At the Club Rush (or whatever it was called) forever ago I subscribed to the Socialist Organizer. I pretended to be the young idealistic red to get some information about these guys. I wouldn’t exactly call myself a saboteur… I mean, a few years ago, if you had questioned my political affiliated, I would have told you that Socialism was the way to go. I touted my revolutionary ideology (of which I really knew little about) on forums and in my history class… then I started to investigate Russian history.
See, my first exposure to socialism as a philosophy and serious political system, not as a joke, farce, or media item, was when I began to investigate history during the Second Great Awakening (Junior year) because my AP U.S. History class had reached the 1840s and was discussing it, eventually discussing Mormonism. Now, I’ve heard LOTS of stories and information about the early days of the LDS Church in… uh… church and from relatives but other than a few wikipedia articles not much from a historical perspective. So, LDS History is very fascinating, but also the context of the movement: the Second Great Awakening, when suddenly there was a flurry of ideas, a cultural shift in the tides of America, most religious, spiritual at least, some not. What caused it? I’m sure Wikipedia could give you a few guesses but, you know what, it suddenly just started to happen. In this atmosphere, Mormonism was born, but so was Seventh Day Adventism, the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and other utopian socialist movements.
Yes, Mormonism has established itself as anti-Communist, but Joseph Smith did preach about the United Order, a Church-monitored socialist system. Current LDS thought accepts the fact that a form of socialism is the perfect system, but only with Christ at the head of the government. This historical fact led me to read some light socialist propaganda and, whadyaknow, I became a Red for a while.
But books are a marvelous thing… to appreciate them, you’ve got to read more than one. And though I could attribute my prodigal emergence from the Socialist ideology to peer pressure (such as when my history teacher sorta made fun of me for it), to my relatives (when my uncle completely shut me down when a casually suggested I was a socialist), or to my father (who I think regarded it as naive silliness), I believe that my reading of history books showed me that socialist systems could be easily co-opted into dictatorship, and when I read Anthem and eventually Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, that turned me from a democratic socialist to a neo-objectivist (which, for those outside of the political scene, is the complete opposite.
As much as Joseph Smith, Marx, Lenin and Trotsky made socialism and communism seem to me as a historical inevitability and the perfect utopian vision to follow, Ayn Rand made it seem that inevitably, all systems that resort to government influence and forced ‘theft’ of individuals would become dictatorships that would by force of mathematics and nature, collapse into anarchy and destruction. Wow. Propaganda is fascinating. Reading propaganda can often lead a reader to try and find reasonable sources of material, which he or she might realize could also be propaganda. As soon as the first piece of propaganda is turned aside, a reader can easily begin to believe that all literature is propaganda in some way or another. How, then, does one make sure what he reads is truthful, that his ideas have existant meaning and importance?
As quickly as I became a neo-objectivist (that is, laissez-faire government in almost all manner of thinking, only with religion allowed), I turned to lengthy criticisms of Objectivism, which forged me into a libertarian. And even now I realize that even that could be a falsehood. What is true? With religion, you must take your beliefs ultimately on faith (though I could argue that there are evidences in the universe if you could attain just a small grain of it) but with politics… its up in the air!
What I realized, shortly after I became a libertarian, is that nothing can be proven to a certainty as truth. Nothing at all. Using that course of logic, it may be that there is truth in all things. What if in the near-future, beyond our wildest expectations of the future, the USA became a complete Objectivist society, while the PRC became a complete Communist society… and both of them worked wonderfully, economically and otherwise? And what if the European Union, which is already moving towards the middle-ground between the two, discovered that its ‘half-and-half’ system also worked fantastically? How… what would people think? How would they react to the presence of multiple truths?
That is sort of a segue. Let’s backtrack. The only way to become certain of something that does not establish that it must be made certain by faith alone (such as religion and perhaps stock investment) is objective truth. Conservatives blame the Liberals. Liberals blame the Conservatives. Socialists blame the Capitalists. Capitalists blame the Socialists… but how do we know who is right or wrong?
I’ve come to a conclusion that frees me from political confusion.
The only way we can know what is a better system of economics or politics is to experiment. What if the state, country, or world was managed exactly as the Republicans desired it to? We would know if they were right or wrong. What if it was managed by the Democrats, all of their wildest dreams come true? We would know if it worked or not. We’d have facts and figures. What if an Objectivist society was established, or a World Communist Union, as the Fourth International proposes? We would experiment on their policies and observe if everything turned out the way they said it would. Then we could make some real changes. Doesn’t work? Well, at least that kind of thought can be removed forever (like Nazism, for example, or subprime lending). We would go down the list and figure out exactly which system worked, for the entire world.
Wait a minute, Brendon, that’s not a good idea. The Nazi Third Reich led to the deaths of millions of people and horrible tragedies. Subprime lending led to a devestating recession that is making a lot of people unhappy and frightened. Experiments can lead to negative results.
You’re absolutely right. Experimentation on such a wide scale can only be done by risking millions of lives, which no one would ever commit to in their right minds, which is why it has only happened by accident.
Unless…
(There’s an unless?)
Unless what? You decide. My best guess is that soon computer technology will become advanced enough that virtual societal experiments can be made, like full-immersion multiplayer games, which could lead to terrible consequences for avatars and virtual characters, but not for the physical, living subjects behind them. Or maybe we could experiment on living subjects… just a few thousand experimenters, very diverse, living in an isolated area for a certain amount of time operating under a certain system. These studies would be priceless! in determining what the ‘perfect political-economic system’ is, in fact. Perhaps it doesn’t exist. But that is a nihilist viewpoint (which we could also experiment with… not really).
And, in any case, this viewpoint helps people judge things objectively and without being affected by easily-made propaganda. Read the studies, look at history, figure out what’s best for the world and country based on evidence.
Anyway… back to the Youth Socialist Organizer. They sent me an e-mail, basically propaganda for the Fourth International. They didn’t mention religion, or spirituality. I would like to show you my reply to them, slightly edited for mistakes in wording, and leave you with that. Real quick: I am not being entirely truthful to these guys, that I am a young, ardent Socialist (well, I am young) and I understand that it could be lying, but, the way I see it, I’m politically ambiguous right now, and I have been a socialist in the past, and I am most definitely concerned with the subject at hand. Thanks for reading!
"Thanks Eric, that [discourse] was very interesting and gave me a lot to think about. In fact, there is little exposed in the mass media concerning exactly what a ’socialist reality’ would look like. It is a wonderful… and plausible vision!
I don’t know if you’re the one I should contact about this, but I’m interested on the Fourth International’s position on religion. I know that Marx was an atheist philosopher, and I’m fine with that, but was he explicitly anti-religious? And is the Marxism that you espouse anti-religious? For myself and other Christian socialists that I’ve associated with, it’s interesting that Christian socialism has a special place in American history and (perhaps still) American culture, preceding the impact of Marxism on American thought. And I also believe that that is a significant demographic that is vital to the eventual revolution for its success… it would be a shame for Christians who might fight for the society you detail to turn against the Revolution based on even rumors that it could be an Anti-Religious movement, as it was during Russia’s revolutionary period from 1917 to 1923, even before Stalinism. And shouldn’t full personal rights include the right to belief, especially religious belief which could at least be seen through an atheist veiwpoint to be of integral cultural value to certain demographics? There has been a historical tendency for Christianity and religion to impose certain oppressions on certain populations, I will not deny that, but is it an institution that must eventually disappear in order for a true communist society to be created, as proposed by Lenin, Stalin and others?
Thank you again for the information you’ve sent!
- Brendon Carpenter"
