Naomi Oreskes - The Big Myth

BY THE SAME AUTHORS

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

CONTENTS

The great enemy of truth is very often not the liedeliberate, contrived, and dishonestbut the mythpersistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

JOHN F. KENNEDY, YALE UNIVERSITY COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS, 1962

What is the cost of lies? Its not that well mistake them for truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.

JARED HARRIS AS VALERY LEGASOV, CHERNOBYL , 1:23:45 (2019)

I did not lie in Vienna, but I did not tell the whole truth.

VALERY LEGASOV, REPORT TO THE SOVIET ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, 1986

Selling the Big Myth : A 1950s advertisementproduced by a consortium operating under the name Americas Independent Electric Light and Power Companiespromoting the electricity industry as the guardian of American freedom.

This is the story of how American business manufactured a myth that has, for decades and to our detriment, held us in its grip. It is the true history of a false idea: the idea of the magic of the marketplace.

Some people call it market absolutism or market essentialism. In the 1990s, George Its a quasi-religious belief that the best way to address our needswhether economic or otherwiseis to let markets do their thing, and not rely on government. Market fundamentalists treat The Market as a proper noun: something unique and unto itself, that has agency and even wisdom, that functions best when left unfettered and unregulated, undisturbed and unperturbed. Government, according to the myth, cannot improve the functioning of markets; it can only interfere. Governments therefore need to stay out of the way, lest they distort the market and prevent it from doing its magic. In the late twentieth century, market fundamentalism was cloaked in the seemingly ancient raiments of received wisdom. In fact, it was more or less invented in the twentieth century.

Classical liberal economistsincluding Adam Smithrecognized that government served essential functions, including building infrastructure for everyones benefit and regulating banks, which, left to their own devices, could destroy an economy. They also recognized that taxation was required to enable governments to perform those functions. But in the early twentieth century, a group of self-styled neo-liberals shifted economic and political thinking radically. They argued that any government action in the marketplace, even well intentioned, compromised the freedom of individuals to do as they pleasedand therefore put us on the road to totalitarianism. Political and economic freedom were indivisible, they insisted: any compromise to the latter was a threat to the formerany compromise at all, even to address obvious ills like child labor or workplace injury. Why did we ever come to accept a worldview so impervious to facts? A worldview Smith himself, often thought of as the father of free-market capitalism, would have rejected? This book tells that story.

In our first book, Merchants of Doubt , we wanted to explain why intelligent, educated people would deny the reality of man-made climate change. At the time, most scientists thought they faced a problem of scientific illiteracythat the public just didnt understand climate science. But through a series of accidents, we stumbled across the story of four physicists who laid the foundations for climate change denial as far back as the late 1980s. These men were prominent scientistsone was a former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, another headed a major NASA labso it wasnt remotely plausible that they didnt understand the facts. We discovered they hadnt just rejected climate science but had fought settled science on a host of public health and environmental issues, starting with the harms of tobacco. Two of these four scientists had worked with tobacco companies. The seemingly obvious explanation for what they didthat they were industry shills motivated by moneyturned out to be wrong. The right answer was ideology: market fundamentalism.