Socialists and Communists Don't Understand These 3 Ideas

Send this essay to one and free them from their naive delusions

You either die a hero, or become a villain because you used logic in the presence of far left whackos on a university campus. These are the two paths available to man.

With that said, I write to you today to talk about the three ideas that Socialists and Communists do not understand, or seem to not understand.

But first, let’s give a quick dictionary definition of each from Merriam-Webster, so that the contradictions will be more apparent:

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socialism

any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

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communism

a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed; a theory advocating elimination of private property.

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Okay, now let’s dive in to the three ideas.

1. The theory of evolution by natural selection

You can sum up the basic idea of evolution by natural selection elegantly, as Steve-Stuart Williams in his book The Ape That Understood The Universe: “Species are not static; they change and evolve over time. Every species we share the planet with today evolved from an earlier species, which itself evolved from an earlier species, and so on and so on, back into the mists of time.”

The driving force of this process is natural selection, as articulated by Charles Darwin in 1859. The essence of life is selection. It is what historian Will Durant calls the first lesson of history.

The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years or so, and during that time, nature has been doing a whole lot of selecting. Random traits pop up and those that help a creature survive and reproduce get passed on, and those that don’t fade out of the gene pool.

Crucially, this process is driven by competition, which Durant calls the second lesson of history. Life, as Rocky Balboa once said, ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It is a ruthless competition for resources, social position, and mates. Plants choke one another for sunlight, just as humans jostle for love and influence. The losers fade into the fossil record and the winners pass on their genes.¹

This reality makes it clear that communism and socialism are irreconcilable with our very nature. All it takes is a basic extrapolation of the evolutionary logic.

Animals who have been crafted by natural selection to be competitive, acquisitive, and selfish cannot—and do not—work well under a system that advocates for things like, say, the abolition of private property.

Of course, humans can cooperate, as we do every day. But if you remove the incentive to excel, or try to stifle our inherent competitive drive to rise above others in all different types of success metrics, you’re fighting our very nature. You are bound for a hellish situation. We have no shortage of historical examples.

No one really wants equal outcomes. It’s anti-human nature.

2. As a rule, politicians are dishonest

In every land during every age, politicians have slung empty words that they didn’t believe to capture the imaginations of people they don’t care about to enrich themselves and consolidate their power.

If that sounds too cynical, I’m sorry, it is what it is.

So, when the apparently benevolent socialist or communist attempts to hijack your empathy system, claiming he or she is going to reduce inequality, or effectively redistribute wealth, remember this life-saving dash of cynicism: politicians are often power-hungry psychopathic liars.

3. Wealth creation is not a zero-sum game

In the immortal words of the economist Thomas Sowell: “Liberals want to help the poor while they are poor, but really the biggest benefit is to stop them from being poor.”

Perhaps the biggest misconception in the minds of communists and socialists is that wealth is a zero-sum game: one person’s gain automatically means another person’s loss. Like a game of basketball, one team must win and one team must lose.

But in reality, regarding wealth, this is not the case. Both teams can win.

I’ll draw on the wisdom of a famous example. If we think about the economy as a pie, capitalists know that the pie can grow for everyone, through positive-sum wealth creation. But communists and socialists, viewing the pie as fixed, obsess over dividing it, because they have a zero-sum mindset. It seems some people think that riches necessarily have to come from someone; that one person becoming wealthier inevitably makes another person poorer.

Of course, there are examples of zero-sum exploitation and one person’s gain being another person’s loss. But more often than not, especially in the United States, wealth creation makes everyone richer.

The development of the internet—and subsequent ecosystem of businesses created on the internet like Amazon, Shopify, and YouTube, (and then businesses created on top of those new ecosystems!)—is an easy example. This made everyone richer.

4. Bonus

The meme below.

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With gratitude,

Jeff

1. Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene clears our eyes even more, by revealing that the basic unit of evolution is genes. Evolution is not necessarily about survival of the fittest, but about the genes with the best chance of getting to the next generation. The prime example of this is the peacock. Male peacocks have excessively colorful and large tails that make it harder for them to escape predators i.e. less fit, but the tails are attractive to female peacocks, and help their genes get passed on.