Communism Can’t Work Because Its Principles Conflict With Human Nature
Running a country under rules based on philosophical ideas of right and wrong or fair and unfair never ends well
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Imposing Laws Based On Ideology Instead Of Practicality
It’s not unusual for some ideological group to get control of a country and impose laws based on what these theorists think God wants, what is sinful and what is holy, or what is morally fair or unfair.
These rules might be the principles of Sharia Law, the values of the Temperance League, communism, libertarianism, fundamentalist Christianity, whatever, but they all have one thing in common:
- The idea that the imposition of their pet political, religious, or moral principles that run counter to human nature can nevertheless yield a prosperous, efficient, harmonious and successful society.
That never EVER works.
Laws That Conflict With Human Nature
If you try to either promote or prohibit conduct contrary to human nature, a material portion of the population will work very hard to disobey those rules and their efforts will result in all kinds of bad, bad collateral effects.
- If you make a law that people can’t drink alcohol, a material percentage of humans are going to do whatever’s required to have access to alcohol.
- Impose a rationing system and inevitably people will create black markets.
- The same thing is true for rules forbidding people from having heterosexual or homosexual sex or looking at pictures of naked people.
Communist Principles Conflict With Human Nature
The fundamental principles of communism run counter to human nature and a material percentage of people living under a communist system will ignore them, break them, violate them, or create endless schemes to get around them, all with toxic collateral effects.
Sure, to a greater or lesser degree people will be willing to contribute to charity. The more they have over and above the amount they think they really need, the greater they will be willing to donate.
Yes, people understand that you have to pay taxes, that there are things that a society as a whole has to do, but, again, there are boundaries, limits, depending on how much the taxpayer has, how much is being taken and what the money is being used for.
But the general idea that everyone is going to give up a majority of their money so that other dumber, less talented, less hard-working people can have more stuff just to make their lives better is so totally contrary to human nature that people who are forced to live under such a system will find all kinds of ways to fight back against it and their resistance will really screw things up.
- People want to keep the money they earn. The harder people work for something, the more they want to keep it.
- People want to keep the stuff they’ve made.
- Telling a farmer that he can’t sell the crops he’s grown or that he must sell them at an artificially low price so that someone else can eat them for free is always a losing argument.
- Making a rule that skilled people are going to be paid no more than unskilled people, that really smart people will only be paid as much as dumb people, that really hard-working people will only earn as much as people who barely work at all is totally against human nature that’s hard-encoded in human beings.
That’s just rubbing salt in the wound.
It is hard-wired human nature to look out for number one. The principles of communism are contrary to that drive.
The skilled people, the smart people and the hard-working people will always find ways to screw up a communist system to everyone’s detriment.
Sorry, but that’s just how people are. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to accept it.
You Can’t Change Human Nature
The idealists who imposed communism in various countries thought that they could make it work by changing human nature.
They thought that in a generation or two they could educate children to grow up to be altruists, to want to be generous, to not care about gaining or keeping material possessions.
They thought they could “educate” kids into becoming adults with a different human nature, that they could modify human nature in a classroom.
Idiots.
You can’t educate people into not drinking, gambling, having sex, lying, cheating on their spouses, stealing, being jealous, getting angry, resorting to violence, wanting stuff, looking out for number one, having allegiance to their tribes, being selfless, being greedy, etc.
How long has it been since the Ten Commandments were written? And yet, after all this time, people are still breaking them in droves.
And the communist theoreticians thought that they could run a generation or two of kids through some school and that would change human beings’ fundamental human nature?
How dumb is that?
You Can Deter SOME Conduct By SOME People
To some degree you can repress some prohibited emotions and actions in some people, but you can’t eliminate them or even fully contain them, and most people who want to do them, most of the time will be straining and pushing and scheming to do them no matter how much some government official tells them that it’s wrong.
You can frighten some people into not doing some disliked things, or doing them less often, if the punishment is great enough and the certainty of getting caught is high enough, but you can’t stop those people from WANTING to do them!
And what enough people want to do badly enough, they will sooner or later find a way to do.
The Tipping Point
The only question is how great a percentage of the population wants to do them and how far they are willing to go.
With strong enough punishments and effective enough enforcement you can restrain, not eliminate, certain conduct — murder, rape, drunk driving, pedophilia, robbery, etc. — until the percentage of the population that really wants to do something gets too large.
For a long time we could restrain people from smoking dope because the numbers of people who wanted to buy dope were small enough. But now we’ve hit a tipping point. Now too many Americans want to smoke dope and the costs of trying to stop it is higher than the costs of allowing it.
Once a material percentage of the population wants to smoke pot, the laws against smoking pot are doomed.
Human nature.
You Will Never Defeat Human Nature
You can never train or educate most people to want to go along with any philosophy that’s contrary to their human nature.
You might force them to do it, for a while, to some extent, but they are going to find ways to fight back and if that resistance is widespread enough it will really screw up your country.
E.G. every country that has imposed communism. Have your next vacation in Venezuela and see how things are working out there.
Libertarian Rules Are Just As Contrary To Human Nature As Communist Ones
Hey, all you libertarians, don’t get so happy. Any country run under libertarian principles will be just as screwed up as a communist one because your rules are also contrary to human nature.
See my next column for the details on why that is.
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
