Gary Jason is continuing his Thoughts books: Dangerous Thoughts: Provocative Writings on Contemporary Issues; Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy; Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues. Now we have Devious Thoughts: Unconventional Thoughts on Contemporary Issues. It is an excellent complement to the others in the series.
Jason is Liberty’s esteemed senior editor, and some of the essays in Devious Thoughts have appeared in Liberty. So my regard for this book may not be free from all possible or conceivable bias — but then again, Jason is senior editor because he is an exceptional writer and an exceptional reasoner, so it is natural to find that he writes exceptional books. Such as this one.
At more than 400 pages, it is also a big book, willing to take up a wide range of issues. There are essays on education, immigration, energy policy, labor unions, and politics and economics more generally. An especially interesting section highlights one of Jason’s major developing interests, the history of propaganda.
I have long considered Jason one of this country’s leading experts on that most familiar and most misguided of America’s obsessions, energy and the environment. In a world in which public assertions about the environment are seldom supported by relevant or even existent facts, Jason always has facts to spare. For such nonspecialists as I, the 22 essays in the Energy and Environmentalism section of Devious Thoughts are a thorough education in the crucial events of the past five years, the age of fracking. Summarizing this section of his book, Jason refers to “the good news of the fracking revolution and America’s resurrection as an energy superpower.” He also mentions “the continuing follies of the environmentalist movement, a movement as rich in emotion as it is impoverished in rationality.”
Clearly, Jason’s thoughts are not “devious” in the sense of being tricky or slyly suggestive or cunningly insinuated. They are clear and straightforward, devious only in the ironic sense that to people who view them from a conventional perspective they will look like Mephistophelian underminings of Right Thinking. Of course, Right Thinking includes unconditional support for government schools, uncritical sympathy for monopolistic labor unions, abject worship at the shrines of the environmentalist cult, and other strange mental exercises now required of all who wish to be regarded as good citizens.
One of my favorite essays in this volume is Jason’s hilarious account of the migration of Toyota’s national headquarters from California to Texas, and the stunned or hubristic reactions of local politicians to the fact that companies prefer to operate where governments don’t make business too hard to carry on. Too numerous to mention are Jason’s droll commentaries on the afflictions of the big labor unions, which are losing all but their chutzpah. Near the top of my list is his series of essays on the means by which a totalitarian state (Nazi Germany) manipulated its population. Jason’s knowledge of fact, always impressive, is especially so in these works, in which one continually finds facts one didn’t know — facts about so many things: Nazi financial schemes, Nazi children’s books, the Nazi Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (what a name!), with its staff of 2,000 and its budget of almost 200 million Reichsmarks. . . . So many things.
Jason has an unusual ability to provide a dense array of facts and data while preserving liveliness and accessibility. In this book there is no unexplained jargon, no haughtily opaque references. The relatively short length of most essays allows them to be conveniently devoured and digested. And it’s a fine meal.
