Ruxandra Teslo

Those critical of Communism often highlight how it’s underpinned by Envy; But I think supporting Communism is first and foremost a result of the Sin of Pride: there’s immense hubris in believing one can design a centralised economic system that beats evolutionary forces. In “The Road to Serfdom” F.A. Hayek contends that government control of economic decision-making, even with good intentions, inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Hayek was a visionary: a lot of intellectuals persisted in their love for Communism even after the horrors of the Soviet Regime became apparent. 

While at the moment outright advocacy for Communism may not be widespread among intellectuals, there remains a latent affinity for top-down control – a kind of ember of ideology that, though subdued, is still smouldering, waiting for the right conditions to reignite. Often, the catalyst for such a resurgence is the perception of a looming threat (that might very well be a justified worry in itself), such as the recent concern over misinformation. The same pride that made intellectuals believe in centralised control over the economy now leads them to often support a form of epistemic control to fight off misinformation. US even briefly had a “misinformation czar” to deal with this problem; The political and media movement feeds off the actual academic field of misinformation studies. This is a heterogeneous domain, but there is certainly an element of it that veers into justifying top-down control over the information ecosystem, often by overstating how good researchers are at detecting false information and why we should trust them. Perhaps nowhere is this overstatement more prominent than in the book “Foolproof” by Sander Van Der Linden, one of the foremost researchers in the field. If you are inclined to dismiss this book as a sort of inconsequential academic exercise, don’t! These are the kind of outlets that recommend it (particularly disappointed by Financial Times). The book also has a blurb from Marianna Spring, BBC’s first disinformation correspondent. Funnily enough, she was recently revealed to have lied on her CV – I guess misinforming employers is ok (they are evil capitalists anyway) if you are doing it for the “Greater Good”.