Evolutionary Reasons For Why Socialism Is So Damned Attractive
Ron Bailey at Reason reports on a Cato Institute forum with moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt and evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. Here's Tooby:
The chief problem, he suggested, is that many people are beguiled by "romantic socialism"--that is, they imagine what their personal lives would be like if everyone shared and treated one another like family. We evolved in small bands that were an individual's only protection from starvation, victimization, and inter-group aggression. People feel vulnerable if their band does not exist. Such sentiments are more or less appropriate when people lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers composed mostly of kin, but they fail spectacularly when navigating a world of strangers cooperating in global markets.More darkly, Tooby pointed out that political entrepreneurs know how to appeal to romantic socialist sentiments as a way to establish themselves in power. The evolved psychological propensity toward romantic socialism facilitates political coalitions that oppose free-market societies. Since such coalitions are organized around romantically appealing ideas, any heresy is treated as betrayal. If things are not going well (and they never are in full-blown socialist societies) and since the ideology cannot be wrong, evildoers are undermining progress and must be found and punished (think kulaks and the Gulag). Such coalitions tend to revert to primitive zero-sum thinking: If there is something you don't get that means that someone took it from you. The result is, according to Tooby, that there really are those who are willing to make poor people worse off in order to make rich people worse off.
There is good news, as Bailey notes:
Our evolved psychological programs may more readily succumb to romantic socialism, but as Cosmides, Tooby, and Haidt remind us, there are other brain apps that can turn humanity toward liberty and prosperity.
Kip's Law: Every advocate of central planning always — always — envisions himself as the central planner.
Remember, the worst thing you can do to a socialist is not to make him live under capitalism, it is to make him live under socialism run by people who are not his friends.
I R A Darth Aggie at September 18, 2016 10:31 AM
Well, like some say: "It takes a village."
Canvasback at September 18, 2016 11:22 AM
Just ask Robespierre or Trotsky. The Revolution always eats its own.
When things are done "for the people," it's easy to commit atrocities. After all, they're for a greater good. Right?
Socialism, like religion, justifies everything done in its name simply by it being done in its name.
Conan the Grammarian at September 18, 2016 1:50 PM
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