Une fausse idée claire, a clear but false idea, is a label Alexis de Tocqueville liked to use. He believed that such ideas are especially apt to sprout in democracies, where everybody is called upon to pass judgment on almost everything. Even today most of us still tend to think that simple explanations are nearer to the truth than complex ones. There is a very good psychological explanation for this: man is inclined to believe that whereas falsehood must hide behind a smokescreen of verbosity, truth is not afraid to present itself plain and unalloyed.
Yet the universe—the whole of creation—is immensely complex; there is no simple, easily explained truth about cancer, nuclear fission, the origins of World War I, Platonic philosophy, the anatomy of a cow, higher mathematics, or a transistor radio. It does not take long to explain the Islamic faith (one of the reasons for its continued spreading), whereas Christianity is a most complicated creed. Anyone who thinks the Bible is easily understood has certainly not read it. Theologians of the first order have interpreted crucial passages differently. Hence the schisms, rifts, wars, and persecutions in the name of our religion. I can explain socialism to almost anybody in fifteen minutes, but to give a rational account of the free market economy (“capitalism” is the dirtier word for it) would require a seminar. Socialism (including Communism) is very distinctly a fausse idée claire and so, needless to say, was Nazism.
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