Socialism is incompatible with human nature | Hacker News Reader

Socialism is incompatible with human nature

spectator.co.uk

20 pointsyarapavan30 comments

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.

> 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.

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.

That's called the "blank slate" (aka _tabula rasa_ in latin) theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa

You might be interested by Pinker's take on it, in his book "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate. The topic can be quite polemic though, not all academic fields (and of course not all academics) share a consensus on what should be attributed or not to biology and/or culture. Still, I personally enjoyed the perspective he shared in his writing and recommend the book. Even if you don't agree with his thesis it's a good way to understand other point of views on such polarizing subjects.

You're right! A lot of what people mean when they say "human nature" is cultural and social, a product of stories we tell another. These are things can can, have been, and will continue to be changed.

That said, there do appear to be some things that are not wholly learned. So perhaps it might be worth considering that humans are not wholly blank slates, to be formatted and molded to our infinite convenience.

Again, you're absolutely right. Humans are made of stories and culture learnings and more! It just might be worth considering that complex low-hair plains apes might not be born pure and clean, waiting for any old arbirary formatting to come along.

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.

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)

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.

I'd recommend James Burnham's "The Managerial Revolution"

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.

The vast majority of any labor force is of the unskilled variety. The "bourgeois capitalist" are still in full command, even at the largest and most profitable tech firms.

We will always have proles. That wasn't part of the argument.

Going by Marx, the "bourgeois capitalist" was an owner, and that owner had a very large say in how the enterprise was run. He had power. Tech companies remain one of the few cases that still adhere to the old formula--probably since they're not old enough to have fully diluted their ownership.

For older companies, the owners tend to be pension funds and retirement accounts. And the ownership is often so diluted that replacing an obviously bad manager rarely happens. The mutual fund just sells the thing at a discount, puts "company X ceased to meet our investment criteria" in the next prospectus, and maybe, if things get bad enough, a hedge fund will pick it up on the cheap and fire the managers--who should have been axed years ago.

With some of the newer companies, there are classes of share that are so restricted that--even if you owned a large percentage of them--you'd still have no say in how the company was run.

> And the ownership is often so diluted that replacing an obviously bad manager rarely happens.

It can happen via a takeover bid - essentially, a bet that whoever is making a bid for control of the firm will be able to increase its value enough to profit from that investment.

Yes, and how often is that takeover bid entirely in the hands of one person spending his own money?

More often than not, it is done by an organization--like a hedge fund, mutual fund, or pension system--that pools the money of several investors together (the owners) to make the bid. Yet the fund managers are the ones who make the call.

In some cases, like the hedge fund, the compensation structure forces management to have the same priorities as the owners. In other compensation structures--like mutual funds, where they get a positive percentage whether the investments go up or down--not so much.

it's no longer the proletariat, it's the precariat.

“Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.”

― Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

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.

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.

Then we need better humans.

Socialism does not bring the best out of humans, it actually prevents it.

The proverb "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" is perfectly fitting.

Is this the commentary we bring to HN now? A snide remark followed by baseless claims, without evidence, nuance or anything to add to the discussion? All precipitated by a piece of flamebait which claims that an entire political philosophy is bunk because one instance of it isn't working to the author's satisfaction?

We can do better.

I think the proverb I quoted fits the article, and in fact all attempts at implementing socialism. I am happy to discuss why you think it's not appropriate.

Your commentary has equally little substance. An insult, an accusation and? Be the change you want to see. Bitching about it helps nobody.

"Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species"

-- Edward O. Wilson, The Ants

The problem with ants is that they have a weird sexual structure. For a female ant it is better to have sister than to have their own children. So they just kidnap their mother and force her to have more and more sisters. [1]

On the other hand, termites have a sex structure more similar to humans, so it can be a better example.

[1] The movie "Antz" is completely wrong.

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.

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.

"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.

> 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.

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..

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.

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