The following is a bit redundant, but I am sort of like an intellectual Roomba, trying to explore a large, dark room. Sometimes I cover the same ground, but usually from another angle, and often it leads to new places.
As I have said often, Socialism is a meaning system for the person who embraces it. As such, by my definition, it provides a reason to suffer–to work, beyond mere survival–and a paradigm by which to organize decision making behavior.
Given that the actual history of Socialism has been a sordid one, filled with horrific inhumanities, one must ask how people who embrace this doctrine reconcile its history with their own purported humanitarianism.
Here is a thesis I have not yet offered, I don’t think: they understand, on some level, that a sustainable world must include suffering, but don’t want to draw the conclusion that it is necessary for them. What they form, then is a sort of pain aggregation, that parallels in the cultural realm the centralization of resources in the economic realm. A whole new class of people whose induced slavery causes them pain is created, and in some inchoate way these “humanitarian” theoreticians believe they have solved some aspect of the human condition/problem.
This is what I have termed “Cultural Sadeism”, but one which is unconscious. They know there must be pain, and the “pain math” adds up.
Yet, a true Liberal would understand that in a truly just society, we would all pick up crosses of our own choosing, and work and suffer for ends we choose as individuals.
As I have argued in the previous post, true happiness requires a bit of misery, just as a varied diet requires some bitter foods, so we can read “pursuit of happiness” not just as “pursuit of virtue”, as I have said many times, but also “pursuit of voluntary deprivation and misery.” This is the necessary flip side of the coin.