Friday, March 14, 2008
We Need A New "-Ism"
The other day, I heard someone talking about the need to re-energize the "cause of socialism".
I was quite surprised to hear this, since I didn't think socialism per se was a cause anymore.
In saying that, I'm not attacking leftist views. More social spending, making the rich pay more of their share, more sustainable environmental policies, etc. etc. Yeah, those of course are all still very valid components of the public debate. The particular policy prescriptions that arise from those debates are either good or bad depending on the context.
But Socialism, with a big capital "s"? State ownership and management of the economy and what-not? Geezuz, how many times does the human race need to be bashed over the head? Didn't we just come through a whole century of socialist societies crashing and burning, not once, not twice, but over and over and over again?
This is not to say that capitalism is perfect. Obviously, it has many many failings as well. But it's a bit like Winston Churchill's assessment of democracy. He used to say "democracy is the worst system of government in the world, except for all the others."
To me, there is one overwhelming flaw in the entire concept of socialism: it relies on humans to run things. This has been universally demonstrated to be a bad idea. Humans have a very hard time coming to proper conclusions about relatively simple things, like not eating or drinking things that are bad for them. The notion that they could be relied upon to manage an entire economy, down to the tiniest details, is doubleplus ridiculous.
Perhaps if we had somewhere on the planet a minority population of angels, titans, elves or Vulcans, then maybe socialism would work. But this pack of glorified chimps to which we belong has consistently demonstrated that they are unable to make correct choices unless they are tricked, bribed or threatened into doing so.
And that's assuming that someone actually knows what the "correct choices" are. Again, until the Vulcans land, if we have to rely on our fellow Great Apes to figure things out for us, we will most certainly be stuck in a perpetual cycle of stupidity and short-sightedness, only occasionally interrupted by good ideas, which are probably just fluke luck. To paraphrase an old cliche, a million humans at a million typewriters will eventually write the greatest novel ever written.
But there I go sounding way too cynical again. In truth, I'm not so misanthropic. Far from it. I think it's cool and fun that a flawed and rather silly species like ours has achieved as much as we have.
However, I think much of what the human race has achieved has happened because we've followed the path of least resistance, the path that most conforms with primal feelings like fear and hunger. Sun Tzu's Art of War describes one of the qualities of an effective army as being like a rock at the top of a hill; it just naturally goes in the direction you want it to go. An effective economy should be the same way, which is why socialism will always, always be doomed: socialism tries to push the rock up the hill.
That's why capitalism, for all of its flaws, has been so successful. The whole Gordon Gekko "Greed is good" notion has some validity.
Ultimately, though, we will have to figure out some other way to do things. Capitalists will never feed the hungry, cure the sick or clean the environment on their own initiative, because it is not their function to do so. Their function is to create material wealth and leave to the random chance of the free market to figure out how it's used.
In my experience, a thing's greatest strength usually also turns out to be its greatest weakness. It seems to me that capitalism has a rather obvious fatal flaw: everyone is greedy. Everyone resents the rich, wants to steal their shit and longs to pull them down. When an alpha male chimpanzee has too many girl friends, the other blue-balled males eventually get fed up and bash the dirty old bugger's head in with a rock. Sooner or later, like it or not, that is the fate of capitalists, and all the economic theories and spin-doctory in the world cannot protect them from this fundamental aspect of ape nature. (c.f. Conrad Black, har har.)
So, if capitalism eventually falls (could take centuries) and socialism is a wash-out, what will the economy of the future look like? What will the next "-ism" be?
I'm sure I'm not nearly smart enough to figure that out. Hell, I can't even balance my cheque-book without Mrs. Mentok's help. Maybe no human will ever be smart enough to figure such things out completely.
But I do have an inkling, a half-baked notion. It's not sexy or cool, in fact it's quite the opposite of sexy and cool:
Pension funds.
Think about it. Already, pension funds and other sorts of retirement investments represent some of the largest pools of capital in the world. Just the other day, the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund successfully bought out Bell Canada for $51 billion. If and when the economies of China and India hit Western standards, just try to imagine the enormity of the pension funds set aside for those massive populations.
These funds will always gravitate to the blue-chip side of the investment spectrum: the power companies, the phone companies, the established mining interests. There will still be plenty of get-rich-quick opportunities (and risks) in other, smaller aspects of the economy, but the fundamentals of the economy will be owned by, well, the People.
So, long and short, if we get to a point where the Market is still free and open but the economy is largely owned by all of us through our pensions and such, won't we have effectively fallen ass-backwards into a sort of socialism, without all that messy shootin'-people revolution business? Isn't ass-backwards always the way the human race advances?
I'm sorry, I'm sure I've deflated your expectations. I'm sure you thought I was going in a whole different direction with this. My view, like it or not, is that the universe is unfolding as it should and that interfering with it through grand schemes (like the Cause of Socialism) will likely screw it up.
But that's just my opinion. If you have other ideas, I'd love to hear them.
posted by Mentok @ 11:55 a.m.,
1 Comments:
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At 12:36 p.m.,
Grumps said...
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How about apathism. Now there's a cause I might actually care about!
