gistfile1.txt

Perhaps, one may hope, human beings will one day attain a scientific understanding of society
comparable to the modern scientific understanding of most aspects of the natural world. On that day,
we may find ways of restructuring society to the benefit of all. But we cannot now predict what that
understanding will look like, nor should we attempt to implement the policies that we guess will one
day be proven to be beneficial. In the meantime, we can anticipate many pretenders to scientific
accounts of society, after the style of Marxism. These will be theories resting on dubious premises that
only certain political ideologues find convincing. These ideologues may, as in the case of the Marxists,
adopt the quintessentially unscientific attitude of regarding those who question the ideology as enemies
to be suppressed.

Political leaders, voters, and activists are well-advised to follow the dictum, often applied to
medicine, to “first, do no harm.” A plausible rule of thumb, to guard us against doing harm as a result
of overconfident ideological beliefs, is that one should not forcibly impose requirements or restrictions
on others unless the value of those requirements or restrictions is essentially uncontroversial among the
community of experts in conditions of free and open debate. Of course, even an expert consensus may
be wrong, but this rule of thumb may be the best that such fallible beings as ourselves can devise.

-- In Praise of Passivity, Michael Huemer