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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I think I know the kind of normies you are referencing here. There are roughly two stripes of normies -- people who don't think deeply / interrogate concepts -- that don't think "Communism is bad:"

  1. The normies who buy into the general media narrative that right-wingers are mean to minorities so anything to the left of them is kind, and that the right uses "Communism" to scare people into being mean, so it must be OK.
  2. The normies who think free stuff has no costs, because they aren't direct costs. (I had a conversation once with a guy from Latin America who was self-declared "pro-freedom," but to him freedom meant freedom from hunger + freedom from poverty).

I wouldn't try to get into a philosophical discussion with someone who doesn't think philosophically. I think you have to take a practical approach, like:

What should happen to people who don't want to participate? What if the government tells you your job is to dig ditches all day every day, and you would rather knit or fix cars or answer phones? Or, worse, start your own business? They say no, you will dig ditches. What should happen to you? What if you accept being forced to dig ditches, but want to talk to your fellow ditch-diggers about how you don't like digging ditches? The government (your boss) tells you to stop talking about that. What should happen to you if you keep talking about it? What if you think of a better, more efficient way to get the ditch dug, that requires less effort on your part, and your boss doesn't care? Communism isn't creative; it doesn't allow for individual initiative/enterprise (except for political climbers, but watch out for the other political climbers!). Every person is a cog in a machine and if you are not a cog in the machine you are a problem. It doesn't matter if the machine is efficient or even operable, you are there to do what you're told, or you're a problem. This is why Communuist countries do not allow their citizens to leave and invariably turn into prisons/death camps.

The Marxist argument against capitalism is that there are a lot of real problems with capitalism, and it presents itself as an idealized solution to the problems of capitalism. The problem with this is that people are imperfect and any system run by people will be imperfect, including Communism. There is no Utopia. All of the same human failings that Communism wants to eliminate will be present inside Communism. There will always be problems. In a centralized system, the problems created by that system are distributed throughout the entire system. One important person makes a mistake or does something evil, and everyone downstream of that important person has to confront the consequences and has no recourse to fix the mistake -- you may not even be able to acknowledge the mistake without consequences!

Capitalism is decentralized, so it's a bunch of people making their own mistakes, and these mistakes have a smaller impact because those downstream are fewer and may be able to navigate their own mitigation strategies. Of course, these people might not make a mistake but do something good that will have good effects on anyone downstream from them. Communism essentially precludes the possibility of the good thing happening and instead locks everyone into the shared mistake path.

As a sort of libertarian, I've been accused of favoring my own Utopian ideal, but really it's the opposite: an anti-utopian ideal. People will do things badly and hurt themselves, and the best way to minimize the effects of this is to keep power limited and allow people the flexibility to fix their own mistakes or mold their circumstances to avoid the worst effects of others' mistakes. Meanwhile, we can share in the benefits from people who do the good things by choosing to trade with them and work on our own good things that give us purpose.