Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

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They failed because their roadmap did not include a workable route to the equality they wanted. Their roadmap led that their system of governance.

Why did their roadmap lead there? Essentially, because it was against human nature. It turns out that "work for the good of all mankind" doesn't motivate as well as "work for the good of yourself and your family". They had to add "work for the good of all mankind, or be punished" in order for the system to work at all.

Now, the really interesting question: Will any system that has an agenda of economic equality end in the same place? Can any system have that as a goal, and produce a system of governance that isn't (approximately) equivalent to the USSR version? I suspect that the answer is no. If your humans have the same human nature as the humans of the USSR, then you wind up running into the same problems that the USSR ran into. If your system doesn't account for human short-sightedness, selfishness, greed, and laziness, it isn't going to work in the real world.

> Essentially, because it was against human nature.

I've heard this counterargument against socialism/communism for a long time, and it always sounds like a form of "magical thinking" to me. Asserting the tautology that "humans are naturally greedy" when if you know any actual humans, you know this is not true.

Short-sightedness, selfishness, greed, and laziness are all easily handled by a functioning criminal justice system, and public education system. At least in THIS country, we willfully subverted and destroyed these institutions, over a long period of time. For various reasons, but mostly because the haves wanted it this way. The same happened in the USSR.

A few entitled and already very wealthy people are greedy. Most of the rest of us will ACT greedy when they've been deprived of basic necessities by a crooked and rigged system. But by and large, most people are not inherently greedy.

> Short-sightedness, selfishness, greed, and laziness are all easily handled by a functioning criminal justice system, and public education system.

You really think we can educate short-sightedness out of people? Or laziness? I think you're kidding yourself.

But more: You think "the haves" are greedy. But the haves usually got the good education. It didn't fix the problem.

And, even if the majority of people are in fact not greedy (or power hungry), it only takes a minority of greedy, power-hungry people to ruin things. Take the USSR. Those who were power-hungry and ruthless wound up in power. They produced what such people produce, no matter what the ideology and the rhetoric said.

If you're going to create an ideal system, you have to keep those people from ruining it. And the answer isn't to create a system powerful enough to keep those people in check, because those people will be drawn to the power they can have by running the system. Soon enough, they'll be in power - if not this generation, then the next.

Utopians always bank on the perfectibility of human nature. The available evidence is strongly against that view of humanity. And no, fixing the education system and the criminal justice system won't do it. They will help, and we should by all means pursue both fixes. But they won't let us build a utopia.

Damn straight and right on.

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