
Socialism is incompatible with human nature - yarapavan
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/11/the-rise-and-disastrous-fall-of-the-kibbutz/
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MatekCopatek
I very much disagree with the fact that any kind of political and economic
system could be "compatible with human nature", which is a popular argument in
supporting the currently dominant liberal democracy.

Firstly, politics and economics are extremely complex high-level concepts that
can't be directly tied to primal, genetic properties. If they were - why did
we go through so much history and different socioeconomic structures before we
got here? Wouldn't it make sense that the further back you go, the more
"compatible with human nature" the social structures are?

Secondly - being in line with human nature is not a good metric. Being
violent, sexual and emotional are all natural instincts, but we don't
encourage people to follow them. Quite the opposite - we consider it a virtue
to be able to control them and instead act rationally.

~~~
zozbot234
> Wouldn't it make sense that the further back you go, the more "compatible
> with human nature" the social structures are?

Well, if you go back to social structures that have really stood the test of
time, it turns out that they didn't scale beyond 150 individuals. That's the
limit that human nature places on naïve 'anarchy' working - in order to scale
beyond that, you need some sort of structure for dispute resolution and
decision-making, at the very least. Liberal democracy generally makes it a
point of being as 'free' as possible - that is, as close as possible to that
original, tribalistic model.

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llamataboot
I see no way this article will lead to a useful comment section on HN, but I'd
like to throw in my 0.02 that "human nature" is not fixed - we are social
mammals that are made of stories and shaped by complex webs of inter-
dependencies and cultural learnings among other things.

In short humans are made, not born, and the socioeconomic systems they live
within can create different humans.

~~~
mytailorisrich
Humans are born and made.

We are humans in part through evolution. Concepts like fairness are actually
hard-coded in us (cannot find a reference at the minute but I remember reading
research on this) : we evolved to live in a group and we are sensitive about
how work and benefits of work are shared in the group.

E.g. if we spent efforts and time growing crops we will 'naturally' object to
giving the produce away or to share it with someone who didn't adequately
contribute or who don't somehow help us in exchange.

There are also other evolved biological aspects at play like seeking our own
survival and that of our offsprings over that of other, unrelated individuals.
So we also 'naturally' have a tendency to self-interest (which extends to
relatives).

All of these are directly relevant when attempting to create a socialist
society.

~~~
llamataboot
I could equally say we evolved to live in a group and therefore we tend to be
highly concerned with inequality and fairness - often we value relative
equality even more than we would value a higher standard of living - see The
Spirit Level, etc, so we would be predisposed towards being happier in various
socialisms (and indeed we do see happiness higher in general in industrial
countries with stronger social safety nets/social welfare programs)

~~~
mytailorisrich
We do value fairness, as I mentioned. Equality of outcomes is not fairness,
and it seems obvious that we don't naturally tend to value it as much or at
all (see also actual results as discussed in the article, and more generally
in countries that attempted to setup socialism). In fact equality of outcomes
is fundamentally unfair.

Social welfare is not the same as socialism at all. That's a common
misrepresentation.

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jstewartmobile
I'd recommend James Burnham's " _The Managerial Revolution_ "

[https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.17923/page/n3](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.17923/page/n3)

The gist being that the capitalist/socialist arguments--the ones we continue
to wear into the ground--ceased to describe reality a very long time ago, and
that real power is now concentrated in the hands of high-leverage
organizational men: technicians, managers, bureaucrats, executives, etc.

I've seen his thesis play out so many times in business--where the owner is
terrified of what his top salesman, or best engineer might or might not do.
Imagine what would happen to Google if their top search guys just walked out
one day. Basically, we have a participant who is technically a wage-laborer,
yet has more power than an owner. This is even reflected in the share rights
(or lack thereof) for many companies.

Outside of local restaurants and developing countries, long gone are the days
of the "bourgeois capitalist"\--who knew his business from top to bottom--
managing unskilled laborers who were as interchangeable as nuts and bolts.

~~~
zozbot234
And yet, these highly-managerial firms do generally outcompete their smaller-
scale rivals. Clearly, the advantages of increased scale are more than enough
to compensate for its drawbacks, at least in many cases.

~~~
jstewartmobile
That's the point. The "highly-managerial" firm is the present and the future,
and in that kind of firm, the capitalist/socialist bourgeois/prole framework
is an inaccurate model.

They're like mini command-economies, each with its own commissars, competing
with other mini command-economies, subcontracting some parts of their activity
to tiny " _bourgeois capitalist_ " enterprises, and others to modern-day slave
plantations.

I think Ted Chiang called them the original paperclip-optimizers.

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rbanffy
Then we need better humans.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Yeah... um... good luck with that.

We actually need systems that work with the humans we have, not with the
humans that someone thinks we _should_ have.

~~~
rbanffy
I think a lot of our misbehavior is cultural and can disappear with time, if
we just organized the society in a way that rewards cooperation over
competition and the collective good over the individual's.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
"Perfect the environment, and we'll get wonderful humans" has enough truth in
it to make it dangerously wrong.

Yes, bad environments harms people - physically, emotionally, and also
morally. But perfect circumstances still leave all the selfishness,
foolishness, and moral faults of human nature. The perfect circumstances just
leave them more room to be selfish.

You can see this in US politics, for example. The nation has rarely been this
prosperous and unthreatened. And what happens? Our politicians turn into
bickering children.

~~~
rbanffy
> The nation has rarely been this prosperous and unthreatened

This is not quite true. While the average income may be higher, the inequality
is also much higher and quality of life has decreased for a large part of the
population. On the politicians turning into bickering children, one can also
blame the lack of oversight and flawed districting system that robs large
populations of representation and removes a lot of accountability.

The country has also been continuously at war for pretty much all of this
century - not quite war, but more like colonial policing, which is a political
hot potato.

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renox
This article while interesting is so oversimplifying things..

How about social security? Public hospitals? Public schools? History has shown
that these 'socialist' institutions can work and IMHO can be better than raw
capitalism but it's not easy. I'm French and our public hospitals are 'under
attack', it's quite possible that they will be replaced by private hospitals.

Some say because public hospitals are too costly other because private
hospitals make money and buys politicians..

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sacomo
This is one of the most simplististic, reductionary arguments against
socialism I have read. Anyone who uses the 'human nature' argument shouldn't
be taken seriously. Especially with this article's mischaraterization of
socialism in the first place.

The idea that all of human nature can be boiled down to only the 'selfish' and
'greedy' traits is pretty insulting, and in this case, propagandistic.

We really shouldn't continue nurturing the selfishness and greed traits on a
mass scale as we currently do.

Socialism is never about people working for free or forcing lazy people to
work. Its about workers owning the means of production. Giving workers dignity
and eliminating the oppresive employer - employee relationship. Slave owners
also thought that they were unfairly being "forced" to give up their freedoms
of owning people.

