Chapter Ǵǵ: Hayek on the Psychology of Socialism and Freedom ȃǿȀWhen one uses a foreign language, particularly over the telephone,
what he hears—not just understands, but even hears—depends on how
well he knows the language, that is, on his previous experience.
Hayek’s theory, along with Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive disso-
nance, helps explain why many people cannot recognize the worst source
of cruelty, predation, and mortal peril in the world today and instead
dump the blame onto those Western statesmen who do identify the evil
and call for adequate defense. Ļose theories also help explain why cer-
tain economists who trumpet their supposed empirical orientation never-
theless cannot see which of their favorite postulates are falsified by facts
and cannot see how substantial or how slight the results are that their
favorite methods have yielded. Admittedly, it may be I, not the people I
am criticizing, who is wrong; but then my errors would still illustrate the
central point that the experiences and the mind set one brings to a cogni-
tive situation affect not only one’s interpretation of it but even what one
can see.
Many writers have presumably been criticized, as I have, for views they
had not expressed. Ļeir readers evidently could not perceive, unfiltered,
what they were saying. Rather, the readers classified the material in their
own preexisting pigeonholes. Ļey then reacted to what their filing sys-
tems accommodated, not just to any bare substance of what had been said.
Ļe message that a reader draws from a book follows partly from the
experiences he brings to it, including his past reading. Ļat is why a book
reread after a long interval may make a different impression than before.
ŠŔő ŞśōŐ Šś şőŞŒŐśř
Ļat is howĻe Road to Serfdomhas affected me. Ļe book’s central mes-
sage is, of course, hard to miss: Socialism, in the sense of collective own-
ership of the means of production and central direction of economic life,
entails loss of personal freedom. What came more strongly to my atten-
tion is Hayek’s concern with political institutions and incentives and also
with linkages of ideas. Since I had also been sensitized in the meanwhile to
Hayek’s interest in psychology, the same is true of his many psychological
insights.
Ļese, inĻe Road to Serfdom, are insights of “literary” psychology
(“thymology,” as Ludwig von Mises called it) rather than of the techni-
cal discipline. Hayek stresses the influence of beliefs and attitudes and
explores reasons why people hold them.