Mises knew this from his personal experience in Europe. He saw it germinate in the academy, infect movements and regimes, and ruin whole societies through its final realization in Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism. The doctrine wrecked his beloved Vienna and drove him into political exile, first to Geneva, Switzerland, and then to New York. It colored the map of Europe black. It had previously ruined Russia and threatened many other regions of the world.
For him, intellectual life was not a parlor game. He knew how bad ideas originating in the academy could result in mass suffering and death. That’s why from early in his career, he dedicated himself to calling out bad ideas, especially those that fundamentally threatened liberty itself.
He called the pernicious doctrine polylogism. The idea is this. There is not one logic, one truth, one path of thinking that is subject to verification. Rather, every group and every interest operates according to its own logic. No one is in a position to say: This does not follow from that. There are multiple and infinite ways to think and emote, and no one is in a position to say which is correct or incorrect, valid or invalid.
As a result, there are no real rules for thinking at all and no right and wrong paths of finding what is or is not true. It’s a short step to deny reality altogether, including even biology. Everything becomes a matter of the unconstrained imagination.
Mises put the theory as follows:
“Polylogism denies the uniformity of the logical structure of the human mind. Every social class, every nation, race, or period of history is equipped with a logic that differs from the logic of other classes, nations, races, or ages. Hence bourgeois economics differs from proletarian economics, German physics from the physics of other nations, Aryan mathematics from Semitic mathematics. There is no need to examine here the essentials of the various brands of polylogism. For polylogism never went beyond the simple declaration that a diversity of the mind’s logical structure exists. It never pointed out in what these differences consist, for instance how the logic of the proletarians differs from that of the bourgeois. All the champions of polylogism did was to reject definite statements by referring to unspecified peculiarities of their author’s logic.”
Consider the implications. There can be no human rights under these conditions because what is right for one group isn’t necessarily right for another. There can be no law or constitution because they presume a uniform structure of human aspiration. There can be no language with true meaning. There can be no truly informed conversation because words are merely sounds and not actually meaningful. Everything is reduced to communication theater. There are no valid arguments; or, rather, all arguments are valid, even if they are just feelings and intuitions.
If polylogism is correct, there is no reason for a logic textbook or even the discovery or discussion of fallacy. There are no fallacies, only perspectives. It is pointless to build systems of thought. All concepts of math and geometry are reduced to arbitrary claims that may or may not be correct. In this world, two plus two really can equal five, and no one is in a position to say otherwise.
If there is a conflict over what is true, it is entirely because of the inherent conflict that exists between different logical systems as they pertain to groups. Karl Marx took this idea and applied it to the workers versus capital owners, which is why his disciplines were never even slightly interested in economics as such. Supply and demand were dismissed as bourgeois concepts, utterly unsuitable for a regime that was emancipating the proletariat.
This became a major problem for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev when he was trying to boost the performance of the Soviet economy. He looked around for someone who could provide him with some plan and metric of success that did not take recourse to basic economic logic, because generations of students and leaders were taught to disregard classical economics as nothing but a capitalist construct.
In Mises’s view, the problem is even deeper and traces to polylogism itself, the complete denial of the validity of logic itself. This began not with Marx, but with G.F. Hegel a half-century earlier. Hegel posited the existence of sweeping forces of historical determinism that operated outside human will and the constraints of logic and old-fashioned notions of truth. The Hegelians eventually branched off into left-wing strains (the Marxians) and right-wing strains that sought to unite church, state, and industry into a single divine force (the fascists and Nazis).
Crucial to the success of totalitarianism, Mises wrote, was the destruction of traditional rules of logic and all of its branches, including mathematics, science, economics, and liberal politics. In a world without the presumption of “the uniformity of the logical structure of the human mind,” anything becomes possible. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is true, or, as is fashionable to say, with disdain, nothing is “cap T true.” All truth claims are merely beliefs and valid or invalid depending on political whim.
Why do people believe this? Most people have never been given the choice to think otherwise. That is because logic is no longer taught in schools or universities.
I mentioned this to a friend, who said: “That’s not correct. My son is a philosophy major at a top school, and he just took a course on logic.”
That’s precisely the point. The only people who encounter the discipline are philosophy majors. It was not always so. Classical education was based on what was called the Trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. This was the foundation of knowledge to teach necessary skills in language, reasoning, and communication. After this, students were positioned to study math, geometry, music, and science generally.
What is today’s Trivium? Complaining, self-obsessing, and grifting.
I can recall falling in love with learning in college and camping out in the library for two years, reading everything I could get my hands on: psychology, history, economics, political science, philosophy, and theology. It was all wonderful, but I had no idea that I was lacking in a crucial foundation in logic. Preparing for law school entrance examinations, I took a course to help me through the mind-blowing logical games section.
I tell you what, you could have picked me off the floor once I found out that there were actual rules for thinking, reasoning, and communicating. It utterly blew my mind, and I can recall well the sudden sense of bitterness I felt that no one had ever told me this. I should have been taught this in middle school, at least. Then I realized that no one else knew this either.
In fact, as I looked through the modern history of learning, I discovered that logic itself had been deprecated in all education sometime in the 1960s. It came to be relegated to an arcane branch of philosophy only to be studied by specialists. This is truly preposterous. Was this by neglect or by intention? I do not know.
It was Mises’s view that without a concession to the validity of universal logic, the state will always take charge. That was always the agenda of Hegel, whose follower Ferdinand Lassalle wrote that “The State is God.” The long march through the institutions was designed to achieve this. It worked more than we like to admit.
Polylogism sounds like a fancy philosophy, but it is nothing but the handmaiden of tyrants.
