How our optimal society is governed by our strengths and weaknesses
I was asked this week…what is the Natural State of Man, and given that, what is our best society? (nationally and globally).
It’s a great question, because people’s attraction to ‘social visions’, and policies aimed towards them, depend upon their beliefs about the answer to this question. And few consider the Human ‘Nature, Nurture and Choice’ question fully, making their own policy beliefs lazy ‘value judgements’ instead of leaning more towards what we statisticians call ‘subjective judgements of fact’.
It is interesting to me how unconscious these beliefs about people can be – even in activists and political influencers. I believe it is important to dig down and see where we get our beliefs about social visions from, and whether our assumptions hold. Using untested or mostly false assumptions in social policy decision-making can be catastrophic, or even, as we shall see, murderous.
Utopian and Tragic (or Unconstrained and Constrained) Visions
The typical binary extremes are the Utopian Vision and the Tragic Vision, outlined really well (and pretty fairly) in the incredibly insightful book, A Conflict of Visions (Sowell, 1987).
The Utopian Vision holds an extreme optimist view of human (selfless) potential, meaning a Utopian, communistic, caring society can be attained after sustained ‘good’ education and environment.
On the other hand, the Tragic Vision takes an extreme skeptical view of the possibility of the grand-scale selflessness of people. Here people can be very ‘good’ but are highly diverse-of-view and individual/independent. Organising them happily from the outside is like herding cats unless they see good incentives for doing so. People are intrinsically self-interested and prone to cognitive error and negative emotion, irrespective of attempts to ‘improve’ or ‘service’ them. They respond more to incentives than to abstract ideas of social construction and good intention, despite claiming the latter (see Public Choice Theory where politics has its own incentive system, that is different to the claimed intention of service of the public). A Utopian society is impossible in this scenario, would always collapse unless held by tyranny, and would always prove a costly economic and humanitarian disaster to try.
In the Tragic Vision, since even Utopian leaders will be badly flawed (and worse, not realise it and believe they are doing good to others despite the contrary evidence which their ego ignores), it is better to respect this wonderful/flawed/evil human nature and make people free to pursue their self-interest, limited only by not harming others. A carrot-and-stick criminal legal system (murder is not allowed etc) can be nuanced by civil Common Law where disputes over claims of rights (freedom to vs freedom from) can be adjudicated. For example, is it fair on my neighbour in a free society for me to build an airport in my back garden? Judgements by an independent judiciary are made and then placed into non-binding but influential legal precedent.
Biblical analogies
There is also a Biblical-like difference to the two Visions.
The Tragic Vision is akin to recognising the Old Testament portrayal of humans. There is an intrinsic sinfulness and ego of humankind, while holding to the principle of universal human dignity and intrinsic human value that is highlighted more in the New Testament. These assumptions about human nature might lead to ‘live and let live’ classical liberal social policies, with care for the poor and vulnerable (more voluntary and cultural than mandated where possible). Policies on say, abortion or assisted dying would balance questions of human value and human dignity. Capital punishment may be unpopular (universal dignity – more New Testament) or popular (fair punishment – more Old Testament).
The Utopian Vision meanwhile is akin to re-attaining Prelapsarian Man – an ideal state of human nature before the Fall. While the Garden of Eden was a pre-sinful state, the Utopian Vision seeks to help us back to something like it – a recovery from the lapse, ‘creating’ or ‘reconnecting’ a ‘better’ New Socialist Man (Trotsky 1924, Guevara 1965). Man becomes progressively more ‘good’ and selfless as a result of his/her Utopia-promoting education and environment.
“The Nature of Human Nature”
So your simple belief about ‘the nature of human nature’ or the ‘educability of New Socialist Man’ on this Tragic/Utopian continuum drastically informs your likely Personal Social Vision and the policies you would advocate to get there and maintain it.
Not surprising then that there are passionate, loud and difficult arguments between advocates at opposite ends of the continuum.
The Natural State – Is the Tragic Vision or the Utopian Vision more valid?
In my opinion the empirical evidence for producing a realistic sustainable good society clearly sits far more in favour of operating from the assumptions of the Tragic Vision than the Utopian one. The Tragic Vision has provided and logically will continue to provide better, if uneven, societal improvements over the long arc of history where it continues to apply Enlightenment principles of evidence-based epistemology and individual liberty toward collective and sustainable success, for the following reasons:
Historical empiricism about human nature
- The history of mankind is largely Hobbesian – before the Industrial Revolution lives across the world were usually externally dominated, socially-limited, brutish, nasty and short.
- Tyrannical rule was the norm – the strong owned or killed the weak in Empires from Mongolia to Rome to Aztec. Rules and superstitions were arbitrary. Despite some localised indigenous successes in more isolated areas we find mainly institutional tyranny, murder, conquest, genocide, torture across almost all societies. Some were better protected but even then there was little medicine. Individuals mainly gathered in families and tribes for safety and comfort where possible. Love existed despite the conditions.
- Slavery was universal by almost all powers; global and diverse. Where it worked it was used. Look at the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Where it wasn’t economically viable, we just had murder by victors. Today it is easy to speak from the privilege of comfort and human rights and say slavery is an unalloyed evil, but if your choice on the losing side of battle is immediate torture and death, there is a logic to accepting slavery. Not much of a choice, but progress. Slow, uneven progress.
- Various religions and philosophies advocated some level of human rights around the world, but for ruling powers, the application of restraint was optional, and power was rewarded by providing safety and resources. Progress was still slow and uneven. Magna Carta, Spanish Inquisition, religious witch-burning. Equivalent efforts and horrors occurred often around the world.
- The Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment brought the basis for these modern constitutional liberal democracies. Over 17th to 20th centuries the three-legged combination of Greek philosophy; Roman law and property rights; and basic Christian ethics (love thy neighbour; judge ye not; put God/conscience above personal advantage; forgiveness, etc) gradually dragged selfish powers from genocide through monarchical tyranny, slavery and colonialism to a more restrained, democratic, but still very imperfect system, with a heavy footprint left behind – both bad and good in places and throughout. Undoubtedly it spawned economic and livelihood progress and relative wealth and health on a previously unimaginable scale. Despite the early Industrial Revolution workhouses, pollution and working conditions, and some colonial exceptions, economic growth was exponential for most.
The argument for and against the Utopian Vision
The Utopian Vision sounds far more lovely than the limitations accepted by the Tragic Vision. But is it realistic or more moral in practice?
Industrial capitalism and individualism was challenged by theories of Marx, Engels and others. Typically the modern route to the Utopian Vision invokes the Marxist claim that the self-interest incentive of capitalism artificially divides us and drives us against each other. We are bad to each other only because of the selfishness-inducing education and environment that capitalism and individualism has created. With collectivist/communistic education and environment we can remove the selfishness (which Engels called false consciousness), removing the lapse, work better together in a shared way, and attain a more wonderful, sustainable Garden of Eden once again. This set of assumptions about human nature might lead to social policies, for example, towards income and wealth redistribution and State-sponsored ‘collective’ social support.
However, the Socialist and pre-Communist Statist experiments of the Utopian Vision were repeatedly a genocidal civil and economic disaster – Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin in Russia; Hitler and Mussolini in Europe; Mao in China, Pohl Pot in Cambodia, etc.
But why? How does the seductive Utopian Vision of working together fail repeatedly or inevitably?
- Coercive by definition: Socialist principles are naturally more directly coercive. The State confiscates more of the means of production from private associations, as part of a transition to eventual local, communistic democratic ownership. This is not popular with most ‘Kulaks’, creating political opposition, and reduces work and innovation incentives.
- Working together: The Utopians believe ‘working together’ is superior, compared to each person following their own interest. But this a corruption of the concept of individualism. With individual rights naturally comes the right of ‘voluntary association’. Of course, individuals work together effectively! A ‘Company’ in a market economy (which includes both commercial and voluntary organisations) means a group of people coming together and working together in mutual interest. A voluntary activity like a team sports club of course means people work together! Some are world class. Individuals rarely achieve amazing things completely alone. Individualists work together, sometimes brilliantly. Ironically, the Utopian complaint about large-company capitalism implies complaining about people working together too much!
- Central Planning fallacy and the Illusion of Control: People are flawed. So arrogant activists and leaders over-value their ability to understand the world. They think they can plan a whole economy centrally and organise others – against their self-perceived interest – better than the voluntary activity of a distributed, locally-informed, self-interested population with all its dispersed knowledge (called ‘markets’). But the odds are stacked against them. It is far too complicated to manage. Free association can work miracles that central planners cannot see.
- Counter-Productive and Counter-Justice Effects: Acts of so-called Social Justice can be sadly self-deluding and badly misinformed, leading to counter-productive outcomes. The coin of Social Justice is more two-sided than people realise. The other side of Social Justice is Proximate Injustice. Trofim Lysenko’s politically-sponsored Soviet agricultural theories were officially sanctioned but terribly flawed. Those who felt the terrible effects of the State policies, over-reach and error rebelled after their complaints and explanations were frustrated. And were punished brutally for criticising the State narrative. State information control then distorted and stifled vital knowledge generation. People starved. Sound innovation slumped, filled with increasing error and injustice, without the self-correcting mechanism of the market.
- Self-reinforcing cognitive bias and motivated reasoning: Utopian leaders get caught in simplistic closed-loop oppressor/oppressed narratives, sliding quickly from ‘compassion from the vulnerable’ to ‘punching up’, to ‘punching at more and more, believing falsely they are always punching up’. The 20th century ‘collectivist’ experience shows they gradually become incentivised to the self-delusion of justifying direct action, illegal activity and political violence. Even when in power, they still see all opponents as the morally-flawed ones and worthy of destruction, by force if necessary. All criticism of their theories is taken not as honest dissent, but of moral failure of the dissenter, reinforcing the echo chamber.
Ends and Means – the fantasy of the Far Side
Marx never wrote that “the ends justify the means”, but given his willingness to overturn voluntary market activity by revolutionary force if necessary, he might well have done. The problem with this is severe. The Utopia always sits on the far side of the introduction of a coercive and controlling State. This renders the local democratic communist Vision unachievable by definition.
I was behind the Iron Curtain three times over five years before the Berlin Wall came down. It was a disaster relative to human and societal progress in the freer world.
Power corrupts public officials as much as anyone else. Ego blinds public intellectuals to their own flawed mental gymnastics, which cost others heavily, while the Utopians are insulated from the consequences of their policies. Few who have such power bestowed upon them then see themselves as part of the system failure, self-correct or give the power away. They think they are doing good. So good that they can never see their own contributions to failure, or let you have your freedom back. Those controlled rebel, or withhold their discretionary effort, meaning that the mantra “from each according to his abilities, to each according to their needs” descends into, “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us!”. Productivity sinks, then plummets. A failure of the Marxist experiments to understand human nature means that compassion inevitably turns to tyranny, and Man’s inhumanity to man arises again and again.
The peaceful, selfless Utopia can never arrive. Given human nature, we always get stuck in the coercion-and-control transition which creates ever-greater economic and social disaster. Social issues from poverty to climate change get progressively worse, not better.
Scapegoating ‘Capitalism’
The vital observation of the Tragic (or Constrained) Vision is that man’s inhumanity to man is almost ubiquitous throughout history, given power, and across all systems. People can be good and loving, but are at best imperfect and are biased to self-interest. Those who attained power were caught in horrible zero-sum battles, even Marcus Aurelius. Basic Christian and other religious principles and atheist humanism principles dampened and restrained many people’s excesses, but hearts are not always turned completely and consistently. And Marx wanted to destroy even religion, in favour of atheistic State worship (as did Hitler, Mussolini, Mao etc). While Marx saw capitalism and iniquity, and connected the two, capitalism didn’t invent iniquity. Humanity did not need capitalism in order to create oppression – poverty, violence and unfairness had always been always an empirical norm. Enlightenment principles of individual rights and capitalism improved people’s circumstances greatly. Marxism made circumstances worse not better. Economic and even environmental outcomes and inequality prove far worse under socialism than capitalism.
The inescapable conclusion of history is that we need to limit State power, while protecting the genuinely vulnerable. Strong democratic classical liberal institutions (eg independent Legislative, Executive and Judiciary) limit economic power in private hands. There is a key difference between private and public power. While both feel potentially oppressive, in the private sector, in a modern liberal constitution, dominant types are at least distracted from applying arbitrary coercive power on others by these institutions and by continually needing to provide goods and services that people want. This includes environmentally helpful goods and services as citizens care for their children’s and grandchildren’s future.
The Tragic or Constrained analysis doesn’t solve everything, but constantly gives us a set of trade-offs to make the best decisions we can, individually and collectively, in the circumstances we find ourselves.
Finally now in the West we have amazing, if uneven, civil progress since 1964 held together by a subliminal cultural knowledge of all the above. We must not let this go. Individual rights that the State or Monarch may not contravene. Constitutional democratic politics. The peaceful transfer of democratic power after free and fair elections. Equal rights for all under the law. Care for the genuinely vulnerable without creating greater need. Imperfect and uneven? Yes. Hence identity politics. Improvable? Vitally, yes. Are international affairs fraught and arguable, and military action necessary at times to defend our way of life? Yes. But is it all dismantlable in favour of the Utopian vision? Is it all removable, without a return to totalitarianism? No.
And so we need to defend the gains for all our sakes. Those who are seduced by the Utopian Vision or fail to grasp the impact of the permanent fallibility of human nature often become the instruments of failure, while thinking they are making things better and thinking that their virtue signalling is a credit to them. It’s the Rescuer identity in Steven Karpman’s Drama Triangle model.
A Middle Social Vision?
Having dispensed with the Utopian Vision, the question arises – do we need to be completely Tragic? Is there a middle ground? I see two possibilities.
Nordic countries are often cited as realistic hybrids of the two extremes. They are clearly pro-capitalist and pro-business while having high personal taxes and welfare states. I trained in Sweden and studied their world class performance plans and efforts. They were very impressive. High support and high challenge. Those in receipt of welfare are clearly expected to work hard to get back, or to contribute how they can. It’s not handouts, and not open-ended. I believe the conditionality helps. A small, high trust, homogeneous population also helped taxpayers to voluntarily support the system. I would argue they are indeed a hybrid, but more Tragic than Utopian. Realists. More possible in an already high trust society.
The other middle ground is to look to the few provably successful indigenous societies. These can be more collective/Utopian than Tragic. The question is whether these models are as genuinely wholesome as some like to think in terms of individual rights and benefits, whether they can be replicated or resurrected as models, and whether they can scale wealth, or at least be left alone to thrive and connect as they wish without being dominated, because of the small scale requirement. A key potential weakness of the Utopian activist is thinking that something that works at a small scale (eg. family cohesion and sharing of resources – which is already a communist society within Western society) would scale society-wide. Like some businesses, small societies often work well at small scale but not at large scale.
Conclusion
The fact we are having this discussion in a relatively established liberal constitutional democracy, and inviting challenge to it, shows something important. There are currently around 30 such democracies out of 195 countries. 93% of the world’s population live in the 165 countries that don’t offer that privilege. While we do not live in Utopia, by a long way, we must not take this freedom for granted and be architects of our own destruction. In most of the world, such philosophical and political discussions as this, with the established freedom to criticise our own Government and politicians in power, are illegal or are otherwise inhibited by the State. They impose censorship and achieve public self-censoring, but then lack the self-correction mechanisms of honest feedback as a result. This leads to a distorted and limping or negative societal progression with reduced problem-solving abilities which lead to relative disaster.
Perhaps that freedom alone (to have this conversation) tells us something about the importance of individual liberty and evidence-based epistemology in achieving a realistic optimal society in a fallen but wonderful world.
Allowing robust public debate with free expression is therefore unavoidably key, accepting the unfortunate effects of the inevitability of hearing offensive speech, which some may hear more than others. But we deal with these with a ‘dignity mindset and culture’ – ignoring idiots or responding with dignity, proportion and resilience. If enough people do this consistently over time, the population – and our politicians – will learn that offensive behaviour is counter-productive and hurts their cause. In the long run we get the politicians – and the society – we deserve.
That is my explanation of the Natural State of Man, and the realistic optimal society we can hope to achieve as a result of it.
In terms of war deaths, poverty reduction, health outcomes, liberty etc we have been close to our personal best (but still far from our potential) between the fall of Berlin Wall in 1991 and the global financial crash in 2008. The Housing Boom and Bust (Thomas Sowell, 2009) shows how the crash was inadvertently government-created by policy incentives and poor regulatory oversight far more than is sold to us now.
The question I am now asking is whether our current societal benefits and freedoms will last and grow, or prove to be just a very temporary positive blip in a tyrannical and difficult human history. I see a lot of civilisational self-harm currently and do not take my freedoms for granted. I choose to remain Tragically realistically optimistic.