Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/95

 devices, hopes and fears, in the selection, direction, and evaluation of the mental movements. In economics and other social “sciences” this secret psychical play is more apparent than in other’s thinking. I have already indicated how the laisser-faire economics of the nineteenth century and the Marxian economics which accompanied and followed were, with a crudity itself humorous, moulded by class interests and desires. I am now faced with the reasonable request “Physician, heal thyself.” For it “stands to reason” that I cannot claim for myself an objectivity and disinterestedness which I have denied to others. Indeed, the biographic details in which I have indulged ought to help to explain not only the steps along which my economic thinking has proceeded, but the slipperiness of these very steps, and the likelihood, perhaps certainty, that my economic humanism, a composition of successive heresies, is defective when regarded as a whole. The psychology of heresy is a subject that has not received the attention it deserves. Orthodoxy, the acceptance: of authoritative theories and opinions, apart from their intrinsic truth or value, is an attitude of mental and social security, a disposition to swim with the tide and to enjoy the benefits of respectability. Orthodoxy may be the right creed it claims to be, and its followers may give a reasonable acceptance to it. But it carries an inertia, an indisposition to question and criticize, and this pacific tendency is an enemy of progress. For progress can only come by a break away from authority