite views. The former will have massive research to back up their viewpoint; the latter may be reduced to speaking in generalities or raising methodological questions about others’ research, neither of which is very effective politically. The net result is that tax money is used to subsidize campaigns to get more tax money. More important, from the standpoint of freedom, central government power is used to promote more central government power, with intellectuals a major force in these efforts.

Despite their acceptance as independent “experts” giving objective judgements, intellectuals have enormous personal stakes. In addition to their immediate personal gains as individuals, intellectuals as a class are dependent upon the backing of political power to impose their visions on the underlying population. The history of intellectuals from the Roman and Chinese empires to the French Revolution to modern totalitarianism shows how compelling a goal that has been, and how readily the freedom of others is sacrificed to such visions — whether of religious salvation, or “social justice.” Totalitarianism is only a carrying to its logical conclusion of the view that the vision — ideals, principles, religion, etc. — is paramount and flesh-and-blood human beings expendable.

Ironically, despite intellectuals’ power concentrating role and their insulation of that power from public feedback, among their justifications is that other decision-making elites possess concentrated power, and are unaccountable in its use. Attempts to depict nonintellectual decision makers as both powerful and socially irresponsible are clearly in the class interest of intellectuals. Moreover, it is easy for intellectuals to conceive of rival elites as unaccountable powers because their accountability is often not in terms of articulated rationality, the central modality of intellectuals. Corporate executives’ decisions may reflect very little articulated input from the public and may be accompanied by very little discussion of their own reasons, or may even be obfuscated by public relations statements — and yet be responsive to public opinion to the point of paranoia about offending, boring, or otherwise losing their customers. The extreme sensitivity of television networks to program ratings is a classic case of corporate hyperresponsiveness in a situation where there is virtually no articulate consumer-producer interaction. The Edsel was not dropped, nor the W.T. Grant department store chain liquidated because of articulation in either direction, but because customer choices forced such decisions.

In short, the absence of articulated accountability is not an absence of accountability as such. Conversely, the presence of articulation, and of phrases about “the public interest” or “the people” does not imply accountability, whether such phrases are used by intellectuals, politicians, or corporate press agents copying their styles to convey a fashionable image of “corporate responsibility.” The decisive knowledge that is conveyed, and responded to, is transmitted financially. Accountability is apparent not only in the dramatic cases where famous products or companies disappear, but more pervasively in the constant changing of products, corporate policies and/or managements to accomodate changing consumer preferences and changing technological and organizational possibilities.