Good Entropy

Why Socialists Should Believe in Human Nature

But our antagonist’s view of human nature is one in which we care only about these things, in which we only care about maximizing returns from the world to ourselves. This is the bourgeois view. The abstract human is basically like a two-year-old on an airplane. Nobody else matters. And if this were true, our project would be doomed. Out of toddlers on an airplane, I think you’d probably be able to build a world of an Ayn Rand novel, but you wouldn’t be able to build socialism. But the bourgeois view is only partly correct. Humans are capable of many things other than simple selfishness. We’re capable of caring for others, we’re capable of empathy and compassion, we have the capacity to distinguish fairness from unfairness, and the capacity to hold ourselves to those standards.

The phrase that stikes me here is “capable of many things other than simple selfishness”. But it really should be many things in addtion to simple selfishness.

Think about the way in which society is organized. What do people have to do to reproduce themselves? What do they have to do to other people in order to reproduce themselves? These facts exercise selectional pressures on the set of drives that constitute our human nature. The socialist wager, in a sentence, is that a better society would encourage our better tendencies.

Whoa. That sure does take a leap of faith. Let’s adopt socialism because it will make us better people.

The second point is that socialism would also be a much more egalitarian society. People would be each other’s equals — not subordinates or superiors.

But people are inherently vastly unequal. 

In a more developed, and more egalitarian society, better humans will flourish. Socialists one, libertarian cousin zero.

And you make all that don’t fit this mold miserable?

Looking Backward On Socialism: A Radical Denial Of Human Nature – Marotta On Money

One of the most common socialist assumptions is that it is possible to perfect society. They believe that enough humans are sufficiently altruistic that, if only they were put in positions of power and control, they would be able to guide the rest of mankind to a similar state of near perfection.

A little simplistic I think.

Socialism and Human Nature. Critics of socialism claim that because… | by Ben Burgis | Arc Digital

This certainly sounds like Marx sees the butcher, the brewer, and the baker — or, rather, the self-managed workers at the collectivized slaughterhouses, breweries, and bakeries of the socialist future — being motivated in the “duration and intensity” of their work by the hope of material rewards. Of course, he envisioned this changing as socialism evolved into its next phase, but this too is easily misunderstood by those who are reading the line quoted by Pinker out of context.

This “next phase stuff” is carrying too much weight. 

I would argue that we can have socialism and incentives. It’s unlikely that workers in a democratic economy would feel the need to incentivize anyone by paying them 287 times what others were paid — the average pay differential between workers and CEOs last year in the United States — but this doesn’t mean they’d settle on completely flat pay scales either. If anything, they might reverse some of the inequalities we’re accustomed to under capitalism.

But the cart is in front of the horse. You pay for what is produced, not pay and reap all that is produced. This is in the vein of central economic planning as talked about by Hayek.

Maintaining Eye Contact While Talking Overwhelms the Brain

Research indicates that eye contact, while powerful, is quite taxing on our brains.