Why should one believe that something is true? It is strange how wise people believe in unbelievable interpretations of events or good declarations about religion or society from the scholars of that time. Elon Musk is known for his one-line philosophy, as well as his religious and political songs discussed by. The Wall Street Journal Columnist Tim Higgins (“Elon Musk’s Walk With Jesus,” August 17, 2024) seems to be in a similar position:
Elon Musk openly gives his interpretation of the teachings of Jesus with a twist of the Old Testament. …
We increasingly see Musk invoking religion as he discusses his worldviews on topics ranging from parenting to freedom of speech. …
“There is no sympathy for victims of criminals and too much sympathy for criminals,” said Musk. “That’s why you want to sympathize with society as a whole, not sympathize with criminals.
Why should anyone attach any importance to what mr. What does Musk think about the unicorn “for society at large”?
What should lead a person to believe something? Scientific evidence should prevail in justifying beliefs. If a coherent theory predicts an outcome and the empirical evidence confirms it, it should be believed—until the empirical evidence proves it false.
In the field of social science—that is, economics or the economic method—one example is the law of demand. There is no consensus theory that says people will buy more of something only because its price has increased. In contrast, economic theory proves the opposite, like the theory in Euclidean geometry. (When a luxury item is bought as a status symbol, it is the status that is being bought, and the quantity demanded of the status symbol will decrease as it is more expensive. This explains why not everyone buys Louis Vuitton baseball caps for 500€ a piece. ) Common sense and economic evidence show that, ceteris paribus, quantity demanded falls when price rises, too in turn. Given free will, it is unlikely that he will buy a single piece of bubble gum every blue moon just because its price has gone up, but that will not change the market demand curve in any significant way.
A related implication of economic theory is that the explanation must be consistent with the motives of people, who maximize their utility—that is, who seek to improve their circumstances as each evaluates himself according to his preferences. For example, it would be very surprising if the Sandy Hook massacre was organized by the deep state because such an operation would not be compatible with individual government agents in an open society with some rule of law. (Note that Elon Musk does not believe that conspiracy theory.)
I mentioned logical consistency, which is the basic condition for believing something to be true. The ancient Greek philosophers discovered that. If a belief implies both A and non-A, it must be rejected.
In all the vast universe, there is much we do not understand and can never hope to understand; Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is only one indication. Perhaps we should open a small window for sincere faith and music and poetry. Ten years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2912, French physician Alexis Carrel, an atheist, converted to Catholicism after witnessing what he could only describe as a miracle at the pilgrimage center of Lourdes. (It did not help his work in France and, by 1912, he was living in the United States.) We must still maintain a measure of reasonable skepticism: in his book. An Impossible Principle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), mathematician David Hand shows how miracles and “amazing” encounters can be (he would say always) explained by probability theory.
In the field of social behavior, as FA Hayek pointed out, we must also leave room for meta-rationality to follow social rules that have proven useful as adaptations to our ignorance.
Only delusional people believe sociologists or philosophers who have not shown any systematic knowledge and understanding of how society (including politics and economics) works, and who pretend to know “social good” and decide how others should live. Getting carried away seems to have the wind in your sails.
We can relate this thinking to three recent thinkers who have greatly advanced our knowledge of social affairs and refuted the pretensions of the would-be masters of philosophy. Anthony de Jasay argued that the social convention of “live and let live,” when it does not involve harming others, “demands far less of our moral impulses” than other political principles.
In their first book, The Calculus of ConsenceJames Buchanan and Gordon Tullock offer interesting comments:
The Christian theory, in order to succeed in leading to a more harmonious social order, must be influenced by the acceptance of the moral responsibility of the individual, the rule of equal freedom. Acceptance of a person’s right to do as they wish as long as their actions do not interfere with the freedom of other people to do the same should be a prominent feature of any “good” society. The rule “Love your neighbor, but also leave him when he wants to be freed” can, in a sense, be said to be the dominant moral principle in the liberal society of the West.
In Why, Me, I’m Not A Ruler (Edward Elgar, 2006), James Buchanan, who was far from an elitist, strongly defended structured knowledge. Reviewing this book on RegulationI summarized what he saw as one requirement of a free society:
Each person must understand “simple principles of social interaction,” and that includes “a general understanding of basic economics.” Otherwise, Buchanan says, they must show a “widespread willingness” to listen to others who understand.
In my opinion, Mr. Musk is far from any kind of systematic social or philosophical knowledge. That you have demonstrated business intuition and skills (see Israel Kirzner, Competition and Entrepreneurship [University of Chicago Press, 1973]) does not give him special intellectual authority to speak on matters of theology and politics. Needless to say, he seems to be also (or mainly?) an active political employer. The most dangerous masters are political masters—”political” in the sense of wanting to force others to live certain ways or pay for the rights of others. Of course, there’s no reason to believe something just because Musk says so.
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