“The act of redistribution requires confiscation of the fruits of labor.
Marxism is a fantasy…..
a classless society with no private ownership of the means of production.
The mere suggestion invites revolution.
Instead, today’s neo Marxist will allow for private ownership
with a high tax rate and a strangling bureaucracy.”
Life, a natural phenomenon, fine-tunes the environment where it happens to take place.
Living organisms, according to our current understanding of how life works, need to eat. Also to drink and to breathe. And they need to excrete the ‘consequences’ of their ‘imperfect’ metabolism.
By ingesting, digesting and excreting portions of their environment, living organisms slowly transform the space where they ‘do their thing’.
Humans do all of the above. Some of it ‘on purpose’!
Human societies ingest huge amounts of raw materials and ‘excrete’ merchandise and waste.
Human societies ingest huge amounts of information and ‘excrete’ knowledge. As in ‘meaning’ and ‘ideology’.
Living organisms, humans included, evolve in the environment they have inherited from their ancestors. Regardless of the species each of them belongs to.
Human societies have to make do in the environment they have inherited. To do that, to ‘survive’, they need to make sense of the situation they find themselves in. In order to go ‘forward’, they need to identify a ‘meaning’. Which meaning is actually built according to the prevalent ideologies, at each given moment in time.
Living organisms do their thing according to species specific information they have inherited from the previous generation. Individual organisms do have some ‘lee-way’/autonomy but only a very small number of animals are able to actually learn something from their parents. And none, but humans, have the ability to teach.
Humans are under a double determination. As animals, they are still functioning according to their DNA. As cultural beings, they are also heavily influenced by the culture in which each of them had happened to be raised. By the culture to which each of them has the opportunity to contribute.
The practical manifestation of culture, civilization, makes it possible for individual humans to enjoy a far deeper autonomy than the rest of the animals. Not only that humans have a lot more to learn from their ancestors/brethren but they are also capable to ad, in real time, new information/meaning to the very culture to which they belong. And to ‘rebuild’/refine the civilization itself.
Darwinian evolution is a multidimensional thing. The individuals/species endowed with genetic information which no longer fits with the prevalent environmental conditions disappear. Only those capable to survive, those endowed with useful enough genetic information, manage to transmit their genetic information to the next generation.
Human evolution, a process which takes place on top of the Darwinian level, is a three dimensional thing.
We build culture and civilization. While searching for ‘meaning’.
We gather information and use it to build the world we live in. The freshly built civilization, our new ‘environment’, constitutes a new ‘playing ground’ where we gather some more information. Which we quickly use to ‘improve’ our ‘homes’.
Humans, like all other living organisms, are limited. By their material nature. By our making.
We live in a three dimensional space but we only perceive two and a half dimensions. Up/down and left/right are very clear. Depth, on the other hand… is a little bit trickier…
Same thing with the evolutionary dimensions.
At first, when transitioning from animals to conscious human beings, we were mainly concerned about ‘meaning’. Gathering food was ‘natural’ – we did it like our ape-like ancestors used to – and we didn’t need much protection against the elements. But our budding conscience was screaming for meaning.
What’s gonna happen to me? What is this whole thing? Who’s responsible for all this?
That was why our ancestors had invented totems, territorial gods and, eventually, religions.
As an answer to the three questions I’ve just formulated.
What we currently call culture and civilization have been built, by us, to ‘beef up’ ‘meaning’. As a manner of confirming, to us, that our already formulated conclusion was right.
Stonehenge was erected to prove that, year after year, the Sun was rising when it was supposed to.
And so on…
After reaching a certain level of material and psychological comfort – Abraham Maslow’s fourth level, self-esteem – we no longer need ‘confirmation’. We’re comfortable enough with what we have so we no longer need fresh meaning.
As a matter of fact, when Maslow was speaking about ‘self-actualization’ he was absolutely clear.
In this stage, the individual is free to chose.
Nota Bene, self actualization is only an opportunity. Not a ‘sentence’.
An open door to a vast space. Where each of us can do almost anything. Anything of what is possible…
Until the bubble bursts!
I grew up under communist rule.
None of us had any hope that our society could ‘revert’ to being ‘normal’.
The fall of the regime was a surprise for everybody.
I understand now, after 35 years of freedom, that the communist rule was doomed to failure.
Because of the ‘strangling bureaucracy’ which was preoccupied with their own survival.
And which blissfully ignored the hard reality.
Living in the bubble they have built for themselves, the strangling bureaucrats were unaware of the mistakes built one on top of the other as a consequence of the bureaucrats deciding according to their own ideology and without proper feed back from the real reality.
Looking farther down in human history, it is easy to see that this has been the fate of all ‘imperial arrangements’. From ‘political’ empires to ‘economic’ monopolies.
Alexander the Great, Genghis-Han, Napoleon Bonaparte, Hitler, Lenin-Stalin-Brezhnev…
East India Company, AT&T and now Boeing & Intel.
And what about gambling?
“Using datasets showing deposits and withdrawals into and out of online sports betting platforms like FanDuel and DraftKings, as well as to and from equity brokerage accounts like Charles Schwab, E-Trade, Vanguard and Fidelity, Baker and his co-authors found that legalization has led to higher credit card balances, lower access to credit, a reduction in longer-term and higher-yield investments, as well as an increase in lottery play — with the effects particularly pronounced among financially constrained households.“
“Financially constrained” people have a tendency to see their future through a glass ceiling. They know it’s there but they have no idea how to reach it.
The “strangling bureaucracy” are busy – but without a real understanding of what they’re doing – casting layer upon layer of fresh glass-ceiling.
And we continue to live in our respective bubbles… built by us, according to our ideological specifications…
nicichiarasa 