Socratic Ignorance and the Occupy AstroTurfers

He among you is the wisest who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is really worth nothing at all. (Apology 21d)

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Now as the Occupy Movement has begun to lose its heat with the oncoming of winter, the utter ignominy and futility of the organizational efforts has at last surfaced. Evidence has begun to surface reflecting the movement's failure to permanently gain respect and commitment from drum beaters in the liberal press and from puppeteers employed by Soros-financed organizations. Failure comes at a great cost to the true believers who simply had no sense as to how to run this railroad and comes to the great joy and relief of those of us who feared anarchy.

From the blog Disaster Notes comes this sad commentary:

A couple days ago I asked [OWS organizer] David Graeber a question about how far the difference between representative democracy and formal consensus process really goes in practice. In his answer he mentioned his (I think mild) regret that during the initial planning for Occupy Wall Street at Bowling Green, they never arrived at any founding principles. Consensus, he said, as a distinct process from democratic consensus (100% of a vote), works the way it’s supposed to when everyone has the same fundamental goals and principles. The answer surprised me a little bit coming from him, but I’m over it; the question of principles tends to get swallowed up by the controversy over demands, despite being different things, and everyone basically has to assume that they exist. Unfortunately, since there aren’t any, they sometimes conflict.

Even in more mundane activity, the “block” in formal consensus is supposed to mean principles are being violated. In their absence, blocks get overused, people get frustrated and leave, and this can easily overwhelm a GA’s [General Assembly's] ability to do much of anything beyond self-maintenance.

Given where the movement is now, it’s hard to imagine principles being any easier to agree on than unifying demands, except maybe for nonviolence.

First you have the mob, then you have demands by mob segments and then you try to organize the mob.  It makes no sense to me  -- especially when you use democratic rules with votes on even the smallest of questions, assisted by the totally maddening "human mic" communication scheme.

Then I happened to read a piece by Steven Hayward over at Powerline appropriately entitled "This Week’s Applied Hayek: Why Sound Economics, Like Political Philosophy, Begins with Socratic Ignorance."  Positioned in the middle of the article was a Frederich Hayek quote so powerful and so 2011 that applies to the Occupy Lost Cause and to our economic shambles that produced the protest. From Hayek's lecture to the Nobel Prize Committee in 1974.

To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm. . . . The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson in humility, which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society—a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

As Mr. Hayward points out, Frederich Hayek was very much attuned to Socratic Ignorance and once again we confirm that Plato Occupies Wall Street.   Common goals are so important --  and even non-violent revolutions must have limits.