The thing that strikes me about the Occupy Wall Street crowd and their demands is how timeless they are.
We lazily think of socialism as something that came up with the Industrial Revolution. In fact, as Eric Voegelin, Igor Shafarevich, and many others have explained, it is a universal human tendency.
In We Are Doomed I included a quote from Aristophanes’ play The Congresswomen, written 391 b.c.:
Everyone is to have an equal share in everything and live on that; we won’t have one man rich while another lives in penury, one man farming hundreds of acres while another hasn’t got enough land to get buried in … No one will be motivated by need: everybody will have everything …
You could put that wellnigh word for word into the mouths of these protestors.
The dream never dies. It only slumbers, waiting for its moment.
You might think, after all the 20th century’s lurid horrors, that it will be a few generations before that moment comes round again. To judge from my kids’ public-school education, though, there is not much room for those horrors in the modern educational curriculum. That small minority of OWS protestors who could place Mao Tse-tung in the correct century probably think he was an “agrarian reformer.”
And so the wheel turns.
The powerful currents of thought and action that collided and clashed in the French Revolution … are so intimately linked to the very essence of human nature that they will inevitably [do so] again in the future.
— Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution (1909).
Throughout socialistic literature there is the well-known insistence upon the materialistic interpretation of history - a conception based upon a hunger for things of material enjoyment, and for more and more of them. Fundamentally, they have as much centred their aim on an increase in material possessions as the veriest Napoleon of finance in Wall Street. An existence in which the acquisition of more material wealth is of very large - if not of chief - importance is in the thoughts of both. The ends sought for by the socialists are not, in effect, different from those of the mass of non-socialists who are striving to acquire wealth in order to have ease and leisure for enjoyment. Agreeing in their aims, their differences - which seem to most persons to place them as wide apart as the poles - really consist in choosing different means of accomplishing their ends. The ordinary hustler for wealth, without or within the stock market, may have no definite moral restraint except the fear of the law (in fact, he may even contrive to escape the law), and he accepts existing institutions; but he plans to gain his end, if honest, by productive processes and trade; or, if dishonest, by a thousand ingenious ways of transferring to himself the wealth created by others. On the other hand, the socialist proposes to overturn industrial competition and the institution of private property in the hope - vaguely outlined and not economically analyzed - of transferring the use of wealth from those who have to those who have not. p613-614
"Socialism a Philosophy of Failure", Laughlin, J.L., Scribner's magazine, 1887
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIn my line of work (Wall St IT) I get to observe people with net worth, let's say, >$100M, coming to work at 7am, leaving late, never taking vacations beyond some extra long weekends.
What motivates them? Certainly not the pursuit of material goods - they don't have even time or much inclination to enjoy their already accumulated wealth, the way, for example, I would, if I were in their shoes, I think. It is, I believe, more about the power and alpha male competitiveness, being "the man". Something deeply ingrained in human nature. A bit more complicated than pursuit for material things.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think you are hitting on something important here. It isn't greed for wealth, but for social status, that drives the overachievers of both the "capitalist" as well as the "socialist" kind. They both have a need to validate their belief in their superiority to their fellow man. White liberals call every other white person racist, because they need to feel superior to other white people (thereby revealing their own racism). New Yorkers famously think people who live elsewhere are morons. Harvard graduates of course assume they have a right to work in the White House or equivalent. It may have something to do with an exaggerated need to win adulation from one's mother or father or substitute thereof (note: I do not subscribe to Freudianism).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTrue. It's been a corruption of true principles since the beginning. On one hand you have the self-centered pursuit of greed and accumulation of wealth while forgetting to individually care for the poor and needy. And on the other hand you have forced redistributionism, which makes a mockery of the word "care" and "charity" (which means love).
You can certainly see condemnation of the former in Isaiah 58, if you're a bible reader, and you can see the highest levels of voluntary charity to the uttermost degree in Acts 2 and 4.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"That small minority of OWS protestors who could place Mao Tse-tung in the correct century probably think he was an “agrarian reformer.”"
/sarcasm on/Dude learning about these dead white males is too hard, that is why I got a degree in Fill in Blank Studies. Since I have my degree, the gov't owes me a nice studio in Greenwich Village. /sarcasm off/
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAmen Derb.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGreat points. And your post does indeed address something (I think I first saw the quote somewhere on NRO recently) that these Occupy Wall street Losers (OWLS) should remember if they wish to be wise (not that they do):
“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh, we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on those faces there is no smile.”
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI still say if we just give them all some legal marijuana, Mountain Dew and some Doritos, they'll all go home and back to playing XBox in their parents' basement.
Then we will see the real group hypnotizing these guvmint zombies.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDiet Mountain Dew. Low Sodium Doritos (they're in NYC).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWanting everything, now, is how a child thinks.
In the old days, parents believed that it was their job to help their children overcome such childish beliefs so that they could start acting like adults.
Modern parents believe that it is more important for them to be their children's best friend. As a result they rarely challenge their children's childish behaviors and beliefs.
The result is the modern liberal movement.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe frequent observation that the Wall Street filthy hippies and other socialists are childish always reminds me of Hayek.
It is a universal human propensity. It is a longing for the society of the family and the extended family, and a refusal to accept the constraints and prejudices ( that would be culture) that make extended orders of cooperation possible.
And that's why ordered liberty is so hard to get and keep. It is endothermic, and requires a constant supply of energy from without. In other words, it's work.
One can readily see that the filthy hippies flopped around the financial district are not much inclined to work.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat is even worse about the current gang is that the dream of everybody having everything has largely been achieved by the very capitalist system they despise. Imagine going back to a socialist rally in 1911 and promising that in 100 years America would be a country where even the poorest members of society would have access to so much food that many of them would be struggling with obesity, houses with indoor plumbing, electric lights, and a new kind of oven that cooks food super-fast. They'd have telephones that they could carry around with them, access to a mail service that allowed them to send letters anywhere in the world instantly, and motion pictures in their homes. They could buy a miracle drug that cures infections for a 1/2 hour pay at a store that also sold a wide range of clothing, food, tools, and a bunch of things that hadn't even been invented yet. Where almost everyone owned an automobile that was far more safe, reliable, and comfortable than anything that had yet been imagined. Where poverty meant being at risk of having to temporarily do without some of these things, and maybe having to live in a high-crime neighborhood.
They'd have driven you off for being insane, but their modern heirs are protesting the system that made it possible and urging the kinds of policies widely used by societies that still have trouble feeding their people despite having access to the technology developed here.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSpot on my friend
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYour post pretty much makes mine redundant. Right on.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI was thinking along similar lines this morning walking to work in the Wall St. area (lucky for us, upwind from OW).
How can anyone take Marxism seriously after the collapse of the USSR, after China ditched it, with Cuba providing next-door reminder of the misery it brings?
The answer is that one is not an idiot because he believes in Marxism, it is that one believes in Marxism because one is an idiot; Marxism is very appealing for some reason to a very specific type of a fool, it is in human nature. Failed USSR, China, Cuba examples do not scare them because one needs the aptitude for critical thinking and observing empirical evidence that this type of a fool totally lacks.
Recognizing this, there is no point in arguing with them, it is society's responsibility to maintain pro-actively the ordered liberty constitutional framework that keeps those fools in check and neutralizes the danger, coming from them. Never treat them as harmless "kids" - be vigilant: USSR, Nazi Germany and all the rest of horror stories of twenties century had "harmless" "kids" that nobody took seriously until it was too late, poisoning the well.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'll disagree slightly. An idiot might believe in any number of stupid things, Marxism (or any of its many analogues) being one of them, so being an idiot does not guarantee belief in Marxism, it just ensures a vulnerability to such belief. On the other hand, belief in Marxism is irrefutable proof of stupidity. Keep in mind that the most extreme form of stupidity is when a person wastes innate intelligence on stupid endeavors. A rock is not normally called stupid, except to the extent that non-intelligence is appropriate to its nature. A Harvard graduate, who presumably demonstrated some intellectual aptitude, but who then goes Marxist, is guilty of criminal stupidity. One could say, then, that belief in Marxism is proof of criminal stupidity, the willful perversion of intelligence in the service of stupidity.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseFunny, reminds me of the debate about homosexuality - if one is born this way, or if it is a matter of choice.
You, if I understand correctly, more on a side of stupidity being a matter of choice and free will (hence "criminal"). At least for Harvard grads.
There are plenty of Harvard grads who lack critical reasoning and the abilities to observe and to learn from hard experiences of others. They are ripe for group think and lack natural resistance mechanism to utopias - to observe facts that do not fit and contradict.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI call such people "Square Peg/Round Holers".
The nation is currently headed by one.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNot exactly. There are people genuinely born stupid, by which I mean significantly more stupid than the usual stupidity we all live with and strive to overcome. But most of these poor souls are aware of their limitations and have enough sense, enough humility, to know that they must push themselves a bit harder than most, and in doing so often outperform their apparent intellectual betters who have been accustomed to getting by without so much effort. I was referring to that subset of people with demonstrable intelligence who, for whatever reason (emotional problems, I would generally expect) choose to devote their intellectual gifts to demonstrably stupid causes. That is what I call criminal stupidity.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBy stupidity or idiocy I don't mean the inability to tie laces or to do math. I know math geniuses, a distinguished linguist and even one Nobel economist who are idiots this way. They are blind to empirical evidence that contradicts their beliefs. They can not learn from experience of other generation and societies - only from their own life, which is often skewed in privileged way.
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