The Case Against Socialism

by Rand Paul

  Zamyatin, Dostoyevsky, and Chernyshevsky are linked together in the debate both for and against utopia. All three share the distinction of having been arrested by the czar. Zamyatin was first arrested during the Russian revolution of 1905 for his association with Bolsheviks. He was sent into exile in Siberia but escaped and was then arrested again in 1911. Despite being a reformer and a Bolshevik sympathizer, he became disturbed by the violence and intolerance of communists as well, particularly their censorship of the arts.

  Zamyatin wrote We in 1920, and by 1921 it became the first book banned by the Soviet censorship board. We was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and first published in the United States in 1924. It would finally be published in the Soviet Union only in 1988.

  In his 1921 essay “I Am Afraid,” Zamyatin wrote: “[T]rue literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics.” Sounds sort of like an homage to the Underground Man.7

  Zamyatin requested exile and with the help of Gorky left the Soviet Union in 1931.

  Some critics maintain that Zamyatin is the creator of the modern genre of dystopian novels. Margaret Atwood wrote of Zamyatin:

  There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after WWI. And almost immediately one of the utopias that people were trying to construct, namely the Soviet Union, threw out a writer called Zamyatin who wrote a seminal book called We, which contains the seeds of Orwell and Huxley [as well as Ayn Rand’s Anthem]. Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived.8

  The links from Chernyshevsky to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground to Zamyatin’s We are many. Chernyshevsky’s “desirable” Crystal Palace becomes Dostoyevsky’s object of derision becomes Zamyatin’s glass cubes, where all are exposed to the eyes of the state.

  The harangues of the Underground Man are still valid and pertinent today. As today’s socialists promote the scientific rationalism of the green agenda and socialized medicine, the rebellion of the individual against the collective is still apropos.

  Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man rebels against the rationalism of the state: “2 times 2 equals 4 . . . Is no longer life, but the beginning of death.” In We, D-503, at least in the beginning, accepts the rationalism of the state:

  The multiplication table is wiser and more absolute than the ancient God. It never—repeat, never—makes a mistake. . . . And there’s nothing happier than figures that live according to the elegant and eternal laws of the multiplication table. No wavering, no wandering.—Truth is one, and the true path is one. And that truth is two times two and that true path is four.9

  The certainty of 2 + 2 = 4 becomes a metaphor for the all-knowing, all-powerful, rational state. At first glance in 1984, Orwell seems to flip the metaphor as Winston cries out that 2 + 2 still does equal four. To Winston, his ability to still know that 2 + 2 = 4 is his last refuge of freedom.

  In 1984, as Winston is being tortured by the state, he believes that “[f]reedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”

  Has Orwell flipped the metaphor or is he making a finer point? Perhaps the point is that in 1984, the government has become so powerful as to be irrational. So, Winston identifies 2 + 2 = 4 as his rebellion. And the state tortures him to agree to the irrational 2 + 2 = 5.

  Adrian Wanner describes the contrast: “In Dostoevsky and Zamyatin’s dystopian dictatorships of reason [where 2 + 2 = 4], madness [where 2 + 2 = 5] becomes a strategy of resistance.”

  Wanner explains Orwell’s different approach to the metaphor of 2 + 2. “Orwell’s use of the formula ‘2+2=5’ inverts the relationship of reason and madness laid out by . . . [Dostoyevsky and Zamyatin].”10

  Orwell’s inversion of the dogma of 2 + 2 = 4 implies, perhaps, that the society based on reason that the socialists strove for somehow has been supplanted. That Winston still strives for a world in which there is objective truth and reason, where two plus two still equals four, seems to imply that the pursuit of reason as a guide is not necessarily the problem. The problem arises when the dictatorship of the proletariat allows reason to become seduced and supplanted by power.

  Wanner quotes Orwell himself “as insisting that this novel was not intended as an attack on socialism . . . but as a ‘show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism.’”

  To Orwell, striving for a reason-driven society (the socialist ideal) is not necessarily the problem. The terror of totalitarianism occurs when the lure of power requires absolute submission even to the irrational. Where Dostoyevsky saw the freedom to act, even in an irrational way, as an act of rebellion against power, Orwell recognized, likely from the tyranny of Stalin and Hitler, that when power is centralized in the name of creating a society of reason, power ceases to impose reason but creates an irrational logic of its own. As such, 2 + 2 must equal 5.

  The tyranny of Orwell is tyranny that has evolved beyond pursuit of reason and now requires submission for submission’s sake. Accepting the irrational 2 + 2 = 5 becomes the submission of reason to power.

  The mathematical certainty of 2 + 2 = 4, the very same that the Underground Man railed against, is adopted wholesale and recited as creed by the guardians of We.

  Zamyatin’s D-503, as a scientist and supporter of the One State, is initially as religiously devoted to the multiplication tables as the next guy. Love, however, lets doubt creep in and causes him to question everything that he has previously accepted at face value.

  In We, society seems to have accepted reason’s mandate to act according to their self-interest. Like Chernyshevsky’s “new men,” they act according to “psychological egoism” (the deterministic doctrine that people necessarily pursue the goals they believe to be in their best interest).

  Normative egoism, by contrast, is the ethical doctrine that people ought to pursue their best interests. Ergo, people can understand and deduce what their best interests are—thus, acting in one’s best interest is not simply a psychological instinct. Normative egoism is a doctrine with moral implications, where people choose to act in their self-interest, and the choice is voluntary. Normative or ethical rational egoism is closer to the objectivism put forward by Ayn Rand.

  The psychological egoism of Chernyshevsky leaves no place for free will. The Underground Man responds to those who argue you can have free will and rational egoism:

  You will scream at me . . . that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic.

  Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four.11

  What so inflames Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man about the Crystal Palace is that it answers all questions. It leaves no place for doubt. It leaves no place for man’s irrational love of “destruction and chaos,” which the Underground Man contends is equivalent to “real suffering.” Dostoyevsky writes, “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness,” and “Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four.”

  Ultimately, it isn’t suffering or well-being that the Underground Man chooses to base his actions on but rather “caprice.” He fears the Crystal Palace because he is “afraid of [the] edifice, that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed and that one cannot put one’s tongue out at it, even on the sly.”

  What today’s socialists utterly fail to understand is the central planning required to create a society based on reason precludes a fundamental aspect of freedom: the freedom to act irrationally, the freedom to act out, the freedom to simply stick one t
ongue’s out at the state.

  When the Crystal Palace is finally completed, when the workers’ paradise is here, what then will men strive for? When history ends and the state melts away, what then? The great insight of Dostoyevsky is that even if it were possible to achieve such a nirvana it should still be opposed, because a fundamental aspect of who we are is our desire to attain. “Man is a creative animal,” says the Underground Man, “destined to strive consciously towards a goal.” And we need the impetus to strive—a utopian goal achieved eliminates that impetus. Finding any utopia, arriving at any Eden, is not to be desired because the end of history would in actuality be the end of a fundamental part of man’s nature.12

  Chapter 33

  Freedom Is Not the Inevitable Outcome of History and Must Be Protected

  Is it possibly that simple? That a hundred million people killed by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were all the result of utopian ideas?

  The horror of utopian determinism, once recognized, is no longer accepted by thinking people, right?

  Unfortunately, there are still modern historians, such as Francis Fukuyama, who believe in the utopian concept that history is developing in a linear fashion, that there can be an end of history.

  Fukuyama, like Hegel, believes that as history unfolds there will come a time when all internal contradictions in ideas resolve themselves and an “end to history” ensues. Hegel saw the American and French revolutions as indicative of the end of history.

  Marx also believed history was moving directionally toward an “end of history” that culminated in a workers’ paradise. Hegel saw the dialectical process of ideas being countered by opposing ideas and their subsequent resolution or synthesis as the driver of history. Popper viewed both Hegel’s and Marx’s historical determinism as dangerous because once the planners were convinced of the inevitability of the workers’ paradise, they also became convinced of their own unlimited authority to coerce the “inevitable” end of history.1

  Fukuyama’s announcement in the late 1980s, as the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War came to a close, that the world was now approaching an “end of history” moment alarmed followers of Popper. Even though Fukuyama argued that the “end of history” he was announcing would be followed by an era of liberal democracy, some worried that Fukuyama’s embrace of historical determinism would encourage modern-day zealots to assume, since liberal democracy was inevitable, that perhaps a little war here and there to nudge us toward it was in order. This concept was doubly worrying since there already existed in Washington a well-connected cabal promoting this neoconservative foreign policy.

  Elizabeth Glaser puts Fukuyama in a contemporary context: “When he wrote ‘The End of History?’, Fukuyama was a neocon. He was taught by Leo Strauss’s protege Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind; he was a researcher for the Rand Corporation, the think tank for the American military-industrial complex; and he followed his mentor Paul Wolfowitz into the Reagan administration.”2

  Although Karl Popper’s arguments predate Fukuyama, they still are spot-on. Fukuyama is a contemporary Hegelian. So, when Fukuyama announced the “end of history” and the triumph of liberal capitalist democracy, many observers worried that the deterministic doctrines that encouraged first Hegel and then Marx were being resurrected.

  Fukuyama argued that the world now understood that democracy provided greater prosperity than centrally planned economies. Big government–planned economies, even communist states, would now wither away and be replaced by capitalism. Sounds great, if you ignore that Fukuyama’s theory is based on the same “end of history” suppositions of Marx that morphed into the totalitarian dystopias of the twentieth century.

  Timothy Stanley and Alexander Lee wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, “Fukuyama’s logic was a bit too reminiscent of the pseudo-Hegelian historical determinism that Marxists and Fascists deployed to disastrous effect earlier in the 20th century. . . .” The events of the last thirty years have not confirmed Fukuyama’s thesis.3

  Not only is history not over, but much of the world is still headed away from liberal democracy.

  Stanley and Lee remind us that “a new Cold War has broken out [and] China’s ‘Marxist capitalism’ suggests you can have wealth without freedom.”

  China may have “wealth without freedom” but they don’t have “wealth without capitalism.” China’s wealth might be described as proportional to the degree of her rejection of socialism. But Stanley and Lee are correct that for whatever capitalism it has embraced, China has not by any analysis accepted liberal democracy.4

  Just as Marx incorrectly believed that history was inevitably going to resolve itself in a workers’ paradise, so too was Fukuyama wrong. Fukuyama’s argument that history is inevitably evolving toward liberal democracy, not tyranny, has been defied by the facts. Throughout the Middle East, dictatorships continue. Russia and China cannot be said to be inevitably headed toward liberal democracy.

  Though critical of Fukuyama’s thesis, Roger Kimball argues that some criticisms of Fukuyama “were based on a simplistic misreading of his thesis. For in proclaiming that the end of history had arrived in the form of triumphant liberal democracy, Francis Fukuyama did not mean that the world would henceforth be free from tumult, political contention, or intractable social problems. Moreover, he was careful to note ‘the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world.’”5

  The only problem with that defense is that it’s hard to imagine an “end to the history” of ideas that is independent of actual history. Fukuyama himself points to real, historical episodes such as the French and American revolutions as indications that the “end of history” was nigh.

  So, if “the longing for recognition” is satisfied and the end of history is paramount, how do we know it unless we look to real-life history or current events? If man has come to the end of his ideological journey and chosen liberal democracy, wouldn’t it be fair to look around and see if current events reflect that? If Fukuyama meant only the “end of the history of ideology,” how would one know it had come to pass without looking at real history to determine if, indeed, people’s ideological conclusions had spilled over into real action?

  Fukuyama wrote boldly, “What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” He was committing the same deterministic errors that Marx did. Kimball responds that “these were the sorts of statements—along with Francis Fukuyama’s professed conviction that ‘the ideal will govern the material world in the long run’—that rang the alarm.”

  Making the case that liberal democracy is the best form of government would not have been so controversial. Popper himself agreed that democracy was not perfect but the least evil form of government and therefore preferable. What alarmed people was the mathematical certainty with which Fukuyama proclaimed the new era and his claim that liberal democracy was historically inevitable.6

  Like Marx and Hegel, Fukuyama argues that “history [should be] understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, . . . taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times.”7 Seems a rather sweeping claim, at once both naive and utopian. Fukuyama’s attempt to marry history and evolution are reminiscent of Marx trying to equate the dialectic with the “science” of evolution.

  Fukuyama goes on to argue that history’s “evolutionary process [is] neither random nor unintelligible.” This is quite the assertion: history is not random or unintelligible. What about unknowable? If the future is unknowable, then history is orderly and unfolding according to an intelligible plan only in retrospect and really only in the biased eyes of the beholder.

  Fukuyama writes: “Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies
was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an ‘end of history’: for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society.”

  Even Fukuyama admits that recent history argues against his end-of-history thesis: “[it is] . . . a very old question: Whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional history of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy.”8

  Fukuyama admits to an abundance of critics: “The most profound thinkers of the twentieth century have directly attacked the idea that history is a coherent or intelligible process; indeed, they have denied the possibility that any aspect of human life is philosophically intelligible.”

  He describes the historians who refute the linearity of history as possessing a “profound pessimism [that] is not accidental, but born of the truly terrible political events of the first half of the twentieth century.”

  Nevertheless, Fukuyama asserts that “liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe.”

  Few would argue against liberal democracy as an aspirational goal. If Fukuyama only expressed hope for history’s direction, the commendable might outweigh the concern. Fukuyama accepts the mathematical certainty and scientism that Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man and Popper, among others, warn us of. History “has proceeded according to certain definite rules laid down not by man, but by nature and nature’s laws.” To Fukuyama, 2 + 2 = 4 applies to the historical actions of men. How very Marxian of him.

  If history were inevitable, would such a conclusion dampen the fire that Jefferson thought necessary in each generation? If people accept historical determinism, the danger exists that charlatans, like Hitler and Stalin, appear on the national stage promising the people that history’s march toward progress and national success goes through them. Contrary to a notion that history’s end is desirable would be that history’s end should scare the hell out of any of us who would resist “homogenization.”