Communism vs individualism. By Eric Weinstein.
Those of us bitterly opposed to communism fall into two different groups.
A) Those who argue that it must be abandoned because it has show us that it doesn’t work.
B) Those of us that are so bitterly opposed to collectivism applied to dissenting individuals that we are relieved that it cannotwork. A happy accident. Those who don’t care if it couldbe made to work: we’d continue to fight it. Working or not working is irrelevant. It’s just bad. Period. The end.
If Communism could actually be shown to deliver stable high levels of growth and innovation, broadly distributed, with low inequality,
I believe I would still fight it to my dying breath.My opposition to communism has little to nothing to do with the fact that it doesn’t work as an economic system. So, it’s merely a relief that it doesn’t work. A convenience for its opposition.
Communism and collectivism are intrinsically soul killing for people who are hyper-individualistic. So let’s stop hiding behind the fact that they don’t work as economic or governance systems.
Some of us who aren’t the biggest fans of naked capitalism red of tooth and claw, hate communism not because we think capitalism is intrinsically fair. It isn’t. We oppose it because communism hunts the individual.
For us, it’s not communism vs capitalism. That is a businessman’s argument. Instead, it’s communism vs individualism for me. Show me a system that fights harder to let a dissenting individual thrive more than brutal market capitalism (which also barely works), and I am all ears.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
Arguments [for communism] are lacking and, therefore, there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp and asylums for the insane with forced confinement.
The real political spectrum is collectivism (left) to individualism (right). A spectrum, not a horseshoe or a circle. Don’t let that communist propaganda that the Nazis were left-wing fool you — the Nazis were collectivists and hated individualism, just like the other socialists.
