This
Essay was prompted by the following remark of Alan
M. Dershowitz about the deterrent system of justice,
i.e., based on the intimidation by the threat of
excessive punishment:
Experience
teaches us that this kind of a system does not work
effectively, since most potential criminals
don't believe they will actually be caught and
convicted.
Alan M. Dershowitz,
The Genesis of Justice, 2000. New York:
Warner Books, p.255.
There
was very little useful knowledge I could
extract from my contacts with the inmates
of Russian prisons and labor camps. It might
have enriched me with understanding myself—a useless
knowledge because I, like the proverbial leopard,
could not change my spots anyway—but the
fringe of humanity offered no new insight into its
core. In contrast with the scientific experiment
that brings the nature to the edge and watches it
crack up under pressure, human nature provides us
only with statistical expectations in place of
intuitive ones.
Among
the meager humanitarian baggage I carried out of the
world of barbed wire, one observation was very close
to the above quotation. I only have a doubt about
the word potential . Potential means not actual, and
many people who have not yet planned and committed
crime are not aware that they are capable of
it. The situation recalls the remark of Robert
Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest
Hemingway. When asked if there were fascists in
America, he said that “there are, but they are not
aware of that.”
The
second and last observation was equally trivial: the
detention does not make anybody better. And that was
all I learned. Alan Dershowitz isabsolutely
right.
Professional
criminals I met were anxious to get back to their
trade and they were sure that next time they would
never make a mistake. Somebody else would be caught
but not they.
The
attitude is not unique to the burglars and thieves.
Everybody drives, flies, goes out, strolls
sidewalks, and enjoys life because he or she
believes that somebody else will get into a traffic
accident, airplane crash, or will get food
poisoning, stray bullet, or cancer. Statistical data
support this belief of the optimist, but, for the
pessimist, probability is the welcoming portal of
misfortune. The asymmetry of human nature makes us
trust the good luck more than the bad one.
I am not
planning a crime and neither have I committed one
(never believe such a statement), but I have
something to confess.
I am an
unwilling liberal: unwilling because I don't like
the reasons why I am liberal.
It is
difficult to start a confession, but then it may be
hard to stop.
I
treasure personal freedom. I don't like
restrictions. As somebody who spent most of his
active life in a totalitarian society, I enjoy
American freedom.
I am not
in opposition to the existing society. I don't know
what a good or better social order is. A social
flaw, as I see it, is nothing but my personal
attitude to it.
I would
probably be more aggressive and intolerant if I
lived an active life, but my activity is over.
Because of that, I have an advantage of
impartiality.
I am not
completely impartial, however, because I am a
liberal. This is a statement, a point of view,
an instinct, and a bias. I have a prejudice of being
liberal. I am not quite tolerant of non-liberals. I
wish I could be more tolerant. I am more
individualist than altruist. I wish I could be more
altruistic. I loathe anarchy but I mistrust
organizations. I am not sure what democracy is and I
believe that any Constitution is conservative by
default. I think that equality is a kind of perpetuum
mobile, the impossible eternal motion. I
believe that cooperation is profitable for both
sides, and we do not have to regard it as a moral
value. I believe that the highest values of life are
health, freedom (see Essay 3, On Free Hay Trade),
and peace of mind, but I would never impose my
somewhat Oriental values on the rest of the
world. I don't believe either happiness or
virtue to be the highest value. I believe that
learning, understanding, and dark chocolate
are among highest bitter-sweet pleasures of life. I
believe love is made of all three. My attitude to
the world is defensive. I do not believe that life
is an absolute, overwhelming and overriding value,
and I believe that there is no single highest and
overriding value.
One of
my deepest convictions is that any abstract idea
that contradicts basic human needs is a definitely
bad abstract idea. To be logical, it means that
"bad" is not bad idea per se but only its
extreme and unopposed advance. It also means that
the basic needs are those recognized by an absolute
majority of people, and the opinion of the absolute
majority of people is something I cannot rely on.
But that
was not my confession, just a warm-up.
I
confess that I am a liberal because I believe, like
a thief, that somebody will take the risks of
liberalism, while I will definitely enjoy liberal
democracy or suffer the consequences of
anti-liberalism.
There is
neither a universally accepted understanding of what
liberalism is, nor a unity among people regarding
themselves or others liberals, nor any chance for
anybody to read all the uncountable special
literature on the subject which comprises all of the
humanities.
Steve
Kangas maintains a
bird's eye view site on
liberalism. The site
works as a psychoanalyst's session: it makes the
reader discover, to his or her surprise, something
deeply hidden in the mind. Or, if you wish, it is a
lie detector test.
For
example, I was surprised to find out that I,
considering myself a liberal, tend to disagree with
at least five out of eight characteristics of liberalism
as opposed to conservatism:
Looking for various definitions, I did not find myself
at odds with definitions of liberalism associating it
with "individual freedom," ( definition
1 ) such qualities as "intellectually
independent, broad-minded, magnanimous, frank, open,
and genial" ( definition
2 ) , although I cannot accept that:
A fundamental principle of Liberalism is the
proposition: "It is contrary to the natural, innate,
and inalienable right and liberty and dignity of man,
to subject himself to an authority, the root, rule,
measure, and sanction of which is not in himself" (definition 2).
I believe this sounds more like the credo of
anarchism.
That
"Liberals want to change things to increase personal
freedom and tolerance, and are willing to empower
government to the extent necessary to achieve those
ends" (definition
3) seems to
directly contradict definition 2: how can one demand
from anybody to succumb to the will of the
government if it is contrary to one's dignity?
Finally,
definition 4 has nothing to do at all with
liberalism as I understand it, which may mean that I
don't understand it at all:
1: a
political orientation that favors progress and
reform 2: an
economic theory advocating free competition and a
self-regulating market
and the gold standard.
I don't
know about the gold standard, but a self-regulating
market advocates anything but equality and any
right-wing conservative is for reforms.
I am not
even sure what the opposite of liberalism is. One
can conservatively believe in old liberal values and
resist the postmodern and frivolous ones.
Like
many readers, I was greatly impressed, without being
convinced, by Francis Fukuyama's The End of
History and the Last Man. I see this book as
a concise critical introduction into liberalism. It
is complemented with the author's position that
summarizes a host of accumulated over decades hints,
forebodings, views, and ideas, partly old and
fossilized, and partly new and shyly fluttering in
the air. It seems, however, that the reaction of
academic reviewers was rather negative or
condescending, but it was not an academic book but
an extended question. An answer can be wrong but a
question is always right, whatever we say about
"wrong question."
The
title of the Fukuyama's book starts with an allusion
to G. W. F. Hegel who, having witnessed the French
Revolution, saw the final phase of world history in
the reign of law and personal freedom, which for him
was freedom of Spirit.
It is
worth mentioning that Hegel saw the beneficial
end of history in German monarchy, too, because:
Yet
with
firmly established laws, and a settled organization
of the State, what is left to the sole arbitrament
of the monarch is, in points of substance, no great
matter. It is certainly a very fortunate
circumstance for a nation, when a sovereign of noble
character falls to its lot; yet in a great state
even this is of small moment, since its strength
lies in the Reason incorporated in it. (Hegel: The Philosophy of
History, pdf)
The second part of the title points to Nietzsche who
in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra wrote:
There cometh the time of the most despicable man,
who can no longer despise himself. Lo! I
show you THE LAST MAN. "What is love?
What is creation? What is longing? What
is a star?"--so asketh the last man and
blinketh. The earth hath then become small,
and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh
everything small.
History formally linked Hegel (through his distant
student Karl Marx) and Nietzsche to the roots of
the self-destructive ideas of fascism and communism.
The lives of Hegel (1770-1831), Marx (1818-1883),
Nietzsche (1844-1900), Lenin (1870-1924), and Hitler
(1889-1945) overlapped, covering a long historical
period, like a growing cloud from which the
thunderbolt of the World War II finally struck. Of
course, to blame philosophers for that is like to
blame Richard Wagner for the Holocaust. The French
Revolution that inspired Hegel was gruesome enough.
In a
very simplified form, Fukuyama's concept means that
the liberal democracy, equalizing all individuals
and groups, leads to either bleak purposeless
existence of the Nietzschean last men or to an
advent of a new totalitarian strongman. Ideas do not
die, but liberal democracy seems to be an idea
loaded with a kind of self-destructive
implementation and more appealing as an ideal than
as a reality. In short, it is philosophically
incorrect to be happy even if it is politically
correct.
Strangely
anticipating Nietzsche, Hegel wrote in Philosophy
of History that "periods of happiness
are blank pages" in the history of the world. Hitler
and Stalin certainly left no paper wasted, but made
their nations happy for a while. I suspect, however,
that history hates void as much as physical nature
does, and we need not be concerned about being bored
by happiness.
By the
very nature of my Essays I have to remain at the
level of impressions and analogies, which means to
be wired above the ground like Peter Pan over the
theater stage. I cannot descend on the floor of
research and analysis. I would only add that
Fukuyama is not alone, although nobody has stated
the problem so head-on, and with so much
argumentation and refinement, although not without
ambiguity.
Here is
my personal view of liberalism, which may not be too
original.
Most
people in the world are not concerned with politics,
philosophy, and art and live by basic human needs
that include entertaining and pleasure together with
needs of the body. They accept the existing order
and mind their business. They have their radius of
freedom. They are happy to be like everybody. They
work, love, and live. Others—a minority—try to
create something that would distinguish them from
the rest and set apart from the average. But what is
average and what does it mean to be set apart from
it?
The
following curve is known as the bell curve or
normal distribution curve and although it is
a mathematical object, it carries some political
charge.
Its
meaning is very simple. If the property is
the height of a human, then most probable
height of a randomly chosen person is close to the
average represented by point C on the curve. The
more the height differs from the average, the less
probable it is. There are very few very tall people
and very few very short ones. Thus, 68 % of all
people have heights between vertical lines B and D
and 95% have heights between A and E. Separate
measurements for men and women would give two
different curves of similar shape but with different
average. Similarly, the height curves for Thailand
and Sweden will have different averages.
The
normal distribution curve is symmetrical, which
means that there must be an approximately equal
number of deviations up and down from the average.
In the normal distribution, the deviation of the
value is, theoretically, infinite in both opposite
directions, although large deviations are
practically impossible.
There is
a neat demo of the
normal distribution and a lot of
sites on the subject where one can find the reason
for the mysterious numbers 68% and 95% ,
points B and D, and other things highly relevant for
understanding the reality of everyday life and for
many social and political issues.
The real
probability distribution in nature and technology
may not be completely normal if there are
constraints on the measured property, i.e., somebody
or something works on the system in order to make it
less random. For example, the height of a
free-growing apple tree distributes normally, but in
the garden, under artificial selection, it can be
skewed by cutting down all trees only below or only
above a certain height. Systems with competition for
a limited resource can also present a highly biased
picture. Normal distribution is an evidence of the
random nature of processes leading to a certain
height as well as of sampling.
A highly
ordered system has a very narrow probability
distribution, with the majority of components very
close to the average. A more chaotic system tends to
have a flattened distribution, with outstretched
wings.
In general, the shape
of the probability distribution for a particular
random system can vary but the main principle is that
the larger the deviation from the average, the less
probable it is. Thus formulated, it is simply common
sense, like much of the science of probabilities.
The
distribution of the speed of molecules (see
Essay 14, On Taking Temperature with a Clock
, from which the figure on the right is copied) is
not normal. Still, the shape of the curve is close
to the bell form, although stretched in one
direction. This skewed bell shape is known as
Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and it depends on the
temperature.
NOTE: In Essay
31, On Poverty, a bell shape deformed
into a shark fin shape can be found.
Since energy is proportional to the square of the
speed, the distribution of energies will look
similar to the speed distribution.
There is
a cardinal difference between height of humans and
speed of molecules. While height is a permanent
property of an individual adult, speed is a dynamic
property. A molecule constantly changes its speed
vector as result of collisions with other molecules.
Human society combines static and dynamic properties
as result of various kinds of exchange between its
members, for example, exchange of wealth and
opinion. This is why humans bear some
"molecularity:" not because there are a lot of them
and they are in motion—so is sand in the tide—but
because they are involved in a constant interaction.
This is what we call dynamic system.
The
physical details about Maxwell-Boltzmann
distribution are abundant on the Web, see a good
analysis and simulator , with
remarkable "big picture" generalizations somewhat
relevant for the human "big picture" I am trying to
imagine.
Human
energy, determination, spirit, charisma, stamina,
ambition, momentum, drive, creativity, intelligence,
pride, and other dynamic properties vary from,
theoretically, zero, to, theoretically, if not
infinite then some potentially large value. Its
limit is as unknown as any future sports record. If
only we could measure ambition like we measure
height! We still can do it without numbers, see Essay
13, On Numbers.
Since
ancient times, philosophers and, later, social
psychologists tried to define the evasive and
multifaceted dynamic property that Plato called thymos
butregarded it as a static component of
the soul.
The
following quotation from Francis Fukuyama's book
gives not only a condensed explanation but also a
sample of his style.
It was first
described by Plato in the Republic, when he noted
that there were three parts to the soul, a desiring
part, a reasoning part, and a part that he called thymos,
or "spiritedness." Much of human behavior can be
explained as a combination of the first two parts,
desire and reason: desire induces men to seek things
outside themselves, while reason or calculation
shows them the best way to get them. But in
addition, human beings seek recognition of their own
worth, or of the people, things, or principles that
they invest with worth. The propensity to invest the
self with a certain value, and to demand recognition
for that value, is what in today's popular language
we would call "self-esteem." The propensity to feel
self-esteem arises out of the part of the soul
called thymos. It is like an innate human
sense of justice. People believe that they have a
certain worth, and when other people treat them as
though they are worth less than that, they
experience the emotion of anger. Conversely,
when people fail to live up to their own sense of
worth, they feel shame, and when they are
evaluated correctly in proportion to their worth,
they feel pride. The desire for recognition,
and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and
pride, are parts of the human personality critical
to political life. According to Hegel, they are what
drives the whole historical process.
The big
picture is that any human ability, physical as well
as intellectual and related to character,
distributes over the population along some bell-like
curve, varying from zero to yet unknown record
limit. I believe, so does what Fukuyama calls,
after Plato, thymos.
I would
define "generalized thymos" as the will (desire,
volition, activity, etc.) of an individual to
deviate from the average. Plato believed it was the
drive to recognition, Nietzsche saw it as power,
Napoleon and Hitler saw it as conquest, Lenin and
Stalin saw it as maximal political domination, but
it does not really matter what they wanted. What
matters is that they wanted it very much and not
only wanted but acted toward achieving their goal.
Ambition is, probably, the best modern approximation
of the Greek thymos.
I would
call it energy: the human drive to reach the extreme
outward wing of the bell curve. We actually widely
use the word creative energy in this sense. The
recognition comes as a number: money, possessions,
territory, sales, prize, romances, awards,
publications, grants, references, media attention,
biographies, etc., or simply being number one. It
depends on the interaction with other people, like
the energy of molecules.
Among
people with high energy (Vilfredo Pareto's elites,
see Note 1) we can find not only conquerors and
emperors but also great philosophers, artists,
scientists, inventors, builders, founders of
institutions, national leaders who selflessly served
the nation in times of a crisis, reformers,
industrialists, philanthropists, leaders of
social or ethnic movements, and others who were
mostly but not always universally praised by the
posterity. Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche are in the
same wing of the curve with Napoleon.
Instead
of— or in addition to—enjoying whatever life brings,
focusing on everyday problems, making day to day
decisions, struggling for personal survival,
limiting the sphere of personal interests by family,
friends, and pets, pursuing pleasure, accepting the
existing order or fighting for a comfortable
personal place in it, "people of the wing" did
what historically only a minority could do: they
left the world changed not over millennia, as nature
does, but, sometimes, overnight.
I do not
see any reason either to scorn the common people and
extol the commanding ones, as Nietzsche did, or to
reverse the sympathies, as Leo Tolstoy did, or to
pit one against the other, as Francis Fukuyama's
concept might unintentionally imply.
The
principle of ethical equality, not the equality of
numbers, is one of the points of my definition for
liberalism, together with compassion, understanding,
and skepticism.
My
equality is the equality under the bell, i.e., under
the laws of nature, and not under the laws of the
book. Any book might be short of compassion and
reason and should be taken with skepticism.
Having
come from the Soviet Communism known in the West for
inhuman cruelty, I have often been struck by the
cruelty and irrational excesses of the
American law in both punishment and reward. The
maximum prison term in the Soviet Union was fifteen
years.
The
bell-shaped distribution is the law of nature. The
potatoes may be of different size, but they all are
the farmer's crop. The absolute majority of people
we are attached to are close to average.
Here,
however, I am interested in the big potatoes
of creative energy.
I
believe that there are two basic creative attitudes
to life. I would call the extremes leaders
and dreamers. An alternative term for leader
is dealer.
Artists
and philosophers were pure dreamers because
they produced new ideas and images that
required little physical energy and can be done
strictly individually, without a team. The dreamer
manipulates words, brush strokes, sounds, images,
words, ideas, and, sometimes, modest hardware. A
teenager at the computer is also a dreamer in this
sense.
Leaders, like
Napoleon, could impose their will on huge armies and
bring them into motion with destructive and
constructive goals. Realization of the goals often
required spending enormous physical energy and could
never be accomplished individually. Pyramids of
Egypt and America are classical examples.
The
leader creates the desired order by will and power.
Most of human history has been driven by the extreme
leaders: king, emperor, gray cardinal, general,
industrialist, organizer, founder, revolutionary,
national leader, etc., who does not necessarily
wins. A leader can be liberal in the common
political sense. The essence of being a leader is to
be strong. The leader manipulates fellow humans like
the teenager the keyboard, Hegel ideas, and the
Pharaoh's builder the stone blocks. In essence,
however, it is the same abstract game of Lego.
There is
a big and radical difference in the position of the
leader and the dreamer. The leader simply makes what
he or she wants by controlling (see Essay
15. On menage a trois in the Stone Age)
resources of energy, labor, and human emotions. The
leader sets the rules of the game, like the
Nietzsche's Superman (ironically, the liberal
cartoon Superman simply solves daily problems
without setting the rules).
The
leader is strong with all his human weakness.
The
strength of the week is in their large numbers while
the strength of the strong is in small numbers of
competitors.
The
dreamer is weak because he is alone, although he can
be humanly strong. The development of
individualism in the Western civilization, since the
Greeks and through Christianity, taught him that his
life was as valuable as any other. This idea, that
might have looked crazy to the pharaohs and Chinese
emperors, could appear only in communities of a
medium size, more than family but less than kingdom,
i.e., in the city and city-state. The pressure
in the pumped-up tire is the resistence of molecular
individualism.
The
dreamer seeks protection from social harm by
appealing to a force as strong as that of the
leader: the law based on the principles of
individual freedom and equality, i.e., the liberal
democracy that does not make the dreamer stronger
but makes the leader weaker. The dreamer believes
that he can survive alone in the environment of
equality where predators are declawed. But in his
heart, the energetic dreamer never believes he or
she is equal to others.
Liberal
democracy would be wishful thinking of the dreamers
if not for the Industrial Revolution and capitalism.
Democracy
displaced monarchy for different reasons in
different countries. Revolutions were made by
leaders along the ideas of the dreamers, but they
also transformed some dreamers into leaders. At some
extent the new order has made most common people
dreamers of a kind, literally, with the run of the
mill dream of the pursuit of happiness. The average
citizen of democracy is a mini-dreamer whose dream
is to win a fair competition, but there is no
fairness in big numbers, only probability.
The
great paradox of equality is that you are lost in
it, unless there is a hierarchy, i.e., inequality.
You are lost like a book in a big library without a
catalog. You are lost until somebody tells the
potential readers that you exist whether as
individual or as a category. You are lost like a
site on the Web unless it is linked to star sites.
Liberals pursue equality in the hope to distance
themselves from it. They believe that somebody else
will be lost, but not they.
Fighting
the depressing equality, individualism creates
hierarchies, pecking orders, ratings, stars, and
satellites. It means giving recognition to dozens of
small and temporary Napoleons and Hegels,
Shakespeares and Rembrandts of the day. The
spontaneous generation of dynamic hierarchy by
liberal democracy is the phenomenon that plays the
role of an automatic control that keeps liberalism
at a certain steady but slowly drifting state.
Liberalism
is self-contained, while despotism can be unopposed.
This is why liberalism is not as suicidal as it may
seem. Too much liberalism is as improbable as too
much body height. Besides, there are always embryos
of future leaders in the cocoons of dreams. The
leader has no heirs.
The
lonely dreamer can stand against despotism only if
he is a soldier of an army of volunteers, and this
is possible if all the other soldiers are in sync
with him. The strength of the democratic army
lies in its numbers and in three pieces of weaponry:
voting power, labor power, and consumer power.
The dreamer unites the crowds with his or her
liberal ideas that require maybe just a cup of
coffee to be formulated, while the despot needs well
fed goon squads, tanks, and prisons to contain
immaterial ideas—the goal doomed from the start,
but, probably, only in the long run.
It is
remarkable how recent social evolution has been
taking away a good part of the voting power and
labor power from the masses by developing the
national and global economy that depends on the
individual voter, worker, and consumer. The
political reality has made politicians more
interchangeable and the choice between the
candidates less crucial. The economic system and the
related culture of consumption and debt made the
labor less willing to take risks. But the role of
the consumer shot up. The consumer became the
omnipotent democratic constituency. This
fusion of consumer base with political base is, in
my opinion, one of the most pronounced and funny to
watch trends of liberal democracy. No wonder that
free market is a liberal ideal.
Any
member of the creative elite of dreamers—artist,
scientist, writer, pop star, and
philosopher—produces goods for sale and has no
desire to limit his consumer base by alienating
buyers, students, grant review boards, readers,
listeners, and minorities because in the consumer
society the punishment for narrowing the
consumer/constituency base hurts incomparably more
than it did two centuries back, in the mansards of
Montmartre. Here is a telling illustration of
the fusion of politics and economy:
The
growing
black middle and working classes put their money and
the bodies on the line. In addition, because the
consumer economy depended on consumer purchasing,
black demands had to be taken seriously. By 1970,
black buying power topped $25 billion, a large
enough sum to make the threat of boycotts an
effective weapon for social change. (
Harvard Sitkoff, The Preconditions for Racial
Change, from: A History of Our Time: Readings on Postwar
America,
Edited by William H. Chafe, Harvard Sitkoff, New
York, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987, p.153. )
It is funny to watch how a politician who is supposed
to be a leader becomes a dreamer navigating between
the irreconcilable consumer/constituency tastes. Today
every presidential candidate says "I have a dream"
after one of a very few true leaders who were also
true dreamers.
Like
order and chaos, liberalism and anti-liberalism,
whatever the latter is, are only the extreme ends of
the continuous scale. Whoever calls for equality,
calls for the inequality of the bell curve. Whoever
calls for inequality, all the more, calls for
inequality.
Theoretically,
there are two possible opposite political doctrines:
one is for the normalization of the bell curve
(political and market liberalism) and the other,
like the gardener who cuts the apple trees, is for
interference with it, i.e., denormalization of the
curve (slavery, apartheid, cast system, class and
group politics, entitlements, and war on either
poverty or wealth fall into this category). There is
yet another possible pair: one calls for narrowing
the distribution tight around the average (this is
close to socialism), and the other calls for
flattening it (the law of the jungle or food chain).
Finally, the third possible pair calls either for
raising the temperature (cultural liberalism) or for
freezing (totalitarianism, fundamentalism).
The property
presented by the curve can be any, but wealth,
income, knowledge, and opportunities are never
distributed along the normal bell curve, see Essay
31, On Poverty.
This subject
is inexhaustible and it is not my intent to burrow
into it any deeper. If it were, I would next explore
the phenomenon of the star, individual as
well as corporate, this new embodiment of Superman,
Superwoman, and Superchild that pushes aside both
leaders and dreamers, and how liberalism entrusts
bureaucracy to enforce hierarchy, and how liberal
society inadvertently loses in conflicts with
non-liberal ones on the global arena.
My
rational intent was to add to my Essay 9, On
Work that understanding is compassion
and it may be very humane to complement dark Hegel
and Nietzsche with some undergraduate laws of
nature.
My
irrational intent was to confess that I am a
deeply convinced liberal and ashamed of it because,
enjoying liberal democracy, I believe that somebody
else will get bad luck, while I will have all the
juice.
Like the
King Midas who shaves
himself, I am
confessing to the hole in the ground that I have
donkey's ears. Having done that, I feel less shame.
Probably, I am not that much liberal, after all. But
just one look at the Web sites of anti-liberals
drives me back to my true flock.
1.
Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) should be
mentioned in connection with the bell curve,
Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and with Nietzsche
because of his highly original and anti-liberal in
modern sense sociological concepts that I find
strongly realistic and physical-chemical in
nature. Pareto, an engineer by education,
compared society with molecular system in
equilibrium. In his time the non-equilibrium
thermodynamics was in embryo. Pareto called groups
of individuals of high achievement in their fields elites.
Pareto demonstrated the influence of competition
on the non-randomness of the distribution of wealth
and offered his own curve known as Pareto
distribution and having nothing in common with the
bell. He was blamed (or praised) for fascism.
More
about Pareto: Essay 31, On Poverty .
2.NOTE AFTER
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. Somebody else
died in unthinkable numbers.