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Comment by UweSchmidt | Hacker News Reader

My take: all the recent changes in western society could be tagged with "Individualism". Fundamental changes regarding lifestyle, relationships and sexuality were enabled by the demise of collectivist ideologies like communism and national socialism which had clear ideas how humans should live, and the wealth and flexibility of modern economies, which enable the individual to exist without any dependencies except a job.

Instead of refering to moral, ethical and other absolutist arguments it's useful to look at how until recently rules limiting the individual were probably necessary for collective survival, and delight in the freedom we can have now.

Right now we're watching people around us coming to terms with planned death (possible now since the community does not need you to tough it out until the end any more). There are more radical and crazy changes ahead that would be revolting right now but will be normal in the future.

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If collective survival was the driving influence, we would have been in favor of suicide for people who were a "burden", like cancer patients.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2160/did-eskimos-pu...

Assisted suicide isn't a new freedom - we had it in the past, it went out of favor, and now it's favorable again. Ancient Greece had radical and crazy practices (infanticide, certain sexual pairings) that are revolting "right now". Having to come to terms with those particular practices isn't something that I look forward to doing in the future.

> My take: all the recent changes in western society could be tagged with "Individualism". Fundamental changes regarding lifestyle, relationships and sexuality were enabled by the demise of collectivist ideologies like communism and national socialism which had clear ideas how humans should live, and the wealth and flexibility of modern economies, which enable the individual to exist without any dependencies except a job.

I don't know the details on nazis (national socialists), but what you're describing was actually was a goal communism - to produce totally atomized units which for everything depend only on the state (that included a totally dystopian dissasembling of families, ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov)

> collectivist ideologies like communism and national socialism

I sense a conflation between communism and USSR dictatorship. I'm not sure this is warranted. (Then again, China is supposedly lead by a "communist party".) More generally, are you suggesting that collectivist ideologies necessarily leads to totalitarianism?

> which enable the individual to exist without any dependencies except a job.

That last exception will need to be remedied some day. Some more automation and substantially more redistribution should do it. Which is why I'm so disturbed by your juxtaposition of communism and national socialism: many people equate redistribution with communism with dictatorship, preventing us to solve the problem of ever growing structural inequality. We're going to get over this trauma if we're to avoid the coming horrors of corporate capitalism (or the horrors of its unplanned demise).

I didn't mean to conflate things; imagine a benevolent communist leadership, or compassionate national socialism: you would still be under a massive ideologically influence. They might not burn your book, but expect massive resistance to anything that does not conform to the collectivist mainstream. To any human from before WW2 we are all crazy weirdos and live a life of an eccentric dreamer.

Possibly. But we do have our own conformism too. We do live under our own ideology.

There is no escaping ideology: we humans have values that go beyond our own self anyway. Good luck finding the "right" (whatever that means) ideology, though.

   conflation between communism and USSR
   dictatorship.

It's a simplification, but historically warranted, in the sense that the USSR was created explicitly with the end-goal of leading to a communist society as described by Marx/Engels in the "Communist Manifesto", i.e., the ideal society where the "contradictions of capitalism" have disappeared. Moreover, the 10 points that the "Communist Manifesto" says (Chapter II. Proletarians and Communists) are required to bring about communism were all carried out in the Soviet Union and its satellites (and brought about not communism, but Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, not to mention an inability to feed the population).

If you want to be more precise in your terminology, I suggest the following distinctions:

Marxism is a theory. Typically 3 things are theorised. (1) How capitalism (re)produced inequality. (2) A theory of revolution as intrinsic part of the transition from contemporary society to communism via socialism. (3) A theory of post-revolutionary society.

Socialism. This describes post-revolutionary, but pre-communist societies, in particular USSR and its satellites.

Communism. The ideal society, post-revolution, where the "contradictions of capitalism" have disappeared.

> the USSR was created explicitly with the end-goal of leading to a communist society […]

I'm not sure that's true. Granted, it was ostensibly, outwardly created for that purpose. But I'm not sure that was the actual intent of those who lead that charge.

My History is quite dusty, so I wonder what exactly brought about the dictatorships you mentioned. Besides, it wouldn't be the first time a revolution lead to (near) absolutism. The French revolution for instance lead to Napoleon. Given this, I wonder how representative governments were able to emerge at all. It doesn't make me very optimistic about the possibility for democracy either. (Yeah, for various reasons, representative governments are hardly democratic: elected leaders are very poor proxies for the will of the people.)

   the actual intent

We cannot look into people's head. We have to take into account what they say they do. Yes, we can question to what extent they were telling the truth, possibly even to themselves.

   wouldn't be the first time

That's why revolutionary political movements continue having a bad name.

> We cannot look into people's head. We have to take into account what they say they do.

The latter often gives a pretty good insight about the former. The fact that USSR became a dictatorship so quickly makes the leaders of the movement look pretty bad.

"It's a simplification, but historically warranted, in the sense that the USSR was created explicitly with the end-goal of leading to a communist society as described by Marx/Engels..."

IMO, it's not very fruitful to study the ideas of Marx/Engels together with the soviet union. Soviet union was a military dictatorship that used the communist story as the replacement theology for their domain.

Sure, there were the true believers who ate up the dogma but I'm pretty sure most of the soviet leadership were pragmatic revolutionaries who just wanted power. They needed to replace "the story of the czar as a loving father" with the story of the communist agenda in peoples minds.

"in the sense that the USSR was created explicitly with the end-goal of leading to a communist society"

That startup failed almost immediately and pivoted as a dictatorship. Calling the USSR communist is like calling Nintendo a playing card company.

Communism seems to work better for ants, bees, and termites. It also might, sort of, work for small groups of humans (extended families)

I think that explains why all communist 'startups' with over, say, 1000 people fail very soon.

Socialism has the same problem to a lesser extent. "Everybody has the right to get something" scales to larger populations than "everybody should get the same". Very few people would knowingly let their neighbors die of hunger, for example, but extending that to "come and have what we eat" is a step too far.

Could you elaborate on the radical and crazy changes ahead?

I am hesitating since that would put things that were just accepted very recently, wounds still healing, in a relation to things that are currently way out of bounds. Not my intention.

But just to illustrate, recently a court in Germany supposedly denied someone the right to marry their pet. Why? Ah and there was a promient case of cannibalism between consenting adults a few years ago.

Got moral, ethical concerns about it? Or just caught some phobia? Either way, the society-transforming force of Individualism will ensure that the individual will get their way and get to do whatever they want.

The Internet (find likeminded people, get crazy ideas, be happy alone) and the declining birth rates (more focus on individual uniqueness and development) have only accelerated this trend.

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