Socialism: The Destructive Search for Fairness
“Fairness does not just happen. Fairness is the result of proper government policies.”
- Hillary Clinton
Part 1 – Socialism’s Claims to Logic and Morality
Socialism is like a beautiful impressionist painting - a lovely image from afar, but completely inadequate as a blueprint for a distinct thing when you get close enough to it. Those myriad dots of paint on the canvas make a beautiful dream appear before our eyes, but that image does not necessarily describe anything either possible or even desirable because it has not been subjected to a thorough logical review by most who adhere to it. Desiring a fair material and political existence for all the world's people is a lovely dream, but not a true philosophy of practical action. Altruistic intentions of happiness and justice are not, by themselves, a wise means of governing a planet. A mirage can be dangerous, no matter how gloriously beautiful its image may be.
Reallocating the world's resources to provide fairness for all is impossible, as fairness itself is the most impossibly indefinable and unapproachable concept to enact. Most of the conflicts and controversies that people face are not simple black-and-white issues. Fair solutions are rarely simple enough to be easily enacted, and often there are no completely fair outcomes at all. Consider the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. No matter what compromise may be reached, many injustices on both sides will never be fully rectified.
Exactly who decides what is and is not fair? Different people will have different opinions of what is fair, and sometimes they feel the fair solution is for them to not compromise at all. Christian Fundamentalists and Scientists fighting over Biology textbook curricula are an example of this. Neither side agrees that teaching both Evolution and Intelligent Design to our kids is fair and acceptable. Both sides want their way only, and feel morally compelled to not compromise. If we have this much disagreement about fairness in school textbooks, how can we possibly all have the same notion of fairness as pertaining to sharing the world’s resources?
And so we are faced with the situation where even reasonable people calmly negotiating with each other will often not come to an agreement that both sides feel is fair. If our government is to actively promote fairness wherever it can, exactly whose fairness will the government champion? And since this governmental action will be seen as profoundly unfair by the faction it disagrees with, how is this any different than pure autocratic tyranny? Is this any different than a medieval king hearing a controversy between two men, and then proceeding to fine the man he disagrees with and giving the money to the man he agrees with? The supposed nobility of the Socialist Leader, “The Champion of Fairness”, is nothing but a false moral sheath to cover the same age-old sword of autocracy that both Napoleon and Hitler once wielded.
What if the government makes both sides compromise in a situation where both sides are morally opposed to any compromise, like the textbook controversy? Is fairness the act of giving neither side what it wants? Let us say that a man has a daughter and he has a dispute with her boyfriend. The father wants his daughter to remain a virgin until she is married, but the boyfriend wants her right now, saying he loves her and will marry her as soon as he saves enough money, but he cannot wait anymore to have her. Shall the government intercede, in the name of fairness, and declare “She shall have her virginity taken, but not by her boyfriend” as a supposedly equitable compromise?
Even more important that this ambiguity about what exactly fairness is, reallocating the world’s resources to promote fairness is truly not logically and ethically desirable. This is because the outcome of such a redistribution would harm humanity far worse than the harm that we suffer now due to poverty and inequality. By taking resources and power away from the people who are the engines of human civilization and progress, and giving these resources to people who do little more than consume and reproduce; Socialism gradually destroys all the progress we have made as a species both up to today and evermore. The masses do benefit the world by working and promoting the economy - I make no accusations of laziness on their part. But they do almost nothing that creates a permanent positive contribution to the state of human enlightenment and civilization. Indeed, their cumulative effect is one of diluting and eroding that which has been created before. They act as a force of entropy on human civilization.
Surely, our goal as a species should be to become wiser and more comprehending of the infinite beauty upon and beyond our world, and within the depths of our own hearts and minds.
Simple survival and multiplication is the goal of a virus, not the goal of a species that claims to be enlightened and something other than mere vermin. Yet Socialism clearly promotes the survival of each member of our species at the expense of the advancement of the capabilities and worth of our species as a whole.[1]
It seeks to feed everybody and equalize everybody, regardless of the effects this would have on art, science, philosophy, and every other hallmark of our purpose for existence. It creates and amplifies a massive population problem that would ultimately destroy our environment and doom our species to oblivion after we exhaust all the food and fresh water sources on Earth. There are higher goals for humanity than simply filling every belly until the Earth has no more food.
Is Greed Truly the Cause of Poverty?
The Earth has approximately 57.5 million square miles of land, and of this, approximately 40 million square miles are suitable for permanent human habitation and food production. Dividing this by 6.5 billion people, we are left with a square of land about 410 feet by 410 feet for each human being on the planet, and that space is shrinking with each new birth. The astute reader can see that it is highly unlikely that one can obtain all the food, fresh water, fuel, minerals, living space, latrine and landfill space that one would need to live above 3rd world poverty levels on such a small parcel of land.[2] Also, even if many areas of the world are so richly blessed as to have all this productive capacity, it is quite clear that most habitable areas of the world cannot provide anywhere near this level of production.
Even if you could reallocate all the world's land equally to each person, all this would accomplish is plunging the whole of humanity into abject poverty. There are simply not enough resources and wealth on this planet to share with all, and Socialists' inability to recognize this fact is their prime fault. The lifeboat that is our Earth simply doesn't have room for 6.5+ billion people! And without a quantum leap forward in many technologies, and a willingness to develop and pave over virtually all our remaining natural spaces, it never will. We keep breeding faster than our technology and economy can handle, and yet some people are still confused why poverty and hunger still exist.
Socialism is Illogical
Socialism's main logical assertion is that if we all simply share everything fairly, that there would be plenty of resources for everybody and that poverty is only caused by greed. Anybody with a calculator and a map of the world can prove this false. While greed might have been one of several causes of poverty 100-150 years ago, time and population growth have left Socialism without any logical basis at all in the modern world.
As of 2005, Per Capita Gross National Income Purchasing Power Parity for the entire world was $9,190 annually. For the same year, the United States figure was $41,950.[3] Implementing total World Socialism would therefore result in a 78% drop in the average wealth of American Citizens. Sharing everything fairly is one thing, but this clearly does nothing but impoverish everybody. When 53% of the world’s population lives on less than $2 per day, how can you possibly hope to bring all these billions of people up to a decent standard of living by taking away resources from the ~ 17% of us who live in USA/Canada, Japan and Europe?
Surely, we could keep them from starving (for the moment) and enable them to obtain some bare housing. But what happens when all these people who would have previously been unable to reproduce due to malnutrition or death become healthy? They reproduce. And these are the very people who are least inclined to limit their reproduction to any self-imposed bounds.
So we can see that by impoverishing the rest of the world so as to sustain these poor suffering masses only results in their subsequent ability to breed even more; while our ability to produce more food, energy, and technological improvements is massively undercut by all of this ‘sharing’ we have done. What results is a world suddenly grown to 8-10 Billion people, but without any increase in capacity to sustain them. The Socialist answer to all of this is simple: we simple reapportion everything again, and this time everybody just has to make do with even less per person.
Thus, we see that Socialism causes a self-reinforcing spiral of poverty to afflict the entire world, while the population explodes upwards towards ever-higher numbers of ultimately unsupportable people. The Socialist promise of Fairness and Prosperity for all becomes only the fairly-evenly shared misery for all. And this will continue until the population grows so high that food can no longer be regularly distributed to everybody. When this happens, the whole structure will collapse under the weight of the billions of unsupportable people it created, and mass chaos and violence will break out across the globe.
The Danger of Illogical Philosophy
Either there is plenty for all, and Socialism is a potentially logical philosophy, or there is not and Socialism is patently illogical. We must be sure about this because illogical philosophies are enormously dangerous! Consider Europe in the Dark Ages, bound to an illogical philosophy imposed by the Catholic Church. Can you begin to calculate the amount of human suffering and ignorance that was caused and perpetuated by their unfettered ideological control of everything? For centuries the church retarded the advancement and flourishing of art, science, and hope in the western world. For centuries, their fanaticism was felt abroad in holy wars and destruction of foreign peoples, all executed under the disingenuous banner of their false spiritual superiority.
The Aztecs also had an illogical philosophy based upon appeasing their gods through a perpetual course of human sacrifice. They believed that if the sacrifices were not done, the gods would physically strike their cities with fire, famine, and that even the sun itself would die. Wars were waged with the main purpose of capturing people to sacrifice, and certain sacrifices were done to fellow Aztecs who volunteered for this supposed honor. This was the framework of their logic, imposed by their paranoid philosophy.
Both of these nightmarish modes of human existence (Dark Age Catholicism and Aztec) were the result of people (even the smart ones) behaving logically within an illogical philosophic framework. If God really will damn you for having sex before marriage, then it is logical to abstain or become a monk or even castrate yourself. If God really will admit you to heaven, no matter what sin you have already committed, if you will simply travel to Jerusalem and kill the Moslems there; then it is logical to go and kill. Is Human Sacrifice logical? If the gods truly will smite your city if you don't do it, then Human Sacrifice is completely logical. Otherwise, your logic is insanity.
The value of a philosophy is dependant upon it's fidelity to reality and logic. Those people of the past who served these false visions of reality had their entire life’s labors consumed by a largely irrelevant purpose. And the greatest human tragedy is that of each of the brilliant people of these times had their creative spark yoked to serve the perpetuation of their culture’s unique form of insanity.
In today’s world, this is happening again with the false philosophy of Socialism, and all the noble people who misguidedly serve this modern form of insanity.
Now some may say that Socialism is not a religion, and so it is different from the Catholics or Aztecs. But although Socialism has differences in style and ethics, on a philosophical level it functions similarly. It is a distinct theory of reality and a guide for a distinct culture and society based upon unique ethical imperatives, just like religions. And although the god that Socialists serve is different from Jehovah or Huehueteotl, it is still commands their unquestioning devotion. This god is The Human Belly.
Intentions are not Proof of Logic
Socialism, as a philosophy, must be put to a logical review. If you say that we can feed every starving person by renouncing our selfish ways, either this is true or it is not. If the world is truly capable of perpetually supporting all the billions of people who exist now and in the future, using present technology, then your philosophy passes this test of reality. If the truth shows that there are not enough resources for all people using current technology, then your philosophy is obviously illogical. It does not matter how good Socialism's goal may be if the goal is unachievable in reality. The Aztecs wanted tranquility and prosperity for their people and to keep the sun itself alive; isn't this an honorable and beautiful intention? The Catholics just wanted to obey the source of all life and creation and find heaven in so doing; isn't this a worthy framework for human thought? Likewise, just because Socialism seeks to eradicate poverty does not automatically make Socialism logical.
Secondary Socialist Logic is Irrelevant if the Primary Logic is False
If we all adopt this philosophy, and we all believe that there is enough food for every human on the planet, we will experience the same kind of abominable events that these other illogical philosophies caused in history. This is because our starting point for logical thinking is false. Like a mathematical equation, if the first step in the equation won't work (the primary logic), all the subsequent logic based upon this "Given" are likewise false, even if the subsequent thinking is completely logical. If we first believe that all fruit can fly, it is perfectly logical to then say that apples can be found hovering in the clouds. In like manner, Socialist thinking about economics and logistics across the globe may be completely logical. But if the philosophical underpinnings of these plans are false, all of these logical and defensible plans are nothing but exercises in insanity like the Crusades.
The old model of the Earth being the center of the universe is another false philosophy that was enhanced and refined in an extremely logical manner. Over the centuries, brilliant people such as Ptolemy refined this model with very intelligent mathematical improvements until it nearly exactly described the actual motion of the planets though the sky. But until we were able to scrap this beautiful system, with the stationary Earth which was so obviously at the center of everything, we could not progress any further and we would have had no chance of knowing the actual truth.
Many people could not bring themselves to believe that the Earth is not the center of the universe; it was such a beautiful and seemingly obvious concept. Likewise, Socialists cannot bear to believe that reality is so cold and dark as to mandate hunger and poverty. A fair world of plentiful food and space for all people is the only thing that makes sense to them. But this is a delusion, and we can never solve the problems of humanity until we face actual reality and make plans based upon the truth, no matter how unpleasant that truth may be. By facing the harsh realities of today honestly, we sow the seeds for future progress which will bring about our worthy intentions. We cannot go forward unless we, like Copernicus, scrap the beautiful delusion and hold fast to the greater beauty found in real truth.
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul - The Socialist Form of Morality
But is Socialism a more moral way to go, even if it is illogical? Hardly. Is it better for 85% of the world to be impoverished or 100% to be impoverished? What is the morality in destroying the capacity of ALL humanity to write symphonies and discover medicines and actually advance our species in the noble disciplines just because 85% of us cannot be thus blessed? Is it better for us all to toil for bare existence, just to be "fair"? Fairness of this kind is truly born of Envy, not Justice.
Socialists often comment about how we cannot simply sit by and let the starving millions perish. They say that our inaction is immoral and that Socialism, by taking action, is the moral course. But this thinking has two problems.
First, the only way to save these starving millions is to steal resources from those who already possess them. This is, to a great extent, what taxation is. Even within America, where poverty is nowhere near as severe as can be found elsewhere in the world, most working people have 40-50% of their income forcibly taken from them by income, property, sales, and other taxes. While governments do require funds to operate, and some governmental functions benefit everybody (defense, infrastructure, etc.), most of this money is simply stolen from them to pay for benefits for somebody else. Whether these other people deserve help or not is irrelevant – theft is not an ethical means for governments to fix social problems. It is only the helplessness that citizens feel to oppose this taxation, and the slow incremental way in which taxation has grown over the past century, that prevents a mass revolt from occurring. When the income tax was first established, it was only a 1% tax on incomes above a significant level. It would never have been adopted if it was proposed back then at modern levels!
Second, as we have previously seen, there are not enough resources for everybody. If we seek to feed the starving millions, we must impoverish other people to do so. How can this be moral? How does it fix the problem? If 1,000 people line up to see a movie, and the theater only seats 100 people, is it “moral” to squeeze all 1,000 into the theater so that nobody is left out? That would only destroy the experience for everybody.
In many instances, sharing resources beyond a certain point simply destroys them completely. A loaf of bread can be broken into a million portions, but each portion then is of no value to anybody and the bread becomes destroyed simply by the apportionment.
“But how do you decide who gets in and who is left out?” Socialists say. This is simple and obvious: The first 100 people who line up and purchase a ticket get in. “But some of these people had an advantage that enabled them to line up earlier than others” Socialists say. “It isn’t fair that they should have this advantage”.
Why? Unless they have personally impeded the progress or assaulted the others, why is this advantage a bad thing? Inevitably, different people have different conditions of life and this is not always an unfair condition. Indeed, if we believe that industry, labor, and intelligence are personal attributes that naturally and properly lead to success, then we have no moral basis to always oppose some people having an advantage over others.
But this is all academic. Socialists simply cannot tolerate a world of winners and losers of any kind, whether justified or not. This is the primary thrust of all their rhetoric and the basis of their supposed morality. A close inspection of the motives of this attitude show that it is based upon cowardice, envy and/or guilt, and not justice, as justice would seek to reward merit. Rewarding merit, of any kind, causes winners and losers to occur. Socialists craft words and phrases into a form that conveys the impression that everybody should be rewarded and that nobody will be losers under their regime. Not only is this an oxymoron, as rewarding everybody is the same logical operation as rewarding nobody, but physical reality shows that unless our population becomes decimated by some cataclysm, we will always have many more losers than winners. No amount of reallocating resources or reshuffling privileges will negate the basic natural law imposed by our huge population.
Competition is not just a brutal reality of life. It is also part of the joy of living and the pulse of personal freedom and expression. Only a coward would prefer not to compete just because they could lose. There is more honor to be found in those people who have never succeeded, yet continually strive for success, than in someone who wants nobody to be able to compete and the entire competition itself destroyed just because they are afraid to play. Those who win often have tried and lost many times over, but their courage and vitality kept them in the game even when times were desperate.
But Socialists are often just cowards who are afraid to compete, envious of those who have competed and won, covering their own fear with a loudmouthed harangue about the plight of the poor and the evils of the rich. This love of the poor is not as meritorious as they profess it to be. After all, if the poor were always truly such bastions of virtue and ability, wrongfully oppressed and reviled, they would have organized themselves long ago and taken over the world. They have had thousands of years to do so!
Nothing presumptive can be said about any individual among an underclass or any downtrodden group. There are both exceptional and deficient people among their numbers, and so we cannot automatically consider any single person deficient simply by reason of poverty or lack of power. But when looked at as a group, it is impossible to conclude that these people are overall as similarly capable as those who supposedly oppress them. This difference can result from either a biological difference or a cultural difference. Oppressed people of similar capacity to their oppressors almost always find a way to fight back effectively, often turning the tables entirely within a few years or decades. And so there mere fact that a nearly-perpetual power imbalance exists is strong evidence that an actual functional disparity exists.[4]
In my view, cultural differences are the main reason why some peoples are better than others at wielding power. Indeed, we can see examples of many races being brought up in another race’s culture and behaving in much the same ways as those whose culture they have adopted. This would not be so if biological differences were paramount. Culture is like a computer program that overlays the still-unprogrammed mind of a young child, causing it to morph and grow into a form that reflects the culture itself. The young mind could have grown into many different outcomes. But culture emphasizes some traits and undercuts others, causing a uniquely biased human mind to emerge. And just like racial biases, poverty itself is a distinct cultural influence that changes the minds of the children born into it.
Some cultures, though advanced in some ways, lack the same capacity for self-defense as neighboring cultures. This failure to provide defense, or to advance technologically as fast as other cultures, represents a true weakness in the culture. After all, all life is competitive. And those species or cultures that cannot defend themselves will inevitably be overcome by a competitor. Past African and Native American cultures were advanced in many ways, some of which were indeed superior to European cultures. But without more of an inherent ability to promote technology and self-defense, these cultures must be considered less viable than European or Asian cultures simply because they lacked the basic requirement of security.[5] Though modern/socialist sensibilities object to this because they renounce all competition, this changes nothing. We must remember that these people were not the placid/pacifistic noble savages that we have come to believe. They too were competing among their neighbors and themselves, and did use war and violence as a political tool. They simply didn’t do this as well as the Europeans and Asians did, and so this is why they fell or were otherwise overcome. The specific dynamics of their unique cultures caused deficits in security, technology, and organization which doomed them.
Biology Mandates Winners and Losers
In nature, all species have winners and losers. A Cheetah that injures its leg during a hunt will probably starve. It is a loser. The nearby gazelles will have a greater chance of survival because the Cheetah is hurt. They are winners. And most importantly, the other nearby Cheetahs are winners because their competition has been disabled. This is true even though the injured Cheetah has done nothing necessarily to deserve being a loser.
Let us suppose that the Cheetahs had a government, and that they decided to be Socialists. They would then command the healthy adults among them to give a portion of their food to support this injured Cheetah. Now many injuries in the wild never heal properly, and so those who become injured have a great chance of never being fit to hunt again. As time goes by, more and more Cheetahs will become injured and never be able to hunt again. But because of Socialism, they will not die because the other Cheetahs continue to hunt for them.
In time, the ratio of productive Cheetahs to non-productive Cheetahs will become so bad that the healthy ones will need to spend double or triple their normal time hunting, just to keep the others alive. All of this over-hunting not only increases the chance that they too will be injured, but it greatly depletes their hunting grounds beyond its natural capacity to provide food. After all, they are taking food from the environment to feed themselves and also a number of Cheetahs who (by nature’s law) ought to be dead and not consuming. Eventually, their situation will become untenable, endangering the survival of the entire group. And as for morality and fairness, the Cheetahs have forced the productive members of their society to labor as virtual slaves to support a cause that never benefited them, and only brought danger and destruction to their world.
The injured Cheetahs did not benefit either. They have traded a natural, honorable death without lingering pain and without harming their kind; for a prolonged period of pain, frustration, and sadness while they contributed to ending the ancient thread of life of their kind.
Life without quality of life and opportunity is no life at all. It is the perverse echo of a life demolished but not mercifully killed, like a stove that will never cook again but whose pilot light is still lit. It is an abominable pantomime of that which once existed, mocking and defiling the nobility of what was present before by its continued defaced existence today. It is futility and pain. This is why nature mercifully abhors this condition, and why Socialism is wrong to strive so hard to preserve it.
Now let us suppose that the Cheetahs’ habitat has an amazing amount of food (like an entire planet) and they did not run out as I have previously described. This situation brings an even more insidious form of destruction. Here we have a large number of Cheetahs hunting to support a large number of non-productive Cheetahs. Let us imagine that this situation has been going on for many centuries.
We have previously said that our first injured Cheetah did not do anything to deserve being a loser. But over time, and when looking at large numbers of individuals, we must conclude that injuries will happen more often to Cheetahs who are doing something wrong than to those who are not. It will happen to those who are not as genetically fit, either in their bone or joint strength. Cheetahs that cannot see as well as others will not run over uneven terrain as safely. Those who are not as smart as others will take overly-dangerous chances in which animals to attack, the routes to pursue them, and the region of their body to first bite or claw.
So we can see that the group of injured Cheetahs likely consists of a small number of fit animals who had some bad luck happen to them, and the rest are those who are not as genetically fit as normal Cheetahs. In nature, these less-fit individuals would die off so that they cannot be a burden on the healthy Cheetahs and so they could not pass on their inferior genes through breeding. This is because it is more important for the species to thrive and prosper than for each individual to avoid death. Every individual dies eventually, but the species should be immortal.
Socialism turns this basic natural law on its head. By allowing the less-fit animals to survive and breed, it eventually destroys the genetic health and survival potential of the entire species, all the while forcing the fit animals to live a lesser life than they were born to enjoy.
Socialism is profoundly terrified of death. But the deaths of individuals are required for life itself to exist. Those who understand Biology can see that Socialism’s intentions and view of reality are in direct opposition to the immutable laws of life and are profoundly unscientific.
As long as these deaths serve the life of the species, can we say anything other than this is a good thing? Are we to presume that we can rewrite the laws governing life, itself? Or shall we allow fear of death to be the primary impetus of our philosophy, using a frenetic compassion or altruism as a shield to hide behind?
It is natural to look with empathy on the plight of a dying animal, and for us to feel sadness and to shed tears as its life flows away. To do less would be inhuman. I cannot tell you how many times in my life I have shed tears at the sight of animals or people suffering and dying, whether in real life or through media imagery. This is well so, for our claims at being a noble species require that we feel kinship with all life, both human and otherwise, and that we feel some measure of their suffering. But wisdom is not commanded by empathy, it only takes counsel from it. Wisdom requires that we listen to reason as well.
Socialism, with its irrational fear of all death, takes a dangerously unbalanced approach which is profoundly destructive and unwise. Those who truly possess empathy will understand that the acceptance of death when it serves the cause of life, and of following the path of balance, is a more beautiful and serene philosophy of living than that of shrilly railing against every instance of every individual’s death.
Class Inequities are Required for Human Progress
Humanity's interests and survival are clearly dependant upon our ability to grow both smarter and wiser into the future. These advancements include technological and artistic advances and also superior philosophies to conduct ourselves more efficiently and humanely. Breakthrough philosophies, technologies, and arts are almost never created by people living at a bare subsistence level; their environment inhibits highly abstract thought and lengthy concentration on abstractions.[6] Survival itself is the focus of all of their genius. Even in ancient civilizations, only those removed from daily manual labor and of a higher class or status created intellectual, spiritual, and artistic innovations.
“Works of Art can only be produced in Perfection where the Man is either in Affluence or is Above the Care of it.”
- William Blake
Because of this, enacting true Socialism is the death knell of human philosophy, technology, art, and ultimately of our species. The supposedly just desire to make everybody labor by the sweat of their brow, to prevent parasitism and dead weight, means destroying our creative spark. Those Socialists who imagine that this will not occur are envisioning a world where a Leadership Group still exists to control the ideas and actions of the masses. This is Communism, which is a hypocritical implementation of Socialist Philosophy. Communism, by requiring an elite ruling group, concedes the point that the masses are incapable of living in peace and prosperity with each other without an overseer. And in this way it also proves the point that class distinctions are required for human progress and order.
Almost all the innovators of human history, from Galileo to Gandhi, lived in a manner Socialists would describe as parasitic because of their bourgeois or aristocratic origins and the advantage that gave their whole lives. Even among the impactful musicians of the 1960's counterculture, time and again we find they are not from humble origins. Even Grace Slick is the daughter of an Investment Banker. To have innovation and progress for our species, we must have significant inequities and class distinctions to enable some of us to live in a manner that enables them to work on abstract and advanced problems. These inequities must be preserved until we have discovered and enacted enough advances to enable us to share the world richly with all. Until we have learned how to share the world in a way that makes even the lowest of us comfortable, we need to keep the research going and I oppose sending the researchers into the mines to earn a fair wage just because everybody else is down there.
“To abolish aristocracy, in the sense of social privilege and sanctified authority, would be to cut off the source from which all culture has hitherto flowed.”
- George Santayana
Now it is true that there have been grievous abuses by some past aristocrats, and that the means by which they have maintained their internal standards of decorum and character have often been highly flawed. And when we consider the bourgeois, we can see even less internal regulation among them that tends to noble behavior and the promotion of the public good.
We know of the excesses of the deficient aristocracy and of the obscene way that they squander wealth on vain and useless demonstrations of their own fear. We know about the banal and irrelevant bourgeois; that vast wasteland of pretty flower pots and obediently mooing cattle-like citizens. But we must tolerate these lesser-types if we are to also enjoy the benefits of Newton, Mahler, Buddha, Salk, Washington, Tycho, Gandhi, King, and everybody else who ever added a piece to the puzzle of Human Exaltation. They all come from the same place, and live outwardly similarly as parasitic elites we justly hate. Even Lenin earned his daily bread from the force of his personality and the power of his intellect, not his labor. Likewise, Karl Marx was certainly no peasant, nor was Fidel Castro.
The benefits we derive from the indispensable work being done by the few beneficial people in the upper classes outweigh all the problems we get from all the remaining parasitic elites. We can work on getting rid of some of the parasites, or curbing their obnoxious excesses. But let us not upset things so drastically that we destroy the precious along with the profane.
Intellectual Progress Will Liberate All People Eventually
In time, if we do not fall prey to false philosophies, we will know how to derive so much life and energy from the Earth and Cosmos that there will be a surplus and all will have their needs abundantly fulfilled. Whether we manage our numbers more prudently or we advance our technology to new leaps forward; in some way we will inevitably learn how to bring life to all people. We will exalt humanity, by finally letting all of us live truly as humans.
But we are not there yet. The numbers and reason prove it isn't possible yet. So, we must continue the work and wait until our wishes can be fulfilled by reality. We should not send the researchers into the mines. Otherwise, we will set in motion a nuclear holocaust of the Human Intellect that will condemn our children to a horrible fate. They will live, knowing that they are the last intellectually conscious members of species that is losing consciousness.
The Burden of Proof is on the Socialists
Socialists must prove, not just allege, that the Earth has enough resources to support every person at the same standard of living as is presently found in Europe, America, and Japan. On top of this, Socialists must prove that our agricultural technology can progress as fast as our population, forever. Without this, a wonderful Socialist World of 2020 may create (by feeding the starving) a massive cataclysm of war and famine in 2050 or 2075 that destroys civilization. When the agricultural bubble bursts and technology cannot keep up with our growth any more, there will be hell to pay. What will we do when the planet can't stretch any more to accommodate 10 or 12 Billion people?
With Socialism, we feed everybody and let everybody reproduce right up to the brink of global catastrophe. It uses all of our unsustainable agricultural technology to produce the absolute maximum that Earth can give us, to feed the masses. Inevitably, this overproduction either destroys the soil and the water, or we will simply out-breed even this insane level of production. Almost overnight, 12 Billion happy and well-fed people will become 12 Billion starving and violent people. Can anything other than disaster come of this?
How many times shall mankind suffer a loss like the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, losing the accumulated genius of millennia, before we realize that some things are more precious than the ephemeral needs of people who inhabit only one moment in history?
What could be more illogical and immoral than jeopardizing civilization and/or the very fertility of the planet? In an irresponsibly compassionate attempt to feed an unsustainable, suffering mass of humanity; Socialism risks our civilization, and perhaps the very survival of our species. The Socialist god, The Human Belly, is truly a dangerous master.
Part 2 – Socialism’s False Offer of Peace
Socialism is a highly suspicious philosophy. No government, faction, or voice that declares that it will renounce its own power after its enemies are defeated is to be trusted. Since the ultimate intended outcome of a Socialist Revolution is a state of peaceful world anarchy, without governments wielding compulsory power over the people, Socialism is declaring that the power it wields today and during the future revolutionary period will not be needed afterwards once it is enacted worldwide. It declares that by removing the basic causes of human want and animosity, that government will exist only as a worldwide cooperative collective structure, and that people will not truly need the types of power structures like military forces and political factions that presently exist.
But this is either the voice of a Messiah, leading the world to an age of enlightenment and peace; or else it is the pitch of a conman seeking to take advantage of the gullibility of those who hold dear the dream of human exaltation. History and reason show us that the latter is the case.
A World of Conflict and Socialism's Plan for Peace
All the world's factions and forces are each armed with their own power and influence - their "gun". These are all set together in a large room, pointing their guns at each other, contending for the World or whatever portion of it they can control. In the midst of this perpetual strife, contending like all the others, Socialism says to the world:
"We humans should not fight among ourselves and waste time and tears in seeking to enslave each other. Let us instead be reasonable and just fairly share all the Earth's bounty with each other, giving each a fair enough portion to satisfy all their needs and their righteous desires. When we all have our fair portion, we will all be happy and have no further quarrel with each other. There will be no need to fight evermore. Then we can all lives our lives freely, without the need for conflict and might. Nations, armies, and political divisions of all kinds will become useless because we will all have enough to be peaceable, and our common interests will far outweigh our separate interests."
"The highest form of anarchy will ensue because we will be utterly at peace with each other and have no real need of government. The ancient source of all war and poverty will finally be destroyed, and so the basis for human anger and contention will be removed from our world. Without our ancient disposition to violence, we will not need true governance, and so an era of sublime freedom and peace will begin. We will still have society and culture and means to organize and plan with each other, but a true government which wields compulsory power over its citizens won't be needed once we stop fighting each other."
"So, we need to stop this pointless standoff and learn how to co-operate: Everybody else in the room with a gun (all other factions, political and philosophical); stop contenting with us and each other and drop your guns. Then, we will run the Socialist Program equally all over the world. This will destroy all your guns (political and military structures) as the process starts to take effect all over the planet."
"Do not worry about our gun. The Socialist Program creates Perfect Anarchy and will also destroy our gun as the very last one, after the plan is fully implemented. That is the beauty of the plan. All of our guns are destroyed so that war and tyranny themselves become impossible. Power itself will be abolished. We will create a Permanent Peaceful Anarchic Utopia if we can all just co-operate a bit, trust each other, renounce our own powers, and then enjoy the fruits of a noble and just society. We Socialists only want to make the world a better place and we definitely don't want some barbaric conquest like some of you do. You can trust us to drop our gun too. All we are saying is give peace a chance." [7]
The Problem with ‘Peace’
It looks like a great idea. It seems noble, peaceful, and initially logical. But what is to prevent the Socialists from seizing unlimited despotic power over the globe after we agree to their reasonable and humane plan? After we abandon the ancient structures that keep us powerful in the world, and their revolution has nullified our power, who will be able to hold the Socialists to their word?
Our own noble desire for peace and our love for all humanity move us to say "yes" to the Socialists. We want a world without starving infants and 13 year-old soldiers. We want minds as brilliant as Einstein's, but trapped in bodies born to poverty in Sudan, to be able to fully flower and live to enrich our world. We feel pain and regret, knowing that the power we enjoy here causes death on the other side of the globe. We want to believe you, Socialist! And we don't want to say "no" to you and deny humanity's one, last chance at peace if you are truly genuine. I believe in your dream because it is mine as well - Humanity Exalted.
But, unfortunately, your plan is simply too good to be true, and history proves me right:
LENIN
STALIN
There are many other names, but those two prove my point utterly.
The Fraud Revealed
You won't drop your gun, will you Socialism! After we courageously and altruistically drop our guns, you will simply shoot or enslave our sons and daughters as you see fit. You are pretending to be noble to get noble people and factions to give you the benefit of the doubt. But some of us know who you really are. You are The Thug with the Vision of Human Exaltation, deceiving the stupid masses and also the most brilliant and altruistic minds with the same glorious message of hope. Fraud on a cosmic scale is what you are, Socialism! You seek to deceive an entire planet's people into voluntarily enslaving themselves by following their own innate desires for Utopia. You know how tired we are of fighting each other and we are desperate to find a way out of eternal war and poverty. So you prey upon our hope and our fatigue. You show us the mountaintop of human freedom, and fail to mention the tar pits of servitude surrounding the mountain.
It is clear what will happen. We will drop our guns - disband our political and military structures. You will apply the Socialist Program and we will redistribute everything, causing a lot of true rejoicing. Then, seeing that there are no longer any opposing political or philosophic structures to restrain you, you will renounce your promise to drop your gun - you will fail to disband your Socialist political and military structures. Who among us will quickly renounce unlimited power when there is none to hold us to our word? You will wait a year just to make sure that the transformation is permanent - capitalism could flare up again. One year becomes several years and still you keep your gun. "The world is doing fine and us keeping our gun doesn't seem to hurt anything in the Socialist Process" you will say. "Better to keep the gun for future use should trouble arise" will be your prudent excuse for renouncing your oath.
Gulags and Graves - The Revolution Overtaken From Within
But among your ranks there are also thugs who care nothing at all for the people; those who care more about exalting themselves than mankind. With you, the Socialist Revolutionary, one can see that the oppression you bring is at least somewhat rightly intended and that your heart does indeed beat for your people. But your passion for the welfare of your people makes you vulnerable to the attacks and machinations of those who have no such distractions or scruples.
There are always people, like Stalin, who believe more in themselves than in any code of conduct or philosophy. They are present in every human movement and faction. They seek power, not to wield the Sword of Righteousness and defend the people, but to soothe their twisted souls by tormenting those whom they can. They will overcome you. They will kill you. They will take your gun,[8] the one that you should have thrown into a volcano just like the Ring of Power, to ensure eternal freedom and peace, and they will use it on all of us.
After you are dead, the revolution will be extended and perpetuated to create a power structure to advance the agenda of the Thug who murdered you. Instead of all weapons being dropped and destroyed, like you promised, a Dictatorship of the Thug will be created which will rule unopposed, using the only gun left in the world. Instead of world peace and justice, a Permanent Unopposed Absolute Empire will rule the world - ultimate tyranny. Everything you intended by your revolution will be forgotten, and the exact opposite condition will be imposed upon the people. Four thousand years of human political innovation will be erased overnight. All the steps we have taken since Hammurabi will be swept away in the silent, brief sunset of human hope.
We cannot let this happen. We cannot trust any philosophy that claims to renounce its own power in the future after it has been victorious, when that philosophy also calls for the destruction of all it's opposition's power first. This is clearly a fraudulent and ignoble proposition and even if the Socialists are genuine in their altruistic desires, the nature of the proposition itself invalidates all their supposedly wonderful intentions, and the obvious value and justice of some of their ideas.
Global Equality ►Power Vacuum ► World Conquest: Socialism’s Outcome
A perfect Global Socialist Revolution is doomed to be overtaken later in a coup by its own innate construction. The Revolution itself cannot occur without the destruction of class, national, and cultural distinctions that are the very bulwarks that prevent a Permanent Unopposed Absolute Empire from forming now. Our current capitalist system keeps a number of transitory and competitive tyrannies interacting to prevent a single, permanent one from ever forming. Capitalist tyrannies are restrained from further barbarism and greed by the presence of other strong, and potentially opposing, capitalist tyrannies. In this way, Capitalism ensures that any regime that becomes too depraved or exploitative will eventually be destroyed by a more noble-minded opponent, or by an enemy seeing a moment of opportunity for self-advancement. A balance of power is struck that benefits humanity by limiting the severity and duration of oppression. Also, this process is a kind of Natural Selection that favors more and more peaceable and noble tyrannies as time goes on. Progress is made, even if it is slow and painful, and world history confirms this. Modern America, despite all its problems, is a more peaceful and progressive world empire than those of the Spanish conquistadors or Roman legions.
But Socialism seeks to destroy all tyrannies, and in the process, the world is stripped bare of any protective power structures. A massive global power vacuum is created, greater than has ever existed in history. When you combine this with a Global Economy and Global Communication System to spread uniform propaganda around the world, a massive population to dilute the political impact of any individuals who might complain, and a huge body of formerly destitute peasants who love the revolution and are politically naive to fill the ranks of the Socialist Stormtroopers; Socialism, perfectly applied, creates a perfect tyranny it never anticipated. Thugs who have recognized this throughout history have become Socialists to further the establishment of their future empire, and they pass along the glorious Socialist message of hope to all the world to hasten its conquest.
The False Utopia of Socialism – Even if It Works, It Doesn’t Work
Let us imagine for a moment that I am wrong. Let us take a last look at Socialism, and see it in the utopian splendor that socialists imagine. Forget all the logic that says this cannot be, and let us just imagine if these people were right. Let us presume that a worldwide Socialist Revolution has erased every government, army, nation, and all divisions between the people. Let us say that everybody has a decent standard of living, poverty and war are eliminated, and that nobody on earth possesses the power to oppress or harm anybody. Mankind is equal, at peace, and living pleasant lives.
All progress requires change. All change requires power. But without anybody possessing any power beyond their own individual lives, no change will happen. Because change cannot happen, there can be no progress. If somebody gets a bright idea and tells it to their neighbors, seeking to effect change, this creates a faction and is an anti-socialistic movement. It is anti-socialistic because, by its mere formation, leaders emerge unto the people. Socialism seeks to eliminate all leaders so that no power can be imposed upon anyone. So if we are to be true to the Socialists’ ideals, there cannot be any such spontaneous factions or accumulations of power of any kind. Even if the newborn faction has no overt political intentions, the mere fact that they have formed a group of any kind that has intentions that differ to any degree from the whole of humanity causes sects and differences to appear among the people. If this continues among other people, the whole fabric of the Socialist World will crack and splinter bit by bit until it completely shatters due to loss of unanimity and equality.
Under these stresses, either the experiment in Socialism will shatter, or a government will need to be created to prevent the appearance of these factions. If no government appears, Socialism will quickly revert to all the other forms of government that we possess today. Thus, it will be nothing but a massive waste of time because, without coercion, Socialism cannot prevent factions from forming and therefore will be very short lived. Non-coercive Socialism, we can clearly see, is an even more impermanent form of government than democracy.
So if Socialism is to survive, it must form a government that prevents factions from appearing, by force if necessary. This means that there can be no artistic movements, religious movements, scientific movements, or widespread free expression of any kind unless the government approves of it and imposes it upon the entire world. The government will either oppose change or direct change; it cannot be directed by various factions among the people since this is the very thing it seeks to oppose. If the government opposes all change, the whole planet will become nothing more than an entire barnyard-world full of intellectually disabled cattle-humans. We will simply eat and breed until our population explodes beyond the breaking point.
If the government seeks to direct the cultural changes that occur, and mandates them evenly across the whole world to prevent factions and splinter groups from forming, we have something entirely different. This is Communism. I don’t believe that people who support individual sovereignty and freedom for all the world’s poor can honestly propose Communism as the solution. Like Socialism, Communism is fatally flawed by certain false assumptions about human nature, and is terribly inefficient and inhumanely homogenizes all the people.
So from this we can see that successful Socialism (if that were possible) causes one of three outcomes:
1) Rapid dissolution due to factionalization brought about by free expression and differences in opinions
2) Governmental restriction on expression causing progress to stop and a state of intellectual atrophy to be mandated among the people
3) Communist takeover of the government
Do any of these outcomes even slightly resemble the image of utopian splendor that Socialists think the world will become? Where is the free expression, tolerance, and enlightenment that they promise us? Where is the supposed Dawn of Human Nobility they proclaim as their purpose?
As we can clearly see, Socialism won’t work. But even if it did, for a time, all that would happen is that it would either self-destruct or be forced to convert into Communism to keep the people from contending with each other.[9] Socialists only think about the Day of the Revolution and the happy two weeks that would follow. They fail to understand how human nature would change their revolution into something very different in the following months and years.
Socialism is a very destructive philosophy and threatens tremendous damage to our future. Socialism wants every door on Earth unlocked and every weapon disarmed. What kind of man truly wants this? Is he a Prophet of Peace? Or is he more likely a thief?
ENDNOTES
[1] What kind of world do we want to live in? Shall we have a crowded world where every person has food and a place to live, but without any opportunity or resources to create art and advance science and culture? Shall we live in crowded stagnation like a herd of cattle? Or should we create a world where people are scarcer and have a higher standard of living? Would it not be better to create a world where each person is truly valuable, because each has the right living conditions to bring their own unique talents to a full flowering, so that human civilization and culture is continually invigorated? Quality of life and civilization are superior goals for humanity than simply keeping everybody alive while we blindly reproduce forever.
[2] The land need not have ALL of these resources upon it, but it must produce enough total output of some kind to purchase the remaining needs of the person upon it. Unless you live on top of an oil well, diamond mine, or on some of the world’s best farmland, it is not likely that this land could be so productive.
[3] These data are from the 2006 Population Reference Bureau World Data Sheet.
[4] Note that this does not imply a moral superiority among the ‘oppressors’ at all. It simply indicates a functional superiority in wielding power. But we should also not fall into the trap whereby we automatically believe that the ‘oppressed’ are morally superior simply because they are made to serve or suffer. There is neither honor nor shame in suffering. The powerless may be thus simply because it is their natural place in our species’ hierarchy.
[5] Even if you consider the acts of their oppressors as barbaric, is it not a requirement of a truly civilized culture that it be able to withstand barbarian aggression?
[6] This, of course, excludes early technologies that were directly applicable to food production or defense. I am speaking about things like geometry, rifled gun barrels, transistors, antibiotics, sextants, and so forth.
[7] Pacifism and Socialism often are espoused together. This makes sense because they are both elaborate affectations of altruism and pseudo-reason to cover an underlying cowardice. Pacifism is, at its core, a refusal to acknowledge the fact that all life exists in a perpetually competitive state, and that this competition also includes lethal force on occasion. Indeed, even all of the food we eat is derived from the death of other beings, and it always will be so. And so when pacifists are fearful of the often brutal nature of life itself, they attempt to hide this fear behind a shield of affecting altruistic non-violence; which is neither courageous, civilized, nor harmonizes with the eternal realities of the universe they inhabit.
[8] This is the Socialist Political and Military structures – the government. In this way the ‘Peace’ promised to us by the Socialist doctrine and message becomes oppression and slavery at the hands of those lurking in the shadows.
[9] Contentions will arise due to religious, racial, cultural, and other deeply-ingrained differences among the people. The only way to prevent this is to ERASE these attitudes and replace them with a set of uniform attitudes for the whole world to follow. How? How can this be done voluntarily and willingly throughout every person on earth?!?
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