How could people support such an obviously bad idea? It’s because they are jealous. Maybe they just love to play victim! Or they are lazy and want to live off others. It’s a social mania. Or perhaps, just plain stupidity.
But here we are, after all these years of yelling at people about philosophy and economic policy, and yet the popularity of socialism still seems to be growing! How? What on earth is happening here?
All the lectures will never work, because what we are doing is fighting against human nature. …don’t panic! I’m not a communist, I’ll explain.
First we need to back up a bit and have a look at human nature and where our instincts come from. If you are from the States, you probably were not taught much about humanities “pre history”. Most of what we are taught about humanity is from the past few thousand years. That makes some sense as we have much more of an idea about what was happening then. However, as best we can currently tell, humanity is roughly 250,000 years old. So that leaves quite a lot of time to form instincts prior to those first Mesopetamian farmers ~10,000 years ago.
Agriculture has existed for only about 4-5% of our existence, and that’s just for people with genetic roots in the Middle East, it took thousands of years to spread around the globe. And the world we live in now, with our daily commutes, and single family homes, and our mega cities, is quite an anomaly in our history. We don’t have the instincts for it.
Okay, so what do we have the instincts for? And here we are doing some guess work as we don’t have any documentary footage from the first ~249,870 years of our existence.
It’s really fascinating to read the studies on the few hunter – gatherer tribes that still exist today, or that did exist long enough for us to study them. We can make a pretty decent guess that how these people live, is roughly how all of humanity lived for the vast majority of our time on planet Earth. This is especially true when we find the same patterns in different hunter – gatherer bands on opposite sides of the world. That gives us a pretty clear indication of what is “natural” to humans.
Note: I am not at all suggesting that anyone return to this life. You are free to run off into the woods with your buddies if you like, but I have no intention of returning or advocating for a return to this type of life. I am suggesting here that we can learn quite a lot from looking at these studies, and that will help us continue to grow.
It pains me to skip all of the fascinating learnings from these studies, but out of deep respect for your time I’ll restrain myself and focus on just one. For at least 95% of our history, we lived in groups of about 100-150 people.
Have you heard of Dunbar’s number? British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar was studying the relationship between brain size and social group size in primates and humans. Long story short, after lots of study, he concluded that the human brain can maintain stable social relationships with about 150 people max. He first proposed this theory in the 90’s and it seems to be standing the test of time.
Are you starting to see how this applies to economics? No? Well I’ll explain, but first one more mind f*ck on human nature.
Again, if you are from the States you’ve probably been taught, or just absorbed from the culture, a few ideas and values about human nature that just aren’t true. Us Americans tend to be very into the “rugged individualism”, and I’m still a bit of a fan of this. I’m all in on individuality, personal autonomy, etc. …But, that’s not the human survival adaptation. The human survival adaptation is group formation and co-operation. One tiger vs one human, the human is lunch. One tiger vs 10 humans, the tiger is lunch. We are not bigger, we are not faster or stronger, what we are is cooperative and we come in groups… and we win! We now sit at the top of that food chain.
But we know deep in our bones that we are unlikely to survive and can not thrive without our tribe… without our community. This one is such a deep survival instinct that we tend to panic when we feel that we might lose our tribe. I call this “Exclusion Panic”, and it is unfortunately a heavily abused human instinct. When we get any hint of being ostracized, of being excluded from the group, we fall into a survival panic and politicians and manipulators of all varieties know this, and use it as a tool of control. It’s another fascinating topic, but for our purposes here, we need to understand that we have a deeply rooted need for our tribe, for those ~150 people in our community.
And now back to economics!
And you dear reader know a thing or two about economics. I don’t need to break out the data, and the charts, and all the theories to explain to you why socialism or communism doesn’t work. We know that these economic policies lead to shortages, dependance, starvation, just a massive humanitarian disaster.
If this is true, if we can prove this so easily with all the case studies, with that picture of North and South Korea from space! Then why on Earth are there so many people who still long for socialism?
Those socialism supporters might not want to swallow the hard pill of data, but here is your hard pill to swallow… humans are communists. For ~240,000 we lived in small bands of people practicing communism. Hunter – gatherers don’t use money, they have no need for that. They can maintain a direct relationship with everyone in the tribe. Living in that lifestyle you don’t need to pay Alice for her newly weaved basket, you just remember that you owe her some berries next week. You happily share that bit of buffalo leg with Bob knowing that he’s got you next time he has a big kill. On and on. This is where our instincts still are.
The issue isn’t that communism doesn’t work, the issue is that communism doesn’t scale beyond Dunbar’s number.
Okay, so if we can accept that, we are still left with the same issue. Now that we all live in these massive societies way outside Dunbar’s number, socialist/communist policies still don’t work! Yes, but the way in which we have a habit of explaining “capitalism” or free markets triggers everyone else’s “Exclusion Panic”.
So we have two issues here. Humans long for community, and want to support sharing in their community, and when we try to explain why that won’t work, we trigger their “Exclusion Panic”. In short, we’re doing it all wrong. Yelling at people about data will never work when this is what we are up against.
So, if you haven’t decided that I’m a dirty hippie communist and you’re still reading this, I’ll stop talking about problems and offer a very simple solution. We gotta change how we talk about this.
When we sell capitalism with words and phrases like “competition”, “profit motive”, “rugged individualism”, or “survival of the fittest”, etc, we trigger fears of isolation. When we communicate with words used to signal distance and friction with our fellow humans rather than connection to them and care for them, we trigger concerns for well being. …valid concerns.
If we want to counter the rise of socialism, we need a marketing overhaul. We must speak to humanity’s true survival strategy—cooperation—and honor it in our language. We need to acknowledge our intense longing for community and give people an economically sound path to greater community support. People are rejecting an “every man for himself” world, and socialism is their current tool of rejection. If we believe free markets serve communities better, we have to show it with how we talk.
Specific phrases or scripts that would be more effective here would require their own write up. But once you accept the reality of humanity, and we hold that as our base, then how we communicate on these topics will naturally evolve.
We are all starved of connection and community in the modern world. While it might be too late for the word “capitalism” we can help people to understand that “free markets” are actually what bring us together and are at the core of cooperative communities.