EDITOR’S NOTE: This article continues yesterday’s discussion of the irreconcilable disconnect between collectivist politics and human nature.
Science fiction, the field of literature and entertainment that is freest to explore ideas that stand apart from human nature, has a wealth of examples of group-mind or hive-mind societies. The hive mind, as the name suggests, is a collective consciousness that is distributed across individuals. It is fundamentally different from the human mind, which is self-contained, independent, and (importantly) fundamentally selfish.
A hive mind has a single consciousness across all its individual members. A hive mind can act collectively. A hive mind can sacrifice individuals without losing itself. A hive mind can advance evolutionarily with such thinking and sacrifices.
A human mind cannot, and a human mind that attempts to engage in hive behaviors is more likely to be winnowed out of the gene pool. Its greater affinity for self-sacrifice in favor of collective success means a lower probability of passing on that affinity.
Before Charles Darwin came along and proved him wrong, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck theorized that organisms passed traits they developed during their lives along to their spawn. The grade-school example of this is the giraffe, where giraffes would stretch their necks over time and thus pass longer necks to their offspring. We know now that this isn’t how this works, but there are many who do think that societal evolution and human behavior work in a related fashion. More specifically, some believe that humans can be inculcated with collectivist thinking and the attendant prioritization of self-sacrifice for the collective good over selfish individualism. But, such inculcation does not get passed along genetically, meaning that it requires a perpetual effort. Moreso, it’s self-defeating, as those who are less thoroughly inculcated are more likely to survive and thrive than the most selfless.
It really is as simple as this: Human consciousness is an individual thing, and human wiring favors the individual and the individual’s clan to the extent that it improves his chances of passing down DNA. This makes collectivism fundamentally incompatible with human nature, and we as a society cannot be indoctrinated into a hive consciousness or behaviors that go against our basic biological motives.
Even when we act cooperatively, we do so because cooperation improves our own lot and increases the chance that we’ll pass our DNA forward. The difference between cooperative behavior and collective behavior is stark, and should not be overlooked. Collectivism is, as far as the individual and individual needs are concerned, coercion intended to provide benefit in the aggregate. Cooperation is, to the contrary, voluntary and intended to provide benefit to all cooperators individually.
“Collectivism” is a rather quaint term nowadays. Even its brother, statism, isn’t in as broad usage as it should be. Instead, the word “socialism” has gone from being a specific form of collectivism/statism to being a synonym or colloquial equivalent. Nevertheless, the conclusions about the fundamental incompatibility between the individualistic human brain and the concept of collectivism remains valid, even across a linguistic quibble.
Socialism and human nature cannot be reconciled. It’s why socialism has failed so many times in history, why purportedly “socialist” states that exhibit success have done so by embracing elements of capitalism and free markets, and why the insistence from leftist quarters that we need more government in our lives is counterproductive, destructive and dangerous.
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