Roommate Rebuttal--Socialism

As usual, the only thing Roommate and I argue about is the viability of socialism and an egalitarian society.  She's in the ISO branch on campus, and really believes.  More power to her.  I think that the concept of a properly egalitarian society under the conditions proposed is completely nuts.

She's mad at me right now, mostly because I used the words "non-functional," "impractical," "illogical," and "idiocy" too many times.  But that's what the Internet is for.

I do agree with her on several points.  One, capitalism as it currently exists is flawed.  Economically, there is too much poverty, not enough proper education, and very little in the way of social mobility.  My work is in conflict theory, I get it.  I've read the statistics--hell, I myself am an anomaly in the statistics.  I understand how society works, from the bottom and the middle-ish.  (Just establishing my credentials to comment on this in the first place.)  Two, the political system is flawed.  Big business and obscure special interest groups have way too much influence.  Money buys power, and this ought to be unacceptable.  We don't hold our representatives nearly as accountable as we should.  In addition, they don't really do all that much.  Our system is deadlocked by political bickering. 

Three, I agree that socialism is a nice idea.  Everyone's needs are provided for (we have the technology to do it), everyone has equal rights and an equal say in decisions. It's lovely, in theory.

But that's just it--in theory.  My point is that it is not going to work.  Every part of the supposed path from capitalism to socialism is flawed.  There's a lot of hand-waving on how these transitions are supposed to happen.  Every time a supposed socialist (or communist, in this context it's sort of difficult to make the distinction) revolution happens, a single leader or a small cohort emerges and takes over.  And boom, dictatorship.  For example, everyone's been ecstatic over the Egyptian protests and recent revolution.  They got Mubarak out of the picture.  Awesome.  Now there's rumblings that the "transitional government" provided by the military is acting a lot less transitional than people thought it would.  Why, exactly, are we surprised by this?

Let's say that hypothetically we make it past the revolution stage.  At this point, as Roommate explained it to me, the collective resources are set up to provide for everyone's needs (and that's great) and rather than put all of their energies into the rat race, everyone can spend their not-at-work time into "exploring their humanity."  For now, I'll pass over my objection that that phrase doesn't actually mean anything. 

Supposedly, there will be no hierarchy. This is where I started using the above words that Roommate objected to.

Okay, issue number one: Roommate presented the idea that decisions would be made collectively after debate and discussion.  Sub-issue 1: debate and discussion implies that there will be people doing the debating and discussing.  Did you ever notice how there are some people who do the talking and others who don't?  This is how leaders emerge, political factions form, and hierarchies start to emerge.  It's basic theory.  Even in those hunter-gatherer societies that are held up as models of egalitarianism, there was group A who had one opinion and whose voting/whatever the equivalent may be coalesced around the ideas of one guy.  There was group B who did the same thing based on their guy.  Sub-issue 2: Most people are idiots.  [Okay, most people are average.  Same thing.]  Opinions are formed all the time based on things other than cold hard facts.  While I recognize that this is an unpopular line to take, the majority is not always right.  Because: you guessed it, the majority are idiots.  Combine "average" with "listens to someone who is not average and does what the not-average person wants" is a recipe for disaster.  It's exactly what we have right now, of course, but my point is that under the newly proposed system nothing actually changes. 

Issue number 2: there are reasons that hierarchies exist.  One of them is that most people are idiots (It's a popular theme with me, get used to it.  I object to fact that most of the population relies on emotion in any measure rather than 100% logic to make decisions.  It bothers me.).  Theoretically, by electing those who are not idiots, we protect ourselves from our own idiocy.  Again, this doesn't always work in reality.  See Issue 1, Sub-Issue 2.

Another reason why hierarchies exist is because we are not equipped to deal with everyone on an equal level.  Recent research has demonstrated that we are capable of maintaining a maximum of 150 relationships--that's family, friends, co-workers, teachers, people in the neighborhood, the bartender at the local pub, etc.  If you have more that 150 "friends" on Facebook, I suspect you know that you can't truly keep track of all of them.  This is supported by historical evidence as well--tribal groups in all parts of the globe have a carrying capacity of about 150 individuals.  Any larger than that and the group quickly splits apart because the members simply can't keep track of everyone else.  Military units, too, used to number between 100 and 150--technically a company is 100, but it actually varies more because of officers that aren't counted as soldiers in the company, extra non-combatants, what have you.  It's not just a nice number to use for organization--it's the largest number that we are neurologically capable of coping with.  Egalitarian societies are fine when we're below that number--but we're thousands of years of population expansion and urban migrations beyond that.  So let's say that we break Chicago down into little communities of 150 people each.  The population of the city proper--not including the 15-mile dense suburban ring around the city--is just under 3 million.  That's twenty thousand groups of 150 people each.  Let's assume that each group can get along.  What happens when groups come into conflict?  They can't be completely insular societies on their own, so when their interaction with another group turns sour, who mediates?  Socialism says that we can't have some sort of higher authority to deal with this.  Well, with our 20,000 mini-societies just in Chicago, that's 19,999! (that's factorial) potential conflicts.  And that's just two-way conflicts, let's not get into any other polygons.  You want them to work everything out for themselves?  Good luck with that. 

Issue 3 and then I promise I'll shut up: it is not in human nature to be satisfied.  We are competitive by nature.  I mean that literally: if we hadn't adapted to a changing environment and fought to survive--fought the elements, fought each other--the species would have died out long ago.  We are programmed to continually strive to better our lot--economically in particular.  Of course, this means something different than it did when we had only recently split off from apes.  Mazlow's hierarchy, anyone?  Hypothetically, society might change enough to where we can have our basic physical needs fulfilled and not continue to increase our future resources even though we don't need to.  Of course, we then have the issue of how do you control people's competitive urges until that point?  As a final note to back this point up: Roommate pointed out quite correctly that she's never been food insecure (that is, in fact, the politically correct term) and so doesn't know what it's like to have been treated so badly by capitalism that she can't be sure where her next meal is coming from.  I agree.  But having been there, done that (though not nearly as far as a lot of people) I can tell you this: it doesn't matter if today you have enough to eat and you've been promised that you don't have to worry about tomorrow because society will take care of you.  Promises mean nothing.  Having a quietly stockpiled reserve of cash means something.  People's need to compete for resources will never stop. 

To sum up: nice idea, not practical.  "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" (paraphrasing, shut up) is a great slogan.  When you come up with logistics for that and, oh, yeah, a way to circumvent basic biologically imposed (see forthcoming post on altruism as an evolutionary adaptation) "human nature," let me know.  Until then, I'm going to go think of possible solutions that might actually work.