#27: Socialism, Toilet-paper, Greed, and Envy

Back in 1920, Yeats asked this question in the concluding lines of his apocalyptic poem, The Second Coming:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Well, I think I can tell him, the rough beast is socialism, and it’s well on its way to be born. In fact, I suspect that its progress is inexorable and its success inescapable. Sigh.

We whine a lot about Leftoid salmon swimming upstream against reason, spawning more and more of their intellectually disabled kind into the social current. By “we”, I mean me. I’m sure others also do, but I’m certain that I do.

And I’m right to do so, this is something very bad, if only because it means that the real job a university can do, namely train the thinking processes of the young, is not being done by anyone. But concentrating on this one particularly smelly aspect of the problem obscures the larger mechanism at work. Greed.

Yes, Greed is responsible for many social ills, as the Lefties never tire of screaming, but that it is also responsible for the inexorable progress of socialism is usually not mentioned.

I.

The advertisers of the Left have always had a very effective populist mantra with which to attack the free-market people. And notice that they don’t and won’t refer to then as “advocates of free market enterprise,” they rather refer to them with the shop worn 19th C. pejorative, “capitalists.” The mantra is that “capitalism” is “all about” Greed. That’s how they talk – it’s “all about” this and it’s “all about” that. And when they say “greed,” it is always capitalized and italicized, even when they speak. But is this fair (not the style, the “Greed” thing)?

If by “greed” we mean the desire for more goods and wealth, well, sure, the free-market boys are certainly motivated by a desire for more. But surely this is only the beginning of the discussion, not the end. Before we condemn them for this, should not at least a couple of questions be asked and answered.

The first question is this: is Greed unique to free-marketeers?

When social justice types appeal to “the people,” what is it that they promise them? They promise them the wealth and goods accumulated by others. In other words, they appeal to the Greed of the masses, do they not? And while the slaving masses of Tsarist Russia had plenty to complain about, as did the slaving masses of 18^th C. France, surely it would be hard to find comparable “slaving masses” in North America or even Europe these days. Yet the appeal to their Greed continues unabated. The Tsarist worker or peasant did not weigh 300 lbs or own a flat-screen television, he did not sport $200 running shoes, and she did not get a bonus for every illegitimate crack baby she cranked out. Yet the modern equivalent hears exactly the same Greed based rhetoric as did the Russian worker or peasant. In fact, the modern unionized worker, as close to the “worker” of the commie imagination as one will find today, has income and benefits that are equal to if not greater than those of the entrepreneurial class. If they belong to the privileged class of government employees, their benefits are truly astonishing. And yet the social justice machine drones on. Which brings us to our second question.

How do the free-marketeers and the socialists go about satisfying their respective Greeds?

The free-marketeer tries to satisfy his Greed by acquiring voluntary contributions from his fellow citizens. He approaches his fellows and offers them a flat-screen tv for a specified amount of money. The people the social justice type paints as the free-marketeer’s victims have a choice. At last reckoning, there were no gangs roaming the streets forcing poor people to buy flat-screen tvs at gunpoint. This seems as fair as can be, and Rawlsian theory is “all about” “fairness.” A free market government promises its citizenry an equal opportunity to offer products to others and to buy products from others, and it promises to protect the citizenry from any elements or forces that would attempt to interfere with these freedoms.

The social justice type, on the other hand, campaigns on a different platform. The platform should come as no surprise, since it is the same platform perfected and implemented by Lenin and all of his successors. The platform is this: we will take the wealth and goods of your more successful and industrious brethren by force and distribute it in the way that seems to us most fit. But even if you don’t wind up with a lot of what they had (because we now have it), you will have the satisfaction of knowing that they don’t either and, in addition, that we’ve humiliated, jailed, or killed them. Yours truly, Uncle Joe.

Oh, you might say, this is not how it is with democratic socialism. But it is exactly how it is! Try withholding your taxes and see what happens. It is exactly what happened when shopkeepers refused to pay “protection” money to the mafia – two bulky men in badly fitting suits came to their shops and broke their bones. What were they paying for? They were paying for “protection.” From whom? From themselves. But this is very much the same as with the IRS and with Revenue Canada: you pay so that they will not attack you. And from whom do they protect you? Criminals? Certainly not, as anyone who has ever been mugged or burgled will tell you. The police for which we pay dearly is there only to harass and bully and intimidate and maintain as unarmed the already honest and civilized portion of the nation. The police arrange for the pick-up and disposal of bodies, not their protection while alive. The functions of the police include: cleaning up crime scenes (removing bodies), providing more government jobs at citizen expense, keeping the productive citizenry unarmed, and collecting fines for more government redistribution of income.

Sooo, Greed is a large part of the mechanism that makes socialism succeed. It lies at the heart of its appeal to the masses. And, as long as the non-productive have suffrage, they will increasingly vote to have the wealth of the productive re-distributed among themselves. But I want here to draw our attention to another mechanism of Greed that works to the same end, blindly and inexorably.

II.

Back in 1977 there was a documentary called Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies & The American Dream in which is was argued that much of what we think of as emblematically “American” only came into existence during the 20^th C. through the creative activities of (primarily) immigrant Jews.

The fascinating thing about this documentary was that it illustrated the immense culture shaping power that the new media had, both actually and potentially. Given this power, we ask two questions:

1) What directs the application of this power? And

2) What direction(s) has this power chosen?

Well, the answer to the first question is very simple. This power is directed by Greed. At this point in history, the North American media are primarily directed by the fundamental free market force: money. Of course, the movers and the shakers of those industries are themselves human beings and themselves ideologues to various degrees, which influences their experiments with products. There is clearly a kind of synergy between the popular mood and the various media productions, each influencing the other. Ultimately, though, the productions that are utterly beyond the public’s liking cease to appear.

Marketing entertainment products has exactly the same strategies as those employed in winning elections. In both cases, the marketer attempts to define the largest sub-population within the total voting population by means of a flattering narrative. The narrative will characteristically have two elements: the ascription of flattering properties to the members of the sub-group, and the identification of a real or imagined separate “power” group that has victimized those members. We can see this at work in television commercials.

It does not take long to notice that in the U.S., the ads have predictable general forms. Very large numbers of ads feature a bumbling white male ranging in age from teen to middle aged. These males are represented in negative terms, ranging from stupid to clumsy to bumbling to dishonest. The positive figures are generally female or black. The females can range in age from teens to middle aged. Blacks can be male or female, but always observe the white male (occasionally female) with expressions of barely contained annoyance or tolerant bemusement. They exhibit "attitude," but, as the ads show it, well justified "attitude." The blacks are always shown as the competent and knowledgeable figures in the ad, as are the women. Frequently, the women and the blacks are represented as physicians and scientists, the "authorities" on the scene.

In sit-coms, the same character layout exists, with the addition that the women, the children, and the blacks are also the moral correctors of the stupid, bumbling, frequently immoral middle aged men.

Why is this the case? Are all the writers of this dreck militant blacks or feminists? Probably many of them have those sympathies, but this is not what drives the machine. What drives the machine is money. These stories are directed at audiences, specifically the audiences that spend the money. Consequently, the stories flatter the buyers. This is not new, not a mystery. But what has to be added to the story is that the forces that sell toilet paper ALSO sell a culture, which is a set of values and a set of assumptions.

What this means is that the purveyors of toilet paper are actually the architects of the culture of free-market societies. And, since the populations that the most easily flattered are those that have the least to be flattered about, we can expect a culture that has been taught to believe the most outlandish rubbish. And the outlandish theoretical sub-text is that of victimization, the superiority of the most numerous, and the fairness of the "re-distribution" of wealth. Of course, there is further trash, as well, most notably that the U.S. is "at fault" for all the crimes in history, and that the earth is burning.

I believe it is the fact that stay-at-home mothers are the most frequent targets of television fare that accounts, for example, for the language used by newscasters. We hear the talking heads, often one of the obligatory women, referring to mothers as “moms” or “mums,” fathers are “dads,” and in general reducing every issue to its sentimental elements. I think of it as the oprahfication of our national discourse, it focuses constantly on how everyone feels about this or that. The objective of both market forces and government is to reduce the collective mind of the citizenry to a state of Oprah watching sentimental stupidity.

III.

If we take into account both the take over of our schools and the control of the media by left directed market forces, it is difficult to see how socialism can fail to succeed.

Socialism fails as an economic policy, but it succeeds as a political strategy. The reason is succeeds as a political strategy is that in the absence of an ideology that stresses self-reliance and the right to retain what you have earned, the appeal to greed and envy reaches the vast majority of people.