The Curse of the Sincere Believer

Chapter 1 of my forthcoming book "How Economists Will Destroy Capitalism"

“Don’t overrate sincerity,” a voice boomed from the back of the room. “The most sincere person you’ll ever meet will be the maniac chasing you down the street with an axe, trying to chop your head off!”

The room was a senior school classroom in a Catholic boys’ school in 1969 in Sydney, Australia, and the voice belonged to our religion teacher, Brother Gerard.

Unlike most of his freres, Gerard did not shove a catechism down our throats, but let us engage in ethical and political discussions, which were chaired, not by him, but by the students themselves.

Normally, Brother Gerard said not a word. But in one class, as we were vigorously debating some politician whom half the students praised and the other half derided, someone interjected “Well, at least he’s sincere!”—a proposition with which the whole class agreed. And then Gerard dropped his stunning truth bomb.

I never found out what events inspired Gerard’s epiphany, but I’ve come to appreciate its wisdom all the more over the years. It’s related to the saying attributed to Mark Twain, that:

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Putting these two aphorisms together leads to the insight that the most dangerous people on the planet are those who sincerely believe something which is false. This is in contrast to Upton Sinclair’s well-known quip that “it is difficult to get someone to understand something, when his income depends on him not understanding it”. This is true, but it is a second-order phenomenon when compared to false belief. Someone who is paid to misunderstand something won’t fly a plane into a skyscraper, no matter how much they are offered. Someone who believes will.

The most dangerous sincere believers on this planet are not religious extremists, but mainstream economists. They will destroy capitalism, precisely because they falsely believe that it is indestructible.