Conservatives can at times be a bit silly. My car won’t start: Socialism. I pay taxes: Socialism. The guy at the coffee shop has long hair and moves a bit slow: Socialism.
One gets the sense with some people that if other people treat them as anything other than a solipsistic monad with no communal (socialist word, there) responsibilities whatever, then they are living in a tyranny.
Here is my own view. Goodness is a process of organizing information such that all benefit. It is a process of organizing individual consciousness such that YOU benefit. Deployed generally, it operates best in conditions both of freedom, and principle. The principle is the belief that wanting what is best for others and yourself will lead over time to the best emotional, mental, and physical state available, and that the path to that outcome is ever changing, but can be ascertained if we are willing to accept what is without whining, keep trying, and do our best at all times to tell the truth to ourselves and others about what is true and real–physically, emotionally, and mentally.
I won’t go through the process here, but introspection can yield–“derive”–something like the Golden Rule as the best means of organizing individual and social systems.
Liberalism is the doctrine that maximal freedom of movement generates the maximal capacity for personal and social growth and fulfullment. In the economic realm, free trade is nothing other than harnessing local information such that maximal efficiency in matching supply with demand is achieved. As Hayek demonstrated with overwhelming intellectual force, Socialism is nothing other than DEDUCTING information from the system, both in terms of price, but also in terms of what we might term moral information, which here would be motivation to produce.
True Capitalism is the use of innovation for the generation of wealth. We have never had a truly Capitalist system, since banking and financial interests–facilitated by central banks–have stolen large segments of our productivity, and hence our leisure. Ironically enough, this process has been facilitated by Socialist ideas, which purported have as their intent the democratization of leisure.
To get anything done, you have to have three components: motivation, information, and the physical resources. You have to want to do something, you have to know or figure out how to do it, and you have to be able to express it physically. Even books need paper, or computers.
Socialism reduces all three. By taking from them without compensation the fruits of their labor, it reduces the motivation of those who would be innovating on their own. Instead, it compels innovation by force, which reduces the total available. The Soviets were not uninventive. They were superior to us in some ways. But the bulk of their people did not want to work, and they were not encouraged to think, on balance. Quite often, people intentionally worked slow, and ignored ideas that could have been offered, because they hated the people running the nation. Sabotage was a long term, persistent problem.
Socialism is one of the ideas in the air today. What I would suggest is that when self organization happens, it happens from available components. When children 100 years ago were deciding who they wanted to be, and how to live their lives, they were greatly influenced by the Bible, the hard work they grew up doing, and somewhat naive but nonetheless sincere notions of national and local pride.
I was watching kids at the pool on Labor Day. They had hired a deejay, who was playing contemporary music. This music, to be blunt, is stupid. It is entertaining, has a good beat, etc., but it teaches a blind hedonism. 5 year old girls were shaking their hips to Justin Bieber, and being indoctrinated into the “cult of fun”, which is a dominant theme–meme?–in our lives.
To this is added the theme of niceness. You have to always be nice, or else you are a bad person. Self evidently many bad people have mastered this theme, and are able to say horrible things when they format it correctly. Academics would be a good example. They are often allowed to say horrible hateful things, but if they are “Nice”, then they are OK. We are told the lead singers of death metal bands are “Nice”, even if they sing songs like “I cum blood”, and pour fake blood over themselves in their concerts. They are “cool”. What else do you need to know? They smile a lot, when they aren’t shouting out satanic anthems.
Go to the Young Adult section of your local bookstore. Seriously, do it, especially if you have kids. Don’t take my word for it, but you will find HUNDREDS of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies, and other dark creatures. The heroes are always “cool”, but they are dead, or warped in fundamental ways. They are not right. They combine what a previous generation would have readily recognized as evil traits with being “cool”. This is subtle brainwashing.
Doris Lessing wrote in one of her books–I believe the book was “The Five Gated City”, but don’t quote me on that–about the process of turning a girl into a whore, of breaking her. You can’t do it overnight. You have to do it gradually. Perhaps every third time you screw her, you take her just a little past where she is comfortable. You take her past her comfort zone, let her adopt self protective rationalizations (that didn’t hurt so much; he really is nice most of the time; he says he loves me), then repeat the process. Soon enough, she has no boundaries at all. She has lost herself. This will lead, for most, to self desctructive behaviors, like drug use, but economic usefulness. Completing this process is the role of the pimp.
Many in our culture admire pimps. He “pimped out his ride”, and other such sayings are common enough.
When the Fabian Socialists undertook to destroy Western culture, they adopted three symbols: Fabius Maximus himself, a Roman general who strung out his enemy (Hannibal, if memory serves) such that he never allowed a decisive battle to be fought; the turtle, which does win the race with the Hare; and the wolf in sheeps clothing. The intent was the long term combination of deception and gradualness.
In “seducing” a health culture, the task is not just economic. They have to attack the moral basis of our culture as well, the self organizing system component, the capacity to do without government since we trust one another, and carry our own crosses without complaint.
Consider this comment from Keynes sexual partner, Lytton Strachey: he “sought to write in a way that would contribute to a change in our ethical and sexual mores–a change that couldn’t be done in a minute–but would unobtrusively permeate the more flexible minds of young people.”
Socialism does not just deduct local pricing information. It deducts local MORAL information, such that common sense moral decisions become difficult outside of the propagandistic social milieu which has been set up so diligently on our campuses.
Things to do. This will have to pass for now. I will have more to say later.