The Origins of Socialism

...Yet, objective disconfirmations of the "scientific" predictions are disregarded by the faithful...

...Unlike Augustine, Freud did not believe in any promise of supernatural salvation...

...Rousseau and Acton are moderate compared with Condorcet's follower, Cabanis, who summarized the creed of the Enlightenment's prophets: "Les M~chants ne sont que des mauvais raisonneurs...

...and usually they were Antinomians: The return of the Messiah required that they overthrow the existing social order...

...It is our experience of ourselves that is lost in death, the consciousness for the sake of which we were expelled from" paradise...

...And the fable blames human frailty and not Madison Avenue...

...Economics was the redemptive science as long as material deprivation was felt most stingingly...

...They did not "trust the people" as they are often accused of having done...

...Power itself is only as corrupt as we are...

...They would get a preview of things to come, for he would rule them on earth for a thousand years--to the day of judgment, when the rest of humanity too would be resurrected...

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...and, unlike the Pelagians and, later, rationalists, Freud was too stubbornly realistic to believe in "do it y o u r s e l f " salvation e i t h e r - - wherefore Utopians regard him as a baleful pessimist...

...Both parties remain responsible in seduction-unless the victims be incompetent...

...Without hereditary and inherent corruption, we need no divine grace and can save ourselves...

...Of course, one may as well define capital as the exclusive source of excess (surplus) value...

...to the secular, it is assured by definition...

...nor is it, as some Utopians charge, particularly European...

...The idea that man is born and could remain good is as deathless as the wish from which it springs...

...But in times of stress, Millenarian movements always sprung up to expect immediate salvation and, in preparation, to rebel against the ecclesiastic and temporal authorities who, by their sinful conduct and by their lack of faith, were believed to retard salvation...

...Millenarians by readers of the Vulgate, and chiliasts by readers of the Greek gospels...

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...It was Christianity that recognized the positive evil in us--what Freud was to call the death instinct...

...Consciousness, finally, brought death too...

...or else refuting data are met with reformulations denying their relevance--until the "Scientific Predictions," "Laws," "Trends," etc...

...Occasionally, they continued by postponing the fulfillment of the messianic hope indefinitely, though still depicting it as imminent...

...Rousseau's most influential, though unacknowledged, heir, Karl Marx, explained specifically how we are corrupted and made miserable by capitalist institutions...

...Our checks and balances are not instituted because, in Lord Acton's pseudo-profound phrase, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely...

...In Augustine's view the Manicheans overestimated the power of evil and the Pelagians underestimated it...

...And, similarly, the right of entrepreneurs to offer and persuade makes sure that we get what we wish--though perhaps not what we need...

...In the words John Milton heard from Adam's lips: scious merely changes form, as the body does throughout our lifetime...

...Aristotle modified this view by acknowledging akrasia--the weakness of the will which may let us do what we know to be wrong...

...Genesis tells us that by eating the fruit from the forbidden tree we became "wise," we came "to know good and evil...

...Freud is alleged to have held the key...

...There is no way to make the planners responsive to consumer wishes, except by reintroducing the profit system...

...Marx completed the secularization of Utopian thinking by explaining the corrupting capitalist system as historically unavoidable, yet ipso facto, temporary...

...myths, t The reign of Saturn described in the wistful lines of Greek and Latin poets, such as Ovid, seems akin to the Paradise of Genesis...

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...This assurance is no stronger and demands no less faith than that of religion...

...The Manicheans thought that Augustine overestimated God's strength: He needed a decisively help**To insist, as some "humanists" and eulogists do, that the individual "lives" in the memory of others, is to prove that others survive, not that he does: To live is to experience, not to be experienced...

...In practice this Utopian creed weakens both institutional and internalized restraints...

...The responsiveness of the market may not make people happy but at least we will suffer from our mistakes and benefit from our wisdom--instead of being frustrated by others...

...are no more testable than the overtly religious prophecies they were to replace...

...Every child is expelled in turn from the Garden of Eden----expelled by his years--to know "good and evil," to become human, if not "wise": As we grow up nolente volente we are seized with reason and, therefore, responsibility...

...They have none...

...That is why we must control it by checks and balances, why the power of any person must be restrained by that of others interested in wielding their own...

...His doctrine was rejected by Manicheans and Pelagians...

...They have always felt that Paradise can be regained cheaply--if we are but reasonable and listen to them...

...Medieval Utopians often relied on the promise--found most explicitly in Revelation XX, 4-6mthat the Messiah, upon His second coming, would resurrect those who had faithfully suffered and worked for Him...

...ing human hand lest He be overwhelmed by the forces of evil...

...Power merely makes corruption effective, as it does all our inclinations...

...But unlike even the most malevolent fairies, Millenarians never grant this last wish...

...Freud, like Augustine, recognized the irreversibility of the expulsion from Eden and the ineluctability of the human predicament...

...Actual science does not regard definitions as evidence, nor depend on faith...

...Hitler's Germany and Lenin's Russia were associated with education no less than democratic America...

...Although advertising may seduce, it cannot rape...

...we all rebel against the father and fall from his grace...

...it is what makes us human...

...their origin lies shrouded in the mists of history.* Perhaps Plato inspired Sir Thomas, who does refer to him...

...Religious leaders, of course, have grace to explain their mission...

...Though it may be rationalized in different ways, responding to the specific discontents and deprivations of each historical period, MiUenarianism rests on the most pro18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 found common aspirations and fears of humanity--on the paradise we actually lost: on a dim, and largely unconscious memory of our own prehistory...

...Early Christians thought salvation so imminent that theologians had a hard job pushing redemption of the promise beyond this temporal world...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 non-Marxist) Utopians who did not extrapolate their visions of the future from "history...

...More than intellectual untidiness is involved...

...But, in fact, education is a neutral vehicle which can distribute and amplify evil as well as good...

...ultimately we might find that homo homini lupus--that "the life of man" in the resulting approximation of the "state of nature" is just as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" as Thomas Hobbes thought...

...You can eat cake while insisting that you don't like it and blaming Madison Avenue for losing your figure...

...Undeniably, people do get what they wish to an increasing degree, and yet not what they want...

...The fact that, at most, men can become better, is ttNorman O. Brown is an exception among Utopians: He realizes we would have to (and is willing to) renounce reason to re-enter paradise...

...But pseudo-science at present produces credulity more easily than religion...

...The task clearly is not to speculate about a world without it, but rather to provide means to minimize it, or to channel it into the most useful or least harmful activities...

...This is not the occasion for a critique of Marx's often quite instructive but mostly circular reasoning, or of his propositions which restate, disguised as empirical demonstrations of the unavoidable developments of capitalism, what is already implied in his evaluative definitions...

...The fairies in the folk tale were certainly less autocratic than planners are-market fairies no doubt...

...People unwilling to relinquish their mundane advantages, or unconvinced of the divine authority of the Millenarian prophets, were slain without hesitation: Their mission exempted Millenarian leaders from the mores and moralities of ordinary times and men...

...However, actual Utopian movements--of which there were many before and after Sir Thomas wrote--were prompted, and still are, by the Biblical image of prelapsarian bliss, the Garden of Eden, itself a marvelous re-creation of still more venerable and quite universal Ernest van den Haag is the John M. Olin Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Policy at Fordham University...

...I shall use the word broadly to refer to all redemptionist Utopias...

...To translate this into psychological language more familiar today: Each of us has to renounce the pure pleasure principle and his (polymorph perverse) innocence, to "eat bread in the sweat of his face," to acquire an Ego, to engage in object relations, to work and extract sustenance from a harsh and niggardly nature, to make peace with reality...

...Death thus is the wages of sin, as is our fear of it.** Among the church fathers, Saint Augustine thought the fall irreversible by human agency...

...it is not corrupting...

...often it has been beneficial...

...the excess is created exclusively by workers, who are exploited inasmuch as this excess ("surplus value") does not go to them...

...Thus people are wrong but they cannot be blamed...

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...When the cage collapses, she has the power to eat people...

...A leopard may dream of eating people but lack the power to do so as long as she is restrained by her cage...

...How were we locked out of the Garden of Eden...

...indeed, the Millenium, just as "the revolution," required human sacrifices to become credible...

...Each issue highlights a Main Selection...plus an impressive array of alternate selections (most available on cassettes...

...The explanation would suggest the dictatorship of the leaders until everybody transcends corruption as much as they do--and this, usually, takes quite a while...

...Infants and animals do not bear responsibility...

...It is up to us to make them our own, or not to buy...

...Freud and the writers of Genesis concur: Civilization (as well as its discontents) rests on our revolt against paternal rule...

...they thought God had revealed to them--but not to the degenerate official authorities-how to prepare for the imminent Millenium and be saved...

...Thus our fall brought sin and guilt into the world: It made us conscious of choice, made us reponsible for discriminating between "good and evil...

...Production for profit, far from thwarting our wishes, makes certain that they are not disregarded by producers...

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...It is not the power--the collapsed cage, the ability to attack without restraint--that produced the appetite...

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...and if Communism is contained, it will be, I fear, despite, as much as because of, education.*** To be sure, Hitler and Lenin were mistaken in believing that "Nature made man happy and good," and that by changing society they could restore Paradise to him...

...but he failed to unlock the gate because he lacked courage and Marxist training...

...Utopians must find ways to blame the undesired effects of the fulfillment of our desires on evil social forces from which a social revolution could free us...

...We have always looked with longing to the Paradise lost, and with dread, doubt, yet also pride on what this loss made possible: the human career on earth--history...

...Hence we are guilty...

...MiUenarians always were Enthusiasts as well (from en theos...

...power merely makes it possible to satisfy it.~t~t The distinction makes a difference...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 21...

...Ought we not to abolish democracy then...

...and they do not see that to reenter Eden would be to give up the very gift of reason they wish to use as a k e y . t t P a r a d i s e so far remains as elusive as ever...

...We'll send it automatically...

...Unless education is defined as a process effectively leading to goodness (as seen by the proponent...

...and each of us acquires a Super Ego perpetuating the burden of original sin, of Oedipal guilt...

...But in this case it is defined as that which cures, i.e., is effective in the right way by definition, whereas it ought to be shown to be so...

...Seduction, unlike rape, is influence not coercion...

...On the record, dictatorship does not...

...They are innocent, not by not doing or not wanting what is wrong--far from it--but by not knowing, and not being capable of knowing, that it is...

...Pelagianism was revived in eighteenth-century rationalism and ever since has prevailed in socialist thinking...

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...Sin is possible only because of that consciousness...

...In the Hegelian manner, the future was regarded as eo ipso morally right: Morality is either identical with historical developments or irrelevant...

...seduction is but disapproved persuasion...

...Its materials remain: Nothing falls out of the cosmos...

...The idea that the Paradise lost would be regained mainly grew from the Judaic roots of the Christian tradition to become the source of Utopian ideas--from Rousseau to Marx--and of Utopian movements from Tanhelm to Lenin...

...To the religious, redemption was assured by revelation...

...Those who disregard it are easily beguiled by the eschatology of modern millenarianism which depicts the powerless as ipso facto good and contends that the institutions which restrain human corruption and cruelty cause what they restrain...

...Planners produce what they think people ought to wish for, although they seldom tell how they know it...

...For example, the value of output exceeds that of input...

...They were not that foolish...

...He named, but did not father, the literary genre: Paradigms of a perfect social order have been with us since time immemorial...

...See his Life Against Death (1959...

...But if we are not competent enough to resist the blandishments of advertisers when we should, how competent can we be in choosing among candidates for Congress or the Presidency, each of whom tries to persuade us...

...Unlike many of their recent eulogists, most of the Founding Fathers of this country were too shrewd to believe in man's innate goodness, or, at least, to rely on it...

...It rests on forces which are not responsive to educational rectification--on the corruption of human nature which these leaders so painfully demonstrated in their very denial of it...

...We, who have witnessed Stalin and Hitler, have survived the Second World War, and now reluctantly possess weapons which might deter but might also fight a third and cataclysmic world war-we hardly need to be told that evil has proved quite as real as Augustine and Freud thought...

...Paradise must be regainable...

...They succeeded with the faithful as a whole...

...Divine grace was therefore required...

...Planning (i.e., central planning--capitalism is individual planning) means to transfer sovereignty from consumers to the planners, to place the decision on what is to be produced into their hands...

...In a socialist system, when production is geared to a plan, there is no profit or loss determined by independently established market prices and, therefore, no guarantee that the products will be useful to anyone other than the planners...

...Influenced as they are by Rousseau and Marx, our contemporary Utopian movements are truculently secular and "scientific," whereas in the past, religious inspiration usually was prosalvationist wishes and used to rationalize them be truly rational.~/ Hence, the elaborate theories which disclose how redemption through historical development can, will, or must happen in the end turn out to be camouflaged kerygmatic effusions...

...The peasant boy in the folk tale does misuse the three wishes granted by the fairy, and is lucky if in the end he finds himself where he started...

...We cannot go back...

...This pessimistic or, as I would prefer to call it, realistic view is not a product of recent historical and personal experience alone...

...However, planners can disregard our wishes in favor of our (presumed) wants...

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...Democracy, though perhaps not a good system, seems the best available because it makes sure that our leaders, if not better, are not much worse than we are...

...In its current form, Pelagian rationalism goes back to the platonic Socrates who equated happiness with virtue and virtue with knowledge, while vice was but ignorance...

...This seems preferable to getting what planners think we need...

...It matters little that what was resented was not, as Marx so fervently believed, the increasing poverty of people, but the increasing distance between their economic aspiration and their economic actuality--a result not of increasing poverty but of increasing prosperity which causes aspiration to rise faster than attainment, even as both rise...

...Although still Utopian in inspiration, meliorism has played a less disastrous historical role than full-fledged salvationism...

...In a market economy, one can produce for profit only if people have use for one's product--else one produces for loss...

...It is dedication to this task that has always distinguished the realistic from the Utopian leader...

...Like wine, it can be inspiring--but too much too often makes one an alcoholic...

...It is this inherent corruption, or, if you wish, the tension of human...

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...Some form of this rationalist belief is implied in our revivalist enthusiasm for education as a panacea for all the world's ills--ills which we regard as mistakes due to ignorance, or, taking akrasia into account, as the effects of wrong conditioning also correctible by means of education...

...They respect Oliver Goldsmith's "How small of all that human hearts endure, The part which laws or kings can cause or cure...

...Political U t o p i a n s - - f o r obvious reasons--are reluctant to explain that they form an elite which miraculously has transcended the corruption of the rest of us...

...Rationalists have always denied the endogenous and necessary nature of the fall and of the consequent "corruption" of human nature...

...The expectation of salvation by a Messiah is only one of many forms Utopian thinking and wishing has taken...

...Pelagius went in the opposite direction and pushed further: He denied that all men bear Adam's sin and are thereby depraved...

...To die means permanently to lose consciousness, to lose the distinctive experience one has of oneself experiencing...

...With few exceptions, the ancients did not believe in salvation: History was regarded as an irreversible process of degeneration (as in the Platonic view), or, at best, repetition...

...Rousseau's disastrous dictum, "Nature has made man happy and good--society corrupts him and causes his misery," seems to be the more accepted, the more observation of the unconscious, of primitives, and of infants shows it to be false...

...those who reject the revelation of history's prophet, and his marching orders, are not only damned but also doomed...

...But we do...

...If we define education as the empirical process of schooling, its effects depend on the user, and its effectiveness is doubtful and unlikely to provide more than the instruction which makes actions--whether good or badmeffective...

...Perhaps advertisers inspire new wishes...

...although the tree was forbidden, we had to eat its fruit: The Oedipus complex, its causes and effects, is the foundation of human civilization...

...So do politicians...

...The movements either were defeated, or, their hopes disappointed, disappeared...

...The need for the sacrificial "son of man" qui tollit peccata mundi is therefore universally felt...

...but it was irretrievably in the past...

...So is resentment...

...but Marx did not care to realize that workers become the exclusive creators of value only by his definition...

...Ontogeny repeats phylogeny...

...In our religious tradition, the human predicament and the need for salvation from it both derive from Adam's fall--that felix culpa about which we have always been ambivalent...

...But the intellectual mistake itself, let alone its effects, rests on more than ignorance...

...This is the basis of our Constitution...

...To disguise messianic prophecies as the historical predictions these "theories" are is to vest them with scientific status...

...He was contemptuous of old-fashioned (pre- or ~t~tOf course, the wish for achieving or keeping power may itself cause us to act corruptly--but not the power itself...

...Thus, after having first corrupted them, history (which takes the place of a relentless Manichean God) will save the faithful--subject to the usual Millenarian conditions: They must make sacrifices but, above all, they must believe...

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...our (~onstitutional checks and balances represent the institutionalization of their distrust of human beings--and how salutary have they proved to be...

...Marx also scorned old-fashioned Utopians because they offered explicitly moral justifications for their schemes whereas he predicted on "scientific" grounds what his, or rather history's, scheme was and how it would come into being...

...Secular Millenarian prophets cannot offer this explanation...

...Although defeated, these heresies never died...

...Hence, those Christians who, impatient for the redemption of the divine promise, were not above hurrying salvation along, were called ~:I shall not be concerned here with the more moderate version of the salvationist idea (meliorism) which grants not the certainty but the possibility of progress and seeks improvement rather than perfection...

...Because he did, he regarded himself as the founder of scientific socialism...

...The situation is analogous in respect to money (which is a form of power) and in respect to any object of desire...

...The Founding Fathers knew that bad men are as likely to corrupt good institutions as bad institutions are to corrupt good men...

...existence, that rationalists are still busy denying: They depict evil as exogenous, social, and altogether correctible...

...That amounts to sayings of more than 55ch...

...Political Utopians never explain how a society which corrupts all its members, however naturally good they be, can find people to reform it...

...and the faithful, executing history's orders, will help that doom along...

...Millenarians, however, are certain that people would not wish for trivial and vulgar things which ultimately hamper their selffulfillment and happiness, were it not that capitalism produces "for profit and not for use," and that advertising persuades us into feeling desires which we would not feel spontaneously...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 19 however, relied too much on human capacity, particularly the Pelagians who thought man infinitely perfectible by his own hands...

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...Unhappiness, as William James pointed out, is a function of the distance between aspiration and attainment...

...but those who would lead us into it now regard it as a demonstrable possibility of human nature, a natural rather than a supernatural place...

...Human nature remains good...

...Both, Full of doubt I stand Whether I should repent men now of sin By me done or occasioned, or rejoice Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring...

...Certainly the individual structure of which we are conIt's your introduction to The International Preview Society-the classical music club with NO OBLIGATION TO BUY...

...hard to face...

...Whether evil be an inborn drive or an ineluctably acquired reaction, as is the Oedipus complex, matters little...

...But Utopians cannot admit that the human, not the social, condition may bar the full gratification of our deepest wants, or that people may quite spontaneously wish for the wrong things...

...Virtue thus becomes rejection of temptation...