Explaining Socialism's Moral Decay

Socialism was born bad. Bastiat explained socialism several decades before Marx, and in his minds eye he had already seen the killing fields of Cambodia. “The socialist intends to sculpt human flesh as a sculptor sculpts in stone.”

Socialism appeals to the desire for absolute power. If I and people like me have absolute and total power well of course we are going to use it to do good. Naturally. So anyone who opposes people like me having the power to take people’s stuff and murder and torture at whim is obviously opposed to all the good stuff I would do. Lots and lots of good stuff.

Who are the socialists? Consider all those socialists that Stalin gave the tour to. He did not show them fake equality. Instead he showed them privilege and power, instead he showed them savage inequality.

He showed them what they wanted to see, he showed them the prisons and the slave labor camps, he showed them the luxury enjoyed by the nomenclatura, from which we can conclude that what they wanted to see, was fear.

Born bad sounds right to me. It is the explanation for why power corrupts and why the worst get on top. Break it down and the distinguishing characteristic of the socialist is a willingness to exploit human beings (theft, slavery, terror, homicide) in the pursuit of chosen objectives.

All three are correct, but Born Bad covers most. I believe a variation of that explanation was asserted by Rothbard in “Karl Marx as a religious Escathologist”.

1. Power corrupts

Partly, but it doesn’t explain why atrocities are the worst in early periods, when corruption shouldn’t be that extensive.

2. Worst come on top.

No. The worst communist leaders were usually leaders already before the revolution. Their successors will be less cruel.

3. Born bad

Conclusions you made are typical for Leninists:

Their overriding goals were to engineer a new society and a New Socialist Man. If this meant treating workers like slaves – depriving them of the freedom to choose their occupation or location, forbidding them to quit, splitting up families without their consent, and imposing draconian punishments on dissenters – so be it.

Other socialist currents do not accept such ideas. However, it doesn’t explain how it happened that Leninists were so influential in XX. ct…. The answer is – they are very good revolutionaries. In peaceful times, such parties are usually small. Lenin’s party was only the third strongest socialist party in Russia. But in the moment of crisis, foreign aggression, cruel domestic rightist dictator … it turns that they are best equipped to start some national uprising – they are self-selected and thy prepare for that moment whole their lives.

I think all three come into play, however Richter position is the building block. Lord Acton and F.A. Hayek’s position’s would not exist and come into play if it were not for the underlying moral corruption. The moral sespool of Lenin-Marxism is a fertile breading ground for the other two positions. Many a person who once in power, and it told how wonderful they are, believe their demi-Godhood to know all and control all. The system rewards thoughs who are corrupt with more power and destroy’s though’s with any ethics.

It’s a trifecta: born bad, then the worst people will come to lead the movement, and then power will corrupt them further. I think Acton’s insight is crucial, though, since otherwise you might believe that however unlikely it has proved in practice, if you only got the right people in charge and were vigilant about them not losing power to wicked folks, you’d have solved the problem.

I think the Hayekian ‘use of knowledge in society’ is fundamentally distinct and important in assessing socialism. That is, he suggested that because socialist decisions are centralized no decisionmaker ever sees all the varied, ephemeral data needed to make efficient decisions. Further, decision makers are not incented correctly via the Welfare theorem logic (ie, the consistency of profit seeking C.E. and optimal social welfare P.O.). The socialists do not appreciate the unintended order created by a marketplace, where competition and parochial self interest interact to produce efficient solutions. This is related to, but actually quite different than Mises’s debate with Lange (which one might say was ‘solved’ via Russian Kantoravich’s linear programming, but note its complete irrelevance today).

Seems to me, these are the reasons capitalism is born bad:

1. The Actonian “power corrupts” story

2. The Hayekian “worst get on top” story

3. The Richterian “born bad” story

For example, consider European capitalism in Africa, Asia, and the Americas from roughly 1500 to the present.

One can’t argue capitalism improved the lives of Africans, Asians, and Americans, when on the whole their property rights and liberties were taken from them.

I doubt the Dutch, who were the worst of these capitalists, would trade their self imposed socialism for their own capitalism of the past as exercised around the world.

Mulp,

You’re not completely off base. There are capitalist horror stories – though none so tragic as the horror stories from the political class. And, the way I see it, the horror stories about capitalists are really horror stories about political behavior (i.e., exploitation). If we start with the concept of free markets, then add political behavior, the result is what is commonly referred to as capitalism. Its why I greatly prefer the term “free markets” to describe the situation I would prefer.

All of those are good, but in the end, it just plain violates human nature. Well, more even than human nature…

We find the idea of property rights deep in evolutionary history, in the first territorial fishes. Most of today’s territorial fishes are lobe-finned fishes, and there is little doubt that lobe-finned fishes have been territorial for literally hundreds of millions of years. An example is the brightly-colored gobies, which are very territorial. “For many vertebrates, a clearly defined territory for offspring rearing seems to be fundamental. This involves aggressive behavior of a great variety on the part of the male (and sometimes the female too), usually of a ritual nature, but effective in defending an area” (John T. Bonner The Evolution of Culture in Animals, 86). These fish establish territories where they live, feed, mate, and protect their eggs from predators. Schooling fish, like herring, are simple in both coloration and behavior. Why spend energy on dangerous bright colors to attract mates when everyone releases their eggs and sperm at once, collectively? And why develop complex behaviors if there is no reason to, if there is no conflict, since there is no need to defend territory if you are a schooling fish in the open ocean? A great deal of energy is spent on making literally millions or even billions of eggs, let alone sperm – and there is only a limited chance that it will be either your sperm or your egg that survives. But with territorial fishes, the energy is put into protecting the fewer numbers of eggs, but those eggs are more likely to survive. And, more importantly for the individual fish, the female knows her eggs are protected until they hatch, and the male knows the eggs were fertilized by his sperm. Thus, there is a certain advantage to protecting territory, since it ensure that any particular individual fish has passed on its DNA to future generations. Herring can never know for sure.

One of the consequences of the establishment of territory by lobe-finned fishes was that complex behaviors has to evolve as well. This is due to the conflict created by the creation and defense of territory. The conflict comes about between the needs to aggressively defend territory and sexually reproduce. If one just defends, one runs off potential mates. But passive gobies lose territory – and cannot attract mates. What develops from the conflict between the straightforward actions of defense and sex is the mating ritual, a nonlinear feedback behavior designed to allow members of the opposite sex to enter one’s private space. It is a dance. It is a dance wherein linear elements conflict to create nonlinear systems, which reorganize the chaos created by the conflict into a new order. Ritual is the emergent system created out of the conflicting elements. It is a safe space in which the participants play out the conflicts, to ensure mating can occur. One result is that gobies differentiate between individuals. Territoriality (notions of private property) created individuality through the need to ritualize sex. More, it resulted in the creation of ritual itself, which led to more and more complex behaviors as different species evolved, including art and religion in humans. And it was, incidentally, the lobe-finned fishes that evolved into the first amphibians – and territoriality was carried onto the land, and into every land vertebrate. All amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals are territorial. And this includes humans.

Thus, evolution established property rights as a fundamental way of ensuring reproductive fitness. In social mammals, this became partly socialized, since it was the tribe or family group as a whole that owned the territory they defended. And all humans groups have always believed that they owned the land – otherwise they would not have spent so much time, energy, and lives on protecting it from others. In social animals, including pair-bonding animals, this resulted in the development of personal relationships, including love. But none of this could be possible without a complex neural system to allow for the creation of such complex behavior.

Social mammals have strong social bonds even among those who are not mates. These bonds were generated through elaborating mating rituals into things like grooming rituals. Primates have strong grooming rituals, which have led to sexual pleasure, leading to recreational sex in humans and bonobos, and massage in humans. We can see this behavior in the fact that “the human neurotransmitter vasopressin, which is closely associated with aggression, is also deeply implicated in the drive to stay with and cherish one’s mate and protect one’s offspring. Without the resistance to strangers there could be no individuality and love” (Frederick Turner, The Culture of Hope, 170). The conflict is found even at the neurotransmitter level. Which should not surprise us, since we have already shown that it is the protection of territory that resulted in the kinds of rituals that created pair-bonds in the first place.

Animals that have territory not only protect that territory, but work to improve it. Gobies organize rocks in their territories, and keep the caves they create to live and hide in clean. Bower birds decorate their bowers to attract females. Often the male animal himself is decorated, or he creates a larger, more beautiful territory – or, oftentimes, both. Thus undoubtedly explains why human males feel the need to accumulate more and more property, and why we try to decorate ourselves with things ranging from nice clothes to tatoos. And it also explains why, when we own property, we have more of a tendency to take care of it than if we do not own it. When we use private property, we treat it like someone else will come along and clean up the mess we make, or that if we don’t take what is there, then someone else will. We do this because deep in our evolutionary past, in our deepest of instincts, we believe that not only do we have to keep our own territories in good shape to attract mates, but that if any competition’s territory is ruined, then potential mates will be discouraged from mating with our competition. This is the purpose of raids on the territory of other tribes, or exploiting commons – which results in the Tragedy of the Commons. So if we truly want to protect the world’s resources and keep the world clean, then all property must become privately owned, without danger of a government being able to come along and take that property. No amount of social engineering will be able to change this biological imperative to owning property.

And this is certainly best overall. For it is only on our own land where we can be free to be who we are. It is only on our land where we and our families – our tribes – can be safe. There, we can live and love and prosper and speak as we wish. All of our freedoms derive from property rights – and property rights are part of our evolutionary heritage. Thus, there is nothing less scientific than the idea of abolishing private property, as the socialists have wanted to do. The abolition of property is downright unnatural, from a mammalian – and even land vertebrate – point of view.

Thus, property is very deeply a-rational and quite non-ideological in its origins. This is why property has never been abolished anywhere – all that changes is who controls the property and how. Tribes fight to protect territory from other tribes.. Various ways have been developed to protect groups’ and individuals’ property. Small groups have owned huge tracts of land and allowed others to live and work on them (as we saw in slavery throughout the world, various versions of feudalism throughout the world, and in more recent forms of state like the USSR and Communist China). But there has always been property ownership and control. It’s part of being a vertebrate descended from lobe-fined fishes. One cannot go against nature without facing severe consequences.

Sarge, Excellent! Thanks!

fundamentalist,

You’re quite welcome. That comes from his book “God in the Dock.”

Kurbla,

In regards to the idea that power corrupts, you said that “it doesn’t explain why atrocities are the worst in early periods, when corruption shouldn’t be that extensive.” And in a similar vein you noted that “The worst communist leaders were usually leaders already before the revolution. Their successors will be less cruel.”

That doesn’t quite ring true to me. Certainly Stalin was worse than Lenin. When things were turning particularly sour in Russia after the Revolution, Lenin adopted the New Economic Policy, which allowed some small return of privatization and improved the situation somewhat. Stalin, however, deliberately chose mass famine as a way to suppress even the slightest hint of dissent. And Mao’s Great Leap Forward wasn’t implemented for nearly a decade after he took power. Surely this counts as his single greatest atrocity, given that it cost the lives of nearly forty million people. So I don’t think it’s quite right to conclude either that successors tend to be better or that the biggest tragedies take place earliest. North Korea had a mass famine of its own in the nineties, decades after the communist party took power. Also, I would be hard pressed to call Kim Jong Il and improvement on, or less cruel than, Kim Il Sung.

Deng Xiaoping certainly is an improvement, however. I think the jury is still out regarding Raul Castro, but I’m not optimistic.

Where is the reference to CONCEIT?

All this “…ism” stuff derives from the perceptions of some driving them to (at first) influence the conduct of others,then (incrementally) to control the conduct of others, all to some objectives, ranging from evangelism to totalitarianism.

It is the conceit in selecting objectives, regardless of the intellect of those purporting capacity (and entitlement) to be selectors.

That conceit is born of the blindness to the vast scope of human ignorance that makes any discovery seem a monumental revelation.

If one goes all the way back to Saint-Simon, Comte, and on through the many permutations, the conceit of certainties is overwhelming; most vehemently by those who decry that in religious convictions of their times – even now.

MernaMoose: “The concept is moral decay”

Well said.

@Randy

Blighter is a satirist. Don’t take him as seriously arguing that position.

My thanks, Kurbla, for helping me understand your thoughts.