WANT SNAKE OIL? ASK A SNAKE: Charles Koch's BELIEVE IN PEOPLE Reviewed

Toward the end of this long infomercial for himself, his businesses, his political projects, and his ideas, Charles Koch expresses regret for having thrown his money behind the Republican Party and thereby fostered “partisanship” in this country. [1] The regret may be genuine, but if one continues to follow the money, one discovers that Koch financial support for far-right candidates and causes, including virulent opposition to unions and regulations, continues unabated. So, in practice, the new, reformed Koch seems a lot like the old, unreformed Koch.

Indeed, under all the airy, PC happy talk in this book, with its photos of BIPOC and tales of uplift, is the same objective that Koch has been pursuing since his John Birch Society days back in the 1960s, namely, destruction of the public sector (except for the police, the military, and the judiciary) and its replacement with a sort of meritocratic business utopia in which everyone is on their own. A world of “Social Entrepreneurs” (previously known as “social change agents”) in which “everyone” “self-actualizes” by “contributing” and “creating value” for their fellow human beings. For instance, by solving a technical problem on an assembly line (pg 197f).

Koch’s book is silent on what happens to people who are unable to “contribute,” because of disability, circumstances, or simply an inability to come up with usable new ideas. Something that Koch said long ago suggests what his underlying attitude probably is—one that the PC 2020 version of himself dares not express or perhaps even admit to having these days:

“Every time I hear of an entrepreneur going out of business I cheer. He did not serve the consumer and for that, he should be a janitor or a worker.” [2]

The contempt for ordinary people—“janitors,” “workers”—that this statement radiates is quite a contrast to the book’s title, “Believe in People,” and the book’s absurd, repeated, counterfactual claim that “everyone” can be a contributor--an “entrepreneur,” no less—is one of the reasons that I view it as a large vat of snake oil, and Koch as a snake oil marketer.

That is not to say that I think the book is insincere. No, Charles Koch is definitely a true believer, especially in himself and the virtues of his oil. He seems genuinely to believe that what works in the business world—specifically, in the top-down, privately held, privately controlled, profoundly monetized world of Koch Industries—could be expected to work for society as a whole. I have news for Charles. People’s lives involve a lot more than just their jobs. The attempt to monetize everything is not only reductionist, it is doomed to failure. Plus, a business can fire workers (that contemptible class) more or less at will, but short of state terror, citizens cannot be fired from U.S. soil for dissent. Persecuted, no doubt, but not “terminated,” at least not yet. And as we’re currently seeing, a complex society like that of the USA produces intense and intractable dissent and disagreement. That’s what politics is about, or at least what politics attempts to resolve. But Koch’s vision of a harmonious business utopia is a vision of a world without politics.

Such a vision is objectionable in itself, as well as infeasible. It’s almost amusing to see someone who started out in the fiercely anti-communist world of the John Birch Society falling victim to the same sort of unreal, poisonous utopianism that he condemned in the USSR. The specific content is different, but the desire to impose a simplified, “purified” model upon human society is the same. And added on top of that is the crowning irony of seeing a man who sits atop a vast pyramid of wealth, machinery, and human beings preaching against “top-down,” “controlling” systems, and for “bottom-up” solutions. Really? The Pharaoh of Wichita is now the herald of base democracy?

There’s a phrase in Chinese that I think applies to this situation: zi[4] qi[1] qi[1] ren[4] (自欺欺人), meaning, “fool yourself, fool others.” Which, in its foreignness, can serve as a segue to my next complaint, namely, that even though Koch is in love with the Austrian school of economics, Believe in People is intensely USA-centric. One would think that Koch would be interested in looking at the rest of the world and learning, if not from its successes, at least from its failures. Not so. The fascinating variety of human social arrangements outside the USA (including in Austria), is ignored, and so far as I recall, even our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, go essentially unmentioned. This book is therefore yet another example of the blinkered USA exceptionalism that is all too characteristic of books by USA writers, no matter their political affiliation. It is less excusable in this case, however, because Koch is claiming to get at the basic principles of human “flourishing” and failure to flourish, and the last I knew, the human species and human societies are not limited to this continent or the part of it that the USA occupies.

The worst silence in this book, though, is the total silence about the rapidly worsening climate crisis. Koch’s utopia would not be achievable in the best of circumstances, and we may soon find ourselves in the worst. Indeed, the unreality of ignoring the climate crisis intensifies the unreality of Koch’s vision, to the degree that I found it difficult to continue to read his book. Its total unseriousness about the physical (and therefore political) future we’re facing completely undercuts its dead seriousness about the social (but apolitical) future Koch would like to inflict on us all (or at least, all “Americans”). There’s an elephant in the room, Charles, and ignoring it is not going to make it go away.

Among other things, Koch is enamored of the notion of creative destruction. In his case, the destruction of existing institutions (e.g., public education and the regulatory state) would supposedly clear the way for a new American order populated by Social Entrepreneurs and other strivers. Well, we’re certainly getting the destruction, what with the defunding of public education, voter suppression measures, the 1/6/2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the ongoing attack on democratic elections, the increasing animosity in U.S. society, and so forth. The “creative” part of “creative destruction,” however, is very hard to see at this point, and very unlikely to materialize as the climate crisis adds to the spreading chaos in the USA. Meanwhile, the shambolic response of U.S. and world society to the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is not an encouraging sign, given that the climate crisis is going to be far more encompassing and far more destructive. Just when our species needs to be working together—dare I say, “collectively?”—hatred, dissension, gridlock, and other obstacles to cooperation and collaboration are on the increase. And I’m afraid that Koch’s relentless efforts to manipulate U.S. society and impose his vision on us all have worsened and are continuing to worsen the situation.

---Patrick Diehl (12/4/2021)

[1] On pg 218 of this book, Koch claims that he “avoided partisan politics like the plague from the 1960s to 2010 election cycle.”  This is only one of many inaccuracies in Believe in People. In fact, as any book about Charles and his late brother David will attest, they were both involved in the Libertarian Party’s national campaign in 1980—in fact, David Koch was the vice-presidential candidate! The general view in Koch studies is that the poor showing of this campaign convinced Charles and David to pursue an “under-the-radar,” non-electoral strategy, which seems to have ended at last in 2010 or thereabouts.

[2] Quoted on pg 94, D. Schulman, Sons of Wichita (2014). The statement comes from a 12/16/1965 article in the Lawrence Daily Journal-World, and it was made in the course of a “Minority Opinions” forum at Kansas University.