I’d like to highlight some of the cultural assumptions that prevent the United States of America from moving toward a better society. While I do believe that it is too late to rectify these issues, addressing them would be a first step in any movement that intended to bring about a more democratic, just, and rational society.

“The Virtue of Selfishness”

According to the Atlas Society, which is an Ayn Rand fan club:

Ayn Rand rejects altruism, the view that self-sacrifice is the moral ideal. She argues that the ultimate moral value, for each human individual, is his or her own well-being. Since selfishness (as she understands it) is serious, rational, principled concern with one’s own well-being, it turns out to be a prerequisite for the attainment of the ultimate moral value. For this reason, Rand believes that selfishness is a virtue.

This kind of thinking is something only someone lacking social connections would come up with. Basically, if you already don’t care about other people, then the idea of doing something for others becomes “irrational self-sacrifice” rather than just something you naturally do because you care about other people. She creates a false dichotomy where if you are helping others, you are sacrificing yourself. In truth, helping other people is beneficial to the healthy, well-socialized individual for at least a couple of reasons: 1) helping others is psychologically beneficial for the individual (because we are social animals), and 2) helping others is materially beneficial for the individual (for purely materialistic reasons).

Rand’s position is really worse than this, though. Above and beyond her critique of how “irrational self-sacrifice” harms the individual, she also claims that any attempt at altruism at the societal level is also inevitably harmful. Essentially, her position is that anyone who is in a position of power is more harmful if they try to do good than if they behave selfishly. This is the philosophical basis of the idea that communists are the real fascists, or antifa(scists) are the real fascists. It’s a deeply stupid idea for one simple reason: While powerful people who are trying to good might accidentally harm society, in the long run, they cannot be more harmful than powerful people who are only interested in their own welfare. Rand’s position is like saying a man who tries to repair a clock is more likely to break it than a man who tries to turn it into a milkshake machine (because, in this metaphor, he really wants a milkshake).

Americans absolutely assume that selfishness is more virtuous than a healthy community-minded approach to government or any other endeavor that you can think of. In reality, a society that assumes selfishness is the correct moral position (and that a community-oriented approach to life is both stupid and evil) will inevitably fall to ruin, at the expense of everyone. You can look at any social institution (whether it is education, the monetary system, resource extraction and allocation, information management or anything else) and see that, in the long run, governments that prioritize “doing good” over selfishness arrive at better outcomes — with the quality of the outcomes being directly correlated with how much they prioritize the public good. (I will address the whole “communism never works” thing later.)

Importantly, the “virtue of selfishness” is in direct opposition to the message of Jesus Christ.

“Democracy is just mob rule.”

One thing that both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party agree on is this idea that full democracy is exactly the same thing as “mob rule”. Now, I don’t mean rule by organized crime, I mean rule by a mass of angry people with torches and pitchforks. This idea goes back to the founding of the current American republic. Here’s a quote from Thomas Jefferson:

Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.

In fact, the American system of government was designed at the outset to protect “the opulent minority”.

In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.

~ James Madison

I guess I have to state the obvious: Mob rule and democracy are two different things. An actual mobocracy would be a minority of the population using violence to rule over the rest of society without the consent of the governed. In contrast, a democracy allows everyone to participate in the process of deciding the content of the law and how it will be enforced and, importantly, does not do this in such a way that minority groups are excluded, erased, or destroyed — but a democracy would also never allow for a powerful minority group (such as capitalists) to rule over everyone else.

The important thing, though, is that Americans (and the Democratic Party and Republican Party specifically) believe that the common people cannot be trusted to make decisions for themselves. They agree on this broad point, but they disagree on who the noble decision makers should be and who the savage trash are.

The Democratic Party believes that the legitimate decision makers are educated people (the more educated the better) and especially educated people who have proven their leadership acumen by becoming stinking rich (no matter how they achieved that). They call these people “experts” but they assume that their expertise goes far beyond the area of their formal education. For the Republican Party, the legitimate decision makers are white, straight, male Christians — especially those white, straight, male Christians who have proven their leadership acumen by becoming stinking rich (no matter how they achieved that). They believe these people have innately superior traits (and therefore do not require any training to make correct decisions). Both parties have historically seen themselves as forces for the betterment of democracy, but they define democracy in a very specific way involving strategies to deny power to the “wrong” people; in truth, a government that denies power to part of the population is not a democracy even if the denial is ever so clever (like the electoral college or the two party system).

Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party tend to support the idea of “horseshoe theory” — the idea that the far left is the same as the far right — and a good part of the logic of this idea is that both parties hate populism. Populism is just the idea that the people (i.e., the majority of people, working class people, average people) should get what they want and need out of the political system; i.e., nearly the same thing as democracy. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party immediately assume that any populist movement is dangerous (because it could result in “mob rule”) and will rush to both squash and co-opt any popular movement. The Bernie Sanders movement was squashed and co-opted by the Democrats, and the Republicans tried very hard to squash and co-opt the Trump movement (ironically, the Republicans are slightly more democratic than the Democrats when it comes to their constituents, which ultimately resulted in Trump winning control of the Republican Party).

“Communism never works.”

If you’ve spent any time in politically-themed spaces online, you’ve seen someone (typically a white boy) say, “Communism never works.” By “communism” he means anything left of AOC if he’s a Democrat, or anything left of Ronald Reagan if he’s a Republican. AOC is a centrist. Reagan was a fascist. So, from this way of thinking, democratic socialists, social democrats, socialists, Leninists, Maoists and anarchists are all literally the same thing, and it is all completely unworkable. History has proven it, he will say. The debate is over, he will claim.

The logic behind “communism never works” is that since selfishness is virtuous, and trying to do the right thing is the real evil, and since populism is basically the same thing as mob rule, “communism” can’t possibly work. The evidence that this logic is correct is this idea that you can look around and see that all communist projects have failed. I’ve already addressed the logic, so let’s look at the evidence.

First off, consider that it is easier to destroy than to create. It’s a simple law of physics. Order requires more effort — or at least a lot more time — than destruction requires. When a country throws off the chains of monarchy, dictatorship, capitalism, or any other oppressive regime, it is very easy for an outside proponent to damage that country’s attempts to rebuild. In most cases, the chains were put there by the very same foreign power that can then use the wealth it stole to keep the fledgling free society in chaos. Despite this, there are countries who have done well despite the best attempts by western capitalist nations to destroy them.

Currently existing communist nations are:

• China
• North Korea
• Vietnam
• Cuba
• Laos

Second, consider that “success” means something very different to people who care about other people in comparison to what it means to capitalist ghouls who have no sense of altruism or empathy. Is it really success to have the most billionaires per capita? Is it really success to have more vehicles than people? Is it really success to have over 500 square feet of living space per person in our homes? Meanwhile in the USA, there are 28 vacant homes per homeless person (with about 500,000 homeless people), 47 million malnourished people, and 20 million people have medical debt. There isn’t a simple solution to these problems (e.g., you can’t just give every homeless person a free house and expect that to work out), but it is an indication that the American system does not produce outcomes that are good for most human beings. Instead, the American system is providing absurd material benefits to a small minority of people who have a serious and concerning addiction to increasing their wealth.

I would say success is more about giving people freedom from primitive concerns (food, water, shelter) so they can pursue greater — i.e., more human — concerns like engineering, art, music, enlightenment, and anything else that betters the individual and their society. Another way to define success is holding back the attacks of an oppressive regime — maintaining your freedom despite the ease at which an evil society can destroy what you have built. Yet a third way to evaluate success would be to see if the society was improved, meaning that you look at how things were when the communists took over and see if things are better either now or when they were overthrown by outside interference. A fourth way to evaluate success would be by how many fascists you have killed. By any of these metrics, communists (meaning actual communists) have been successful.

Third, no nation has ever actually achieved communism. When we talk about communist nations, we are talking about nations that are currently rebelling against capitalism in hope of eventually achieving communism. They are all, essentially, at war. Some people call this “siege communism” — i.e., a government aspiring to some day achieve communism but currently under siege by the forces of capitalism. When I say that communist nations have succeeded, this success is despite the constant destruction and interference they face from their capitalist adversaries. Some countries have sidestepped this problem by doing something like “Dengism” which is basically a centrally-managed society that participates in global capitalism while maintaining its goal of achieving communism and consistently putting working class people first.

Fourth, the capitalist propagandist likes to talk about how 100 million people were killed by communism. That number is an exaggeration that even the co-authors of The Black Book of Communism do not support. The majority of those deaths were literally fascists killed either during revolutionary wars against the existing fascist government or when the communist nation was under direct military siege by fascist nations (and it attributes deaths on both sides of those conflicts to communism). A significant number of those deaths were due to famines, which were caused by outside interference or, unfortunately, severe errors in the understanding of agricultural science that have since been corrected. When you compare the actual death count of communism (which I won’t attempt to quantify here), subtracting the deaths of actual fascists, you find that capitalism has caused far more death and suffering than communism, including death by famine (see, for example, the Irish Famine, or famines in France’s colonies). For those who don’t believe this, there’s nothing I can say to convince them, but I do encourage them to look into it more thoroughly themselves.

Fifth, the fan of capitalism will suggest that communists can’t do entertainment or technology. Capitalists are certainly better at the technology of killing people and using entertainment to distract people. I will give you that. If you look at the population and resource base of, say, the USSR versus the United States, it is clear that the USSR did amazing things with the limited resources they had available to them. Despite having far fewer people, far fewer resources, and starting from a place of far less industrialization (thanks to the Czars), they still managed to beat the United States in most of the key accomplishments of the space race, including first satellite, first manned space flight, first interplanetary probes and landings on Mars and Venus, first space station, first continuously-crewed space station, and more. Americans like to pretend they “won” by using the landing of people on the moon as the one and only metric for success.

While communism clearly does work, it is also true that a far left government in the United States need not be “communist” in the literal sense and even if it were literally a communist government, it would have American characteristics (just as Chinese communism is different from Russian communism), and could indeed have any characteristics that Americans would like it to have. For example, the Soviets made a decision about Christianity based on Marx’s criticism of religion as a tool of oppression and their experiences with fighting against anti-revolutionary forces. They didn’t make it illegal but they actively worked against it (I consider this to have been a mistake). It is absolutely possible to implement a communist government while still respecting and even supporting the religious inclinations of the American people. Indeed, Jesus Christ was clearly a socialist (which has led some MAGAs to criticize significant portions of his teachings).

“Government is the problem!”

Per Ronald Reagan:

…government is not the solution to the problem — government is the problem.

The important thing about this idea is that it isn’t just held by fascists and conservatives. Most Americans believe this is true. Even on the left, you see that most American leftists are anarchists, literally because they think government is the problem. I’ll clarify here, though, that anarchists understand that a society needs organizing, they just differentiate between a democratically organized society that rules no one, and a government that rules over the citizenry; however, the thing that attracted them to anarchism in the first place is this basic rejection of government.

Of course, it’s absolutely no surprise that a government run by people who think that selfishness is a virtue and, conversely, that trying to do good is ultimately the most harmful thing you can do, would end up being destructive and annoying. And if that’s the only government you’ve ever experienced, it is no surprise that you might think that government, in the most general sense, is bad.

As long as Americans believe that government is the problem (in the non-anarchist sense of just wanting to be left alone), that will create opportunities for capitalists to privatize important societal functions and further oppress working class people. This whole “network states” thing that has piggybacked on the MAGA movement is exactly that — a project to make all aspects of life as authoritarian as the modern work environment. Government is a problem, with a significant part of that problem being that capitalists control the government and use it as a tool to increase their wealth and power, but it doesn’t have to be. The solution would of course be democracy, but Americans do not believe in democracy (except in the sense of the freedom of capitalists to exploit) so that isn’t an option — yet.

“Someday, I will be rich!”

Per John Steinbeck:

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

The interesting thing about this is that everyone cannot be rich. If you say that to a fan of capitalism, they’ll say something like, “Why not?” Well, the “why not” is the fact that wealth is relative. If everyone suddenly had 100 billion dollars, then no one would be rich. To be wealthy, it is required that most other people have less — in fact, they must have very little for you to be rich.

It’s also not true that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. While it was once true that you could become outlandishly wealthy with just gumption and a total lack of morals, it now requires more than that to attain astronomical wealth. You have to start the race very near the finish line. However, it was never a sign of good character if you became wealthy.

CONCLUSION

Unfortunately, culture changes at a glacial pace. These cultural truism that are now embedded deep down in the mind of most Americans can’t just be pried out in an afternoon at the dentist. It will take something extremely significant to make that change happen.