Imagine you are preparing to build a house. You and your best friend have been working on the design for years. You’ve finalized the blueprints, you’ve picked out all the materials and finishes. You’ve got a beautiful patch of earth to build on.
An engineer surveys the plot and says, “The ground is unstable, so the first thing we need to do is spend some time and money building a foundation.”
This throws the whole plan up in the air. You didn’t budget for a foundation!
Your friend says, “I’ve seen the Earth hold buildings bigger than ours. We need to focus our time and money on what’s important: the house itself.”
Who do you listen to?
When you are born, you are infinitely dependent. There is not a single thing in the world that you can do for yourself. Growing up is about moving from dependence to independence, from what everyone else must do for you, to what you can do for yourself. Independence will keep the world going. But it’s not the end goal. It’s not good enough to be strong and self-sufficient and alone. We need to be a part of something. We need each other.
That is called interdependence. That is the goal. That is the pinnacle of what it means to be human: To be capable of taking care of yourself, surrounded by people capable of taking care of themselves, but willing to help when others inevitably fall short, and willing to accept help from others when you inevitably fall short. We need to know we’re not in this alone. A strong community is far better than a community of strong individuals.
Like any ideology, socialism is a movement animated by twin spirits, you can think of them as the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. The angel guiding socialism is the deep human desire to achieve that pinnacle of human experience, to be the strong community that puts in the effort to stay connected and lift each other up.
Capitalism, meanwhile, is the ideology of independence. It stresses individuality; individual freedom, individual action, individual success. It has built this world of plenty because it is inherently true that the individual is the wellspring from which the economy and the community draw their vitality. But pure capitalism, pure individualism, leaves us feeling disconnected and hollow.
It is a stark and unavoidable fact that no matter how beautiful a house is, it will collapse if the foundation is neglected. No matter how beautiful interdependence is, it will collapse if we do not foster independence. No matter how much we may wish to take care of one another, we will not be able to if we cannot take care of ourselves.
For the better angels of socialism to achieve their goal, socialists must accept the continued existence of private property, private corporations, and individual billionaires, at least until we evolve an alternative foundation for the prosperity we take for granted.
Make no mistake, if we continue to move in the direction of nationalizing industry, over-regulating commerce, and taxing away the wealth of the 1%, like a house without a foundation, the economy as we know it will crumble, and we will all be left scrounging through the rubble for crumbs.
And that is where we meet the devil on the shoulder of socialism.
While I would dare to presume that the majority of self-identified socialists are aiming up at that beautiful interdependent community, it is undeniable that much of the energy in the socialist movement is aiming unapologetically down. Animated by jealousy, insecurity, and hatred, many people want nothing more than to tear the house down just because they can’t stand seeing people more content and successful than they are.
Unfortunately, it is sometimes necessary for parents to punish their children. An angry parent will feel completely justified, completely righteous, in punishing a misbehaving child. After all, the child needs to learn. The punishment is for the child’s benefit. But even where that is absolutely true, a dark part inside the parent enjoys bringing pain to the brat that wouldn’t shut up in the grocery store yesterday.
The problem with humans is that we are supremely complex. None of us is completely free of jealousy, of insecurity, of hatred. It is incredibly difficult for dishonest actors to convince an altruist that tearing down capitalism is in the best interest of humanity. But it is very easy for our own jealousy to convince our moral mind that tearing down capitalism is in the best interest of humanity when, subconsciously, what it really believes is that tearing down capitalism will leave the billionaires destitute. And that’s all that jealousy cares about.
So what is more important? If lifting up the poor, the downtrodden, the disadvantaged, is the priority, then what we want to do is build things on the foundation of capitalism, things like charity and a more efficient social safety net, while supporting that foundation by minimizing regulation and taxes.
If bringing down your moderately successful middle-class neighbor is the priority, then tearing down the foundations of capitalism is definitely the best bet.
