What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?

“Make me one with everything!”

I think my generation caught the worst of political correctness as college and university students in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However bad it may still seem, we’re in a much less antirational era now.

This is from Rothbard’s 1991 introduction to a 1970 essay of his called “Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor”:

Perhaps the most chilling recently created category is “logism” or “logo-centric,” the tyranny of the knowledgeable and articulate. A set of “feminist scholarship guidelines” sponsored by the state of New Jersey for its college campuses attacks knowledge and scientific inquiry per se as a male “rape of nature.” It charges:

mind was male. Nature was female, and knowledge was created as an act of aggression — a passive nature had to be interrogated, unclothed, penetrated, and compelled by man to reveal her secrets.[3]

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[3] John Taylor, “Are you Politically Correct?” New York (January 21, 1991, p.38. Also see ibid., pp. 32-40: “Taking Offense,” Newsweek (December 24, 1990), pp. 48–54.

Some of this was already going on in high school in the early 1980s, although it was subtler and gentler than the peak it would reach a few years later.

I remember a winter wilderness trip to climb Mount Washington over Christmas break with my logocentric, nature-raping schoolmates.

My friend Scott (same one I wrote about in “look for the union label”) said he wanted to “conquer the mountain!”

The wilderness teacher was frustrated with him. “That’s exactly the kind of attitude we’re trying to get you past!” he scolded. “You’re goal should be to become one with the mountain.”

Scott replied: “I want to become one with the top of the mountain!”

My favorite Hayekian has died. I suspect I’m not the only one who is taking this hard, despite never having met Sudha Shenoy in person.

Focused on the development of India and China, she was an ardent opponent of all government intervention. She was a lonely voice among third-world statists.

Several times, I’ve written her questions about economic history and she’d reply with concise but thorough answers followed by these long lists of citations. She never seemed to care whether she was talking to a scholar or not. She wanted the information out there. She was a true teacher in the most unpolluted sense of that word.