"There is a reason the Spanish spring [I think he is referring to 1936-9--JS] didn't last; and the Vienna spring of the 1920s didn't last. They are not sustainable so long as humans are involved. I'm afraid you think we're a great deal more evolved and civilized than we really are."
O'Neall and Harris, as these comments illustrate, accept the Big Lie about human nature. And this leads them to forsake the idea of revolution to create an egalitarian society.
The Big Lie Leads to Leftist Dictatorships
Some people accept the Big Lie about human nature but, unlike the folks at AxisofLogic.com, still aim to make a revolution to create a classless society in the future. Because, according to the Big Lie, an egalitarian society "goes against the grain of human nature" it follows very logically that if somebody is going to make society egalitarian it must be somebody who is willing to go against the actual conscious desires of ordinary people with their selfish human nature. It will require top-down social engineering. Who will be the social engineers? Whoever they are they will have to be a dictatorship; they dare not let ordinary people have the real say in a genuine democracy because ordinary people would "go against the grain" of where the social engineers want to go. The Marxists say that the Communist Party must be in control. Non-Marxist Socialists might use a different vocabulary, but it amounts to the same thing: a dictatorship of an elite who views ordinary people as going "against the grain" of progress.
Given that an elite needs to have dictatorial power, they will need to do the things dictators must do to stay in power. Fostering solidarity and equality among people is most certainly not something dictators ever do to stay in power. And this is why such elites inevitably become "more equal than others." The egalitarian society they claim to be guiding society towards will remain a far off dream, never today's reality.
Our View of Human Nature is Key
As long as we accept the capitalist Big Lie about human nature, we will be resigned to the idea that an egalitarian society is impossible, at least until the far distant future. We will be resigned to accepting inequality and the ideas that legitimate it. There will be winners and losers and the winners will get stronger and stronger because the Big Lie legitimates them and undermines any opposition to them. This is why we need to understand that the Big Lie is a lie, and reject it.
Please see my book NO RICH AND NO POOR for discussion about creating a revolutionary movement for an egalitarian society.
Links to Some Articles about Human Nature
Toddlers Have Sense of Justice, Puppet Study Shows(NYT).
In this reportof a scientific study, in PLOS (Public Library of Science) the authors conclude:
"We investigated 15-month-old infants' sensitivity to fairness, and their altruistic behavior, assessed via infants' reactions to a third-party resource distribution task, and via a sharing task. Our results challenge current models of the development of fairness and altruism in two ways. First, in contrast to past work suggesting that fairness and altruism may not emerge until early to mid-childhood, 15-month-old infants are sensitive to fairness and can engage in altruistic sharing. Second, infants' degree of sensitivity to fairness as a third-party observer was related to whether they shared toys altruistically or selfishly, indicating that moral evaluations and prosocial behavior are heavily interconnected from early in development. Our results present the first evidence that the roots of a basic sense of fairness and altruism can be found in infancy, and that these other-regarding preferences develop in a parallel and interwoven fashion. These findings support arguments for an evolutionary basis -- most likely in dialectical manner including both biological and cultural mechanisms -- of human egalitarianism given the rapidly developing nature of other-regarding preferences and their role in the evolution of human-specific forms of cooperation."
In this repor t of a study in the journal Child Development, the authors conclude:
"In sum, the findings of the current study reveal an important developmental transition at the end of the second year of life when toddlers' helping behavior expands to include empathic as well as instrumental helping. The results point as well to the late emergence of altruistic helping, after other-oriented helping first becomes evident, inasmuch as even two-year-olds find costly helping especially difficult. This suggests that changes in social understanding and prosocial motivation may be closely linked, with other-oriented concern developing in concert with growth in children's ability to represent and understand others' subjective internal states, and altruistic helping developing later, in concert with understanding of social and moral norms. It would be productive in future research to investigate these links more directly, possibly by including additional measures of self- and other-understanding and empathy, as well as by testing older children in situations that require various types of helping."
"We're not as selfish as we think we are. Here's the proof"
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