Usually when people us the word fanatic, it is intended to suggest unpredictable or irrational enthusiasm for something, often something trivial. The sports fan who paints himself in team colors and goes to the park shirtless in sub-zero temperatures. The guy who organizes items on his desk in a very specific way and gets upset when someone moves anything. There’s no logic behind that sort of activity. The means are extreme and the ends are pointless, maybe even self-defeating.
Then there is the religious fanatic, like the guys handling snakes or nailing themselves to a cross. From the outside it looks irrational and pointless. To the fanatic it makes perfect sense, but that’s just proof of the fanatic’s irrationality. In other words, there is an inverse relationship between what the outsider sees and what the fanatic sees as rational. The nuttier the behavior, from the perspective of people looking in, the more rational it seems to the people doing it. Again, the sense is a break with reason.
That’s something to keep in mind while reading this piece on Taki. Paul Krugman is a guy you meet and immediately the words “fanatic” springs to mind. If you did not know anything about him, you would assume he is under the care of a doctor. He has that bug-eyed stare and twitchy demeanor that suggest his medications need adjustment. He’s also prone to ranting and raving about things that have an imaginary feel to them. He’s just one of those guys who gives normal people the willies.
Because he is a culture warrior on the Left, he is immune from such scrutiny. His fellows in the cult admire his zeal and lap up his rhetoric. They also like to wave around his academic credentials as proof his work is gospel. The fact that he has been wrong about most everything and has become a punchline in his profession is ignored. In fact, the more he is wrong, the more zealous he becomes, suggesting there is some point in the future where police must be called to get him out his office.
That’s not just a way of dismissing him. It’s possible that he is quite mad, yet functional enough to carry on in his role. Blaize Pascal was ten times more brilliant than Krugman and he was a religious fanatic. Even in his age, when what we would consider extreme religiosity was common, Pascal was considered a bit over the top. The old line about there being a fine line between genius and crazy did not spring from nothing. Put another way, fanaticism is not a barrier to entry in the ruling classes.
History is shot through with men who were both crazy and brilliant. Diogenes was most likely a schizophrenic. Pythagoras was certainly a nut. That does not mean every genius is on the edge of sanity. It is just that you can be both brilliant and crazy as long the crazy is not debilitating. Pascal’s religiosity was driven by the same obsessive curiosity that drove his science and math. It was, for the most part, a harmless thing. People will tolerate a lot of eccentricity in exchange for brilliance or devotion to a cause.
In the case of Krugman, we see that he was generally liberal before going way out where the buses don’t run. Like his coreligionists, he was radicalized by the 2000 election. From that point, his writing became increasingly excited and paranoid. His nuttiness seems to feed some need on the Left. That and they seem to be in a race with one another to see who can stake out the most extreme position. If the finish line is crazy land, the guy running fastest toward it will look like a hero.
Still, one has to wonder how much crazy a society can tolerate. In the medieval person, excessively religious people were not uncommon, but the damage they could cause was limited by the technical realities of the age. Today, a crazy idea can not only rocket around the world in minutes, it can set of millions of other crazies just as fast. The internet is this constant positive feedback loop for these people. In other words, the madness of Paul Krugman becomes something like a pathogen. That can’t be good.
