Musings on Communism and Human Nature

One of the Facebook pages I follow posted the sarcastic statement “I just wish someone had already tried communism to see if it really works.” I knew immediately, before even reading the comments, that there would be at least one twit who’d come forth and declare that “true” or “pure” communism has never actually been tried, and that in theory it’s a wonderful idea and a wonderful system.

There are many paths one can take in rebutting this bit of college freshman stupidity. But rebuttal was not what first popped into my mind when I scrolled down and saw at least 3 people offering that very argument. No desire to point out how the attempts have failed catastrophically, destroying trillions in wealth, killing hundreds of millions and harming the quality of life of billions. No urge to note that “pure” capitalism has never been tried either, but nevertheless the more capitalistic a society has been, the more it has advanced the wealth and quality of life of its members. No need to say that, no matter how pure the motives of those who set things up, there will always be those who don’t “play along,” who seek to use the system, its tools, and the power it wields to their advantage.

No, what first came to the fore of my gray matter was the underlying reason for that last rebuttal, i.e. “human nature.” “Human nature” is a very powerful and succinct point, if understood properly. But, because it’s so succinct, it’s often not fully grasped, and because it’s so powerful, it’s overused to the point of dilution. So, with that in mind, lets contemplate what the phrase “human nature” actually means.

A couple years back I read a fantastic little book, Why We Believe in God(s) by J. Anderson Thomson. The book planted a seed: the notion that humans are bags of chemicals, and that human behavior is the result of interactions between those chemicals. What those interactions are has been determined by hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. Some are as simple as flinching away when we touch something hot, others are more complicated and “irrational.” For the latter, consider the classic example of a twitching blade of grass in a tall savannah. Is it just the wind, or is there a lion hiding there, ready to eat us? The probability is extremely high that it’s just the wind, but over the course of millennia, the human who thought it was a lion would be more likely to survive and propagate than the human who dismissed it. Sure, we have the power of thought, and can choose to over-ride irrational responses to stimuli (as we do, constantly and endlessly). But, no matter how much self-control we exert, those responses are still there. They’re chemical, they’re not learned, and so they cannot be unlearned or inculcated out of us.

Therein lies the problem with communism. Human nature is biological, not learned. Nature, not nurture. Of course, so much of who we are and how we behave is indeed nurture, it is indeed taught, it is indeed the result of our upbringing and the sum total of our experiences, but this is all stacked on top of the basic biochemical machine that is a human being.

That machine works in certain ways. We are social, we want to belong to the tribe, we want to take care of our children, we want to do things that make our lives and the lives of our family, our group, our tribe easier. All these things, in the past, made it more likely that we’d survive to pass down our genes, and all these things, all these tendencies, remain in our brains. We can control them, we can override them, we can choose to ignore them. But, why should we?

There’s a school of thought out there that suggests our base biological instincts are bad things. That the default assessment of a natural tendency is that it’s detrimental in some way. While it’s quick and easy to demonstrate how this is a ubiquitous attitude in modern statist society, how the intelligentsia who dictate school curricula, political correctness and the like want us to presume this to be the case, this isn’t something new. Religions and societies throughout history are full of moral lessons, tales and warnings about how giving into our base desires is bad, about how we should resist our natural urges. I shan’t digress too far onto this detour, I just present it to indicate that the message that our biological imperatives should be viewed negatively until proven otherwise is as old as society itself. But, those imperatives are what got us here.

Competition, cooperation and self-interest are what have advanced humanity to its modern state. They have raised humans from the mean, violent and dangerous hunter-gatherer subsistence lifestyle to one of incredible comfort and ease. They are the basic biological imperatives that made Homo Sapiens a successful species.

Now, lets talk about communism. Communism replaces self-interest with dedication of one’s efforts to the state. It does away with individual ownership of the means of production and with money. If one wants to consider it theoretically, it’s the ultimate expansion of the desire towards cooperation. But, why do we desire cooperation? Because cooperation has proven to be a good way to increase the likelihood that our genes get passed along. In other words, cooperation is still rooted in self-interest. We cooperate because it’s good for us and “ours.” “Ours” is the key here. “Ours” may mean our partner and our children. It may mean our extended family. It may mean our tribe. It may mean a group that has voluntarily assembled with a common goal. These forms of “ours” have two things in common – their formation and perpetuation are rooted in the self-interest of survival and improved success of propagating our genes, and they are voluntary.

Lets dispense with “voluntary” in this discussion. If a group of people want to get together and live in a communist fashion, great. That is, counterintuitively, something enabled by a free and capitalistic society. Communism as a societal and governmental structure is coercive in nature (as are all governmental structures), so discussions of voluntary communist groupings are irrelevant to this debate.

We are left with trying to reconcile the “pure” concept of communism with a basic biological motivation, created by millennia of evolution, on a societal scale. How do we do this? Education? The Soviets and the Chinese tried it. Epic fail. Force, i.e. a set of laws, fully enforced? Again, epic fail. Still, the argument will be that a “pure” communistic system, if achieved, would be a Good Thing, and lets not bother at this time with how to get from A to B. That’s like saying it would be a Good Thing if there were no wars, and lets not bother figuring out how that could possibly come to be. In other words, it’s a childish fantasy that conflicts directly with human nature.

Why, then, do people still cling to the dream, if you will, that some day, some how, a pure communist society could come to be, and that this society would work better at resolving the problems that all societies face and providing the things that societies need? Some will claim that they do it out of a noble interest in helping those that non-communist societies have supposedly failed – the poor, the weak, the needy, the less capable. Others will claim that a properly communist society will better provide for all its members than any current society does, and thus advance the survival and propagation chances of the species. But, evolution is not about survival and propagation of the species, it’s about survival and propagation of the individual’s genes. It is the competition between members of a species that advances the species, via the alterations to that species that occur over time. In sum, communism, pure or not, cannot be reconciled with human nature. Our basic wiring, our fundamental biological and chemical self, our elemental structure is fundamentally incompatible with communism.

That is why communism can never work as a societal structure. For it to work, in pure form, everyone in the society must want to expend his effort for the betterment of the collective. Everyone must want to share all that he creates with everyone else in the society, and if that sharing means that an individual foregoes some of the product of his hard work, abilities and success for the betterment of those who don’t work as hard, who have achieved less success, or who have lesser abilities, he should feel good and positive about doing so. You must see the problem here – the problem known as “the tragedy of the commons.” If everyone shares equally in a commonly owned good or service, wherefrom does the motivation to improve that good or service come from? And, if the answer is to share unequally, if it’s to motivate people to contribute by rewarding them personally… isn’t there a different word for that? Isn’t that – gasp – capitalism?

It’s clear that there can never be pure communism, not as long as human beings are human beings. Perhaps, in some distant future, science will enable us to create beings who are hardwired to work hard for the collective good. Whether that’s a good idea or not is what science fiction is about, and since it’s not in the realm of possibility today or in the foreseeable future, I’ll leave it to the science fiction writers. But, even if we recognize and accept that pure communism cannot come to be in reality, is there any harm in dreaming about it? What’s wrong with imagining a society like that?

What’s wrong is obvious from a quick look at the 20th century. Socialism arose as a stepping stone towards communism, towards that pure, ownerless society that made all things good. People embraced collectivism in anticipation of a future utopia, and enabled and demanded of their leaders to effect the changes that would move their society in that direction. 222 million dead, billions living under oppression, billions denied standards of living that those in societies that didn’t go down that path enjoyed, billions forced to live in a fashion contrary to human nature.

So, next time someone talks to you about pure communism, don’t concur, don’t let it slide, don’t even concede that in theory there’s something to be said for it. There isn’t. It is a terrible, destructive and impossible idea, and it should be resisted and fought whenever it appears.