Not that we expect such self-knowledge from The Guardian but still...

The Guardian gives us a long read on denialism. The part that so interests is what is not being said:

Denialism is more than just another manifestation of the humdrum intricacies of our deceptions and self-deceptions. It represents the transformation of the everyday practice of denial into a whole new way of seeing the world and – most important – a collective accomplishment. Denial is furtive and routine; denialism is combative and extraordinary. Denial hides from the truth, denialism builds a new and better truth.

OK. That's what we're being told it all is.

In recent years, the term has been used to describe a number of fields of “scholarship”, whose scholars engage in audacious projects to hold back, against seemingly insurmountable odds, the findings of an avalanche of research. They argue that the Holocaust (and other genocides) never happened, that anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is a myth, that Aids either does not exist or is unrelated to HIV, that evolution is a scientific impossibility, and that all manner of other scientific and historical orthodoxies must be rejected.

We have checked and nowhere is the denialism with the greatest impact upon humans mentioned, not even once. That delusion that planned economies work. We did test this idea to destruction in that controlled experiment we call the 20th century. The market economies wildly outperformed the planned ones in that basic aim of having an economy in the first place, making human lives better. But not a mention of this at all.

There are multiple kinds of denialists: from those who are sceptical of all established knowledge, to those who challenge one type of knowledge; from those who actively contribute to the creation of denialist scholarship, to those who quietly consume it; from those who burn with certainty, to those who are privately sceptical about their scepticism. What they all have in common, I would argue, is a particular type of desire. This desire – for something not to be true – is the driver of denialism.

Quite so, that desire to insist that if only the right people were directing affairs then all would be copacetic. The right people always, but always, being defined as those doing the insisting.

If we are to be properly informed concerning what we humans really do know then it is of a certain importance that all accept the idea that market economies work, non-market economies do not. As above, we have tested this and we know it to be true.

But then we don't really expect that level of self-knowledge from The Guardian. It would certainly have a lot of blank space between the adverts if it took the principle seriously.