My thoughts tended to circle around two ideas:
- How deep does the ignorance have to go, and
- How deep is the desire for power at any price?
I now think it is something else. I think the question revolves around two other ideas, just as depressing, really, but less sinister:
- The human desire to get something for nothing, and
- A society that is too complicated for too many people.
First, the human desire to get something for nothing is very nearly irresistible. As with sex, only the power of religion can contain it. Not every religion. I have in mind primarily Protestantism, and I hope a couple of my friends are right that Judaism works as well. But, as the force of religion wanes in our society, the power of socialism waxes. I think the waning of religion is one important explanation for the growing popularity of socialism. And the strategy of politicians to promise something for nothing, always a danger, has become dominant.
On the second point, I am personally aware of many cases in which intelligent, educated people are shockingly ignorant of basic facts about the world we live in, but it was a conversation with my son about a year ago, on healthcare, that crystallized my thinking on this point.
Forgive me for saying that my son is a pretty smart guy who took his graduate degree in biomedical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. UPenn is a first class school, especially strong in the life sciences and business (Wharton is there), so he was surround by ideas on healthcare, and he paid attention.
One day, we were chatting about American healthcare. I admitted to him that I---a college educated man---do not understand how the system works. His simple and astonishing response was, "nobody does." Friends, that is a hell of a statement and, almost instantly, all my other thoughts, about our complicated society, rallied to his comment like soldiers rallying around the flag.
Capitalism is the central organizing idea of our society, yet it is more misunderstood by more people than almost any other socially important idea. Socialism is very easy to understand. The analogy I like to use, in comparing capitalism to socialism, is the flat vs the round theories on the shape of the earth.
A flat earth is easy to understand: you can see it and feel it. Most of us live as if the earth is flat. Frankly, it does not make any difference, to most people, which theory is correct, so they rightly ignore the whole subject.
On the other hand, 2,500 years ago, a few people knew the earth is round. And they knew this not merely as a competing superstition, but as fact. In a simple and lovely exercise in spherical geometry, involving shadows at the bottoms of wells, Greek mathematicians not only proved the earth is round, but they worked out the circumference of the earth within 10% of the modern figure, I seem to recall. Not many people, then or now, can understand the mathematical argument.
Ah, but who needs a mathematical argument, these days, when you can see the round earth in pictures taken from space? Too true. But recognize the fantastical scientific and engineering infrastructure required to take those pictures. So my point still stands, very much so: in one way or another, it is a far more difficult intellectual challenge to understand a round earth than a flat one. And, space pictures or no, lots of modern, young Americans are still not sure.
Just the same with capitalism and socialism. Socialism is easy to understand: let's just get together and fix the problem. Are there poor people? Give them money. Are there sick people? Give them doctors. There is an apocryphal conversation between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway:
Fitzgerald: The rich are different from you and me.
Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.
suggesting that Hemingway cut through Fitzgerald's effete complexification. Socialism just can't be more obvious. And yet, everybody fails at implementing it. Everybody.
On the other hand, capitalism, the theory that every person pursues his own self-interest, is a byword for selfishness. How can you help your neighbor by being selfish? Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, had to conjure an "invisible hand" for explanation,
"Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."What?
You can see a flat earth, it's the round earth that sounds like superstition. You can understand people working together to solve problems, we do it all the time. It's the "invisible hand" that sounds like superstition. Like religion, actually. The same religion that warns you never to possess things you did not earn by the labor of your own hands.
Capitalism requires a difficult explanation. Just try reading Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" or
F.A. Hayek's remarkable work, "The Road to Serfdom". I think most people are no more able to read Smith than to understand the Greek argument in spherical geometry.
The American nation was founded by a small intellectual elite who could read Adam Smith, and understand a geometric argument. Benjamin Franklin met Smith twice and conducted an extensive correspondence with him. Their respect and admiration was mutual.
So, it comes down to this. That small intellectual elite: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, and Benjamin Franklin, created a society in their image. The rest of us are more or less uncomfortable guests. Most of us do not understand capitalism, do not understand healthcare, do not understand compound interest, or how to use a credit card responsibly.
Do not imagine, however, that lack of understanding is restricted to the "lower" classes. E.g., there were several strange reasons for the housing crisis of 2008. Three of them were
- several million people bought houses they could not afford,
- financial institutions traded in securities they did not understand, and
- a federal agency, the Federal Reserve Bank, that did not understand the market it was supposedly regulating.
From high school dropouts to economics PhD's, the complexities of their personal and professional lives, in 21st century America, simply eluded their grasp. For them, for most of us, socialism will come as a physical relief. We will be poorer but more peaceful in spirit.
There is a passage in "The Fellowship of the Ring" that predicts our fate. The Lady Galadriel is queen of the Sylvan Elves. Her great powers derived from the Ring of Power in her possession, one of nine. All nine Rings of Power were slaves to the One Ring, a ring of great evil.
Galadriel understood the One Ring had to be destroyed. And, when the One Ring is destroyed,
"...then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten."
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