Today my YouTube account was hacked. Fortunately, Google has already solved the problem. My email was also attacked, the problem is not yet completely solved. I hereby apologize for the possible delay in my email communication. JŠ
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Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto died 100 years ago on August 19, 1923: "Any action can be justified demagogically, by means of eminent, obscure and deceptive verbal evidence. This is where the vast majority of political life falls." - "Give me as many fruitful fallacies full of germs of ideas as you can, and keep your futile truths." - "No individual or group can any longer achieve a better position without, in turn, making someone else's position worse." - "20% of the people own 80% of the national wealth and the other 80% of the people own the other 20% of the national wealth."
The value of anything to a person depends on their actual needs. The mistake of both Ricardo and Marx was that they attributed the origin of value to labor and so confused the end with the means - William II and his diplomats did not learn from history. They disregarded the interests of others, started a war, and even in the course of it missed the opportunity to reverse gear.
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The champion of economic liberty brought to the fore what many of his predecessors had underestimated: humanity, the role of emotion and instinct. The Italian thinker Pareto's reflections on general sociology capture society in its complexity, above all by taking into account an old truth: humans are irrational creatures.
He did not like to argue with politicians restricting economic freedom: one industrialist laboriously reduces his costs by a few percent, but another, by intrigue or bribes, extorts the imposition of a fifty percent tariff, thus devaluing the productive work of many intelligent people! Tariffs are destroying the Italian economy and impoverishing the people, but certain groups, through the corruption of politicians, are extracting benefits at the expense of the majority, whose loss through tax increases is relatively small, so that it is not worth anyone's while to raise their voice against injustice.
Well, the world is complex, people have a distorted perception of things and their causes, and it is difficult to deal with them in an appropriate way. They pursue their feelings and interests, but at the same time, in retrospect, they look for a theory to give logic to their actions. Then they form an inner conviction and clothe it in lofty phrases. The most catchy of all are the Marxist theses on exploitation.
The traditional economic notion of the "utility" of a thing is said to be concerned exclusively with the relationship between man and the thing, and with the thing itself in terms of its objective properties. But the value of anything to man depends on his actual needs. Pareto therefore introduced the concept of "ofelimita" - the desirability or satisfaction of a thing, that which will give him pleasure as well. The maximum ofelimity for a thirsty man in the desert is thus represented by the first sips of water. The mistake of both Ricardo and Marx, it is said, was that they attributed the origin of value to labour, and so confused the end with the means.
The notion is still relevant today, when the rulers, in order to strengthen their own power, impose on the ruled what they do not want and prevent their emotional and spiritual satisfaction.
Pareto's "logical-rational" action is one in which the actor chooses the means that lead in the most expedient way to the stated objective.
People outside of economic life, however, do not usually act even as rationally as bees, shaping their combs to collect as much honey as possible and consume as little wax as possible. The powerful drivers of human activity are still the residuals, those expressions of emotion and instinct that people explain in distorted terms, using myths, slogans, cults, ideas and ideologies. They are not based on reason, they come from within people, they belong to individuals only to a very small extent and they tend to be relatively constant in society.
The engineer makes do almost exclusively with rational arguments when selling a machine. A politician, on the other hand, if he is to act "rationally", even to the benefit of the public, must resort to "non-rational" derivations, otherwise he will not get anything through. And the government should rather use the residues and not waste its power on futile, even counterproductive, attempts to destroy them.
The most capable people in any field make up a vaguely defined elite in any social system. Those endowed with the "residui combination" actively seek out new opportunities for profit, not by fighting, but by devising ingenious stratagems to gain short-term advantages. When such 'profiteers' or 'foxes' rule, society enjoys success in business and industry, but fails to plan ahead, loses the ability to use power, and often fails to hold or defend the state, especially when the residues of sociality are also weakened.
Conversely, people endowed with the "residue of stability of aggregates", the so-called lions, tend to be more firmly grounded in worldview, more authoritative, resist change, tend to be able to use force and think longer term. The 'rentiers' also contribute to stability, but they tend to be like rabbits, defenceless against change from above.
Society needs both of the first two types to survive. It should use intelligent persuasion and consensus, but of necessity it should also boldly use force, without which it cannot govern. It is dangerous to pity criminals while forgetting their victims. The ruling elite itself always degenerates, but if, on the one hand, it suppresses and excludes the most capable from below - and, on the other hand, is unable to deal effectively and decisively with a small but all-powerful group, it can then destroy itself and still plunge the whole of society into ruin. The notion that the use of force is impermissible at any time is refuted by the whole of history, which is the "graveyard of the aristocracy". It is he who is terrified of blood who, like a sheep, becomes the prey of another. Even if the sheep avoids the wolf, it ends up with the butcher.
Before the Great War, Pareto prophesied that there could be "immense catastrophes which in their magnitude and intensity surpass anything hitherto known in history". And it seems that the cruelest regimes of the 20th century arose precisely where ruling circles did not heed Pareto's warnings. The Tsarist regime in Russia may have been able to shoot thousands of peaceful demonstrators in 1905, but it could no longer cope with the Bolsheviks. Both the Cuban Battista and the Venezuelan oligarchy released the violent Castro and Chavez, only for the latter to turn the rulers' bloodbath and economically ruin the once richest countries in Latin America. The Shah of Iran persecuted his loyalist Shahpour Bakhtiar, only to have Khomeini's religious fanatics murder his people and Bakhtiar himself. It was "our" Václav Havel who, with his immature statements and his sweeping amnesty in 1990, caused only chain chaos, the needless deaths of many innocent victims of released criminals, the watering down of laws and the ideological division of a fairly consensual nation.
Happy people, happy government
The more the government meddles in the affairs of the people, Pareto argues, the greater the abuses of power and the disenfranchisement of the people.
Pareto was concerned with the dignity of every single person - both the owner, afflicted by arbitrary actions of the authorities or terror from his employees, and the unorganized worker, intimidated by union bosses and their people, overlooked from above and sucked dry by tariffs.
The alleged "opponent of democracy" considered the best system of his time to be not a dictatorship but democratic Switzerland. Italy's problem, he said, was "the lack of independent and energetic persons", so that no one could be found to oppose evil. And "the more honest the inhabitants of a country, the more honest its government".
From the Article „O lvech a králících naší společnosti“: Zdeněk Zacpal, translator (LN 19.8.2023, supplement to ORIENTATION)
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