Peters: He's proud of it! They are both so frigging weird that they don't even know how weird they are. To me it's a compliment to put him in that Sanders league. It's the freaks of Silicon Valley, and he's a freak. And freak to me is a good word, not a bad word.
Don't you think that a place like the Valley or Hollywood is home to a shocking degree of immaturity?
Reason: Places like that depend on having both a great deal of individuality and a kind of discipline.
Peters: Play has discipline. You watch a kid playing doing something in sand at the beach, and that is discipline with a capital D.
Reason: It has discipline, but it has discipline that's related to the task itself and not to some external ideal of discipline. One of the real problems, I think, is that a lot of intellectuals have learned everything they know about capitalism from Max Weber and his descendants, so all they know is the bourgeois work ethic. They don't appreciate the element of play that drives the discovery process.
Peters: Only Hayek and [historian Fernand] Braudel get it. With all my love for Hayek, I would give Braudel even more credit. Braudel let himself go and described everyday life and the transactions associated therewith.
Reason: I sent you the Weekly Standard article, "Cosmic Capitalists," by David Brooks. He compares efforts to reinvent business along less hierarchical lines to the French Revolution, a sort of hubristic overturning of all that has gone before: "It used to be that this modernist ethos, this desire to be free of history, to leap out into a brave new future flourished only in politics, where it created the disastrous Marxist utopias" and various forms of the arts. "And, now it's the cosmic capitalists." He's talking about you.
Peters: When I read that thing, Virginia, I was of two minds. Obviously, the Gilders, and perhaps the mes of the world, are hopelessly caricaturizable, to coin a phrase that should never be coined. But I took the article mostly to be flattering. I understood that it was meant to be the worst kind of trashing, but I sort of chuckled my way through it because the answer is, hey, that's pretty much what is going on.
Reason: And, yet, you say The Fatal Conceit is your favorite book.
Peters: Yep.
Reason: And Hayek spent his life fighting this desire to be free from history, as opposed to progress by trial and error.
Peters: But I think that is semantics. I think that what is happening now [in business] is pure, raw, unmitigated Popperian conjectures and refutations.
I happened to be blessed by being trained by a University of Chicago methodologist, and everything to him was level-of-the-analysis issues, and why it is totally reasonable to be libertarian at a macro level and a Marxist central planner at the micro level. Why it's OK to be Virginia the autocrat running REASON, who is nonetheless writing about a society which lacks, at the macro level, exactly the controls which, at the micro level, allow her to do her job well. But that's all level-of-analysis stuff.
Reason: That's what Brooks got wrong when he said changing from elevators to escalators at Procter & Gamble is like the French Revolution. Well, no, it's not. That would be like saying that starting The Weekly Standard to compete with National Review is like the French Revolution--why not preserve the status quo?
Peters: Exactly.
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