#89: Disappointed Expectations and Common Sense (I)

February 21, 2011

Some expectations emerge from a complete world-view and, when they fail to materialize, this cannot but have an enormous impact on those who hold them. One wonders actually how those people accommodate such massive disappointments.

One wonders, for example, how the Millenarians coped with the fact that the world did not come to an end in the year 2000 or, for that matter, in the year 1000. But for all the tragic and comic implications of religious Millenarianism, there are few consequences for the world at large in the disappointments of this small sect. There are others, however, whose disappointments have been far more interesting for the rest of us.

Lenin, for one, was completely astonished that the German working population did not spontaneously rise up in solidarity with the Russian revolution, bringing down the Kaiser’s government and ending the war at least for Russia. Stalin, never a fellow with many thoughts of his own, followed Lenin closely in this expectation. He was also very surprised and very disappointed, even later after Lenin’s death, he was still expecting the “workers of the world” to rise up. They didn’t. Lenin died, so we can’t really know how this shocking theoretical failure would have had him mend his ways, but Stalin managed to live for quite a while and we know the sorts of policies and practices he put in place. Why didn’t he abandon the Socialist faith? I suppose it comes down to this: tyrants can accommodate cognitive dissonance without difficulty.

Diehard old-school commies have been waiting by the phone for decades for the news that capitalist regimes were foundering and on the verge of collapse, brought there by the internal and ineluctable dynamic of history so trenchantly detailed by the prophet Karl Marx. They also have been disappointed. How do they manage? I think they just assume that there was an undetected error in the calculations, and they sit and they wait in their workers’ garrets.

They have been disappointed and unpleasantly surprised because they have had to suffer the twofold misery of disappointed expectation, as well as the additional misery of seeing the social phenomena they predicted, but not where they expected them to be.

They looked anxiously for signs of capitalist decay, but instead they have been seeing signs of socialist decay. Most significantly, the U.S.S.R. is no more. And Russia, whatever it is, is certainly not a Marxist workers’ paradise. The Chicoms, once so very seriously Commie, are not so gradually embracing a market economy. But, perhaps most disappointing of all, the European experiment in “Social Democracy” seems to be heading steadily into bankruptcy.

The popular revolutions that Lenin and Stalin were looking for have indeed surfaced, but, to everyone’s surprise, these are not “workers’ revolutions” in the Socialist sense, they are actually revolutions against statists of every kind in North Africa and the Middle East. These revolutionaries are asking not for a Socialist paradise, but for (gasp!) … Democracy. They want, in other words, for their damn governments to get out of their faces.

Of course, popular revolutions are usually hijacked by scum just as nasty as the scum thrown from power, but that is not the point.

The point is that common sense predictions are far more likely to come true than ones which follow from large social-political theories.

Bush was right: People everywhere want to be free.

This seemed just basic common sense to him, it wasn’t the product of some great theoretical construction. The libs everywhere ridiculed him for his naïveté. “Freedom,” they scoffed and snickered among themselves, “what a childish buffoon.” Now, however, when they see the Egyptians capering and dancing in the streets screaming for freedom, they forget that it was Bush who told them so.

Contrary to what the commies think, it’s not all about class at all: people from all classes are apparently becoming unified around the idea that governments should work for them, not the other way around.