"My Conversion from Anti-Industrialist to Lover of Human Progress'"

"Sometimes when I talk and write about the importance of science, technology, and entrepreneurship to human opportunity and living standards, people ask me why I seem so obsessed with progress.
    "There is a simple reason: I did not use to believe in it.
    "When I was around fifteen, I shared many of the ideas of the people I now spend my time arguing against. I was very unhappy about modern, industrial civilisation. I looked upon highways, cars, trucks, and factories as blights on the landscape. I thought the hustle, bustle, and stress of consumerism and modernity were unnatural and unhealthy. ...

"I thought that there must have been a better time in the past, when we lived in harmony with one another and with nature. ... There, I thought, were the good old days. This view predisposed me to look at technology and construction and consumption only in terms of their negative impacts on traditional lifestyles, livelihoods, and the environment. ...

"I read the Existentialists, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Henry David Thoreau; I read Franz Kafka and plenty of other disturbing fiction, all of which reinforced my sense that something was seriously wrong with the world and humanity. It made me a pessimist, almost even a misanthrope. Such stupid people, to ruin their world like that!

"... I don’t think that I ever became clinically depressed, but as a friend of mine put it, I had made myself 'philosophically depressed.' The world and everything in it just seemed hopeless. And that became a self-fulfilling despair.
    "Two things began to lift me out of the intellectual hole that I had dug for myself: reading about history—boy, was that an eye-opener—and studying politics. ...

"Whatever period I read about, and whichever region I turned to, the 'good old days' were nowhere to be found. ... I found that the desperate struggle to find something, anything, to feed your family and stave off hunger for another few weeks was the defining experience of all previous eras. ... My ancestors in northern Sweden had not lived a good life; they had fought hard for food, shelter, and clothing, and when the weather was bad, the crop failed, and they starved. In bad times, they had to dry and grind tree bark into flour to prepare their daily bread. ...
    "Once I began to pull this thread, I found it hard to stop. I just had to find out what made the difference between their lives and ours. Why is it that for ten thousand years, people did not experience any lasting improvement in their material condition, and then suddenly, in the past five or six generations, we saw an explosion of wealth and technology?
    "For the first time, I started to actually think about the impact of railways, steamboats, international trade, corporations, financial markets, and so on. I had to ask myself: Where would I have been without them? Probably in the graveyard, or never born. ...

"This was the beginning of my obsession with human progress. I could no longer take modern civilisation as a given—or a curse.
    "Step by step, I realised that the modern world was not so bad after all. But my heart was not in it. ... Then some friends in [the freedom] community told me that I had to read Ayn Rand, whom I had never heard of. It happened at an important moment in my thought process. ... 

    "I had yet to experience, in visceral form, the meaning of industrialisation and commerce, and so I was left with a hollow, less-than-inspired ideal. That began to change when I read Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s nonfiction books.

    "For the first time, I read someone who talked about man as a heroic being, with happiness as his moral purpose, and science, technology, and industry his noblest activities. I was appalled. And deeply fascinated!
    "Rand had this annoying ability to get to the bottom of every question and challenge my every belief. ...
    "If scientists and entrepreneurs provide us with the knowledge and wealth that make the world an amazing place, why weren’t they the heroes in my story? And why were the whiners and moaners good guys—just because they dressed in black like me and had the better tunes? Previously, I had identified government intervention as a bad thing and had been involved in libertarian activism against it, but I had not clearly identified or articulated the good that deserved protection against it. Thanks to Rand, I began to shift from fighting against what’s bad to fighting for what’s good—for progress, and not just against oppression.
    "Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, the biggest impact of reading Rand was on my emotional outlook—the part of my personality that had not kept up with my intellectual transformation. She helped me see the beauty in exploration and achievement and that technology and innovation can be romantic adventures. I credit her at least partly with my bright sense of life, my belief in mankind, in progress and the future. In Rand’s novel 'The Fountainhead,' the sight of one man’s achievement provides a young boy with “the courage to face a lifetime.” In time, that’s what Rand’s works provided me.
    "This intellectual journey of discovery is why I am obsessed with progress. It is fueled in part by my gratitude for the people who keep on working and thinking and producing, even when people like my old self denigrate them. I had always taken progress for granted. I did not recognise it, and I did not understand it, and now I am trying to make up for it.
    "As a convert to the cause, I hope you will forgive my missionary zeal. You see, I am trying to get a younger version of myself to see the error of his ways."

~ Johan Norberg from his article 'My Conversion from Anti-Industrialist to Lover of Human Progress'. His most recent book is The Capitalist Manifesto – Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World