I am simplifying to a semi-violent extent, but please bear with me; we are looking at some of the basic principles.
And from there on, the legal system spirals out of control and begins punishing people very severely and rather arbitrarily, and from there on the incentives for everyone are to be very careful and suspicious and to collect as much political power as possible. And the way to do that is spying on others, and informing, so that you have more information, more juicy threats to make, and more favors to call. All of these things become more important for your personal survival (and prosperity) than being an efficient office clerk or entrepreneur. Gain power, don’t rock the boat.
And from there on, the incentive of the political leadership becomes to hide some of the bad stuff that is going on, because you need the legitimacy of the system to justify your power; your power being the only protection from being swallowed as the revolution begins to eat its own children in a spying-reporting slugfest. So you need to control the press and other media, which means people receive even less reliable information to make decisions and regulate their behaviors correctly—which messes up decision-making even more, across the board. And people thus fail to coordinate their actions at a large scale and over longer stretches of time, which means more shortages and errors; which means more incentives for corruption.
And in order to defend the false positive image conjured up by the controlled media that people no longer trust, you have to make parades and celebrations and fake display villages—lots of them—so that people will believe that things are alright and keep up the enthusiasm. And people will need to show up and be enthused at such occasions in order not to seem suspect, which in turn makes them start to genuinely insist they live in a fantastic society since the least convinced ones will be viewed with the most suspicion. It is a kind of Stockholm syndrome, by which hostages begin to love and admire their captors.
This is classical cognitive dissonance: People will genuinely believe things are awesome because it’s too dangerous not to. And this again interferes with any hope of self-corrective feedback cycles. As the historian Anne Applebaum and many other foreign travelers in the USSR noted, Soviet citizens would often—amidst obvious drudgeries—emphatically insist that theirs was a superb society. Gulag survivor Solzhenitsyn described in his books how people would come to the labor camps and insist upon keeping their beliefs in the benevolence of the Soviet Union, even as they were being beaten, starved and degraded.
The social dynamics of religious cults come to mind. It is as though the communist project, by its inherent dynamics, drew people into a nationwide cult: a dynamic followed even down to gory details like “cult of personality” and the cult-like, or at least extremely sectarian, organization of Trotskyist groups around the world.
And indeed, what would a society run by, let’s say, the Scientologists look like? We may have an example in present-day North Korea; a surviving spawn of the Soviet Union. The similarities between Scientology and North Korea are striking, even down to the level of comportments and demeanors displayed by those who harass deviants from the dogma.
However, once the spell is broken and society collapses, traumas surface and abound. Today’s happiness research lays its verdict: Post-communist societies are the least happy (relative to their levels of economic prosperity), and the longer a country stayed under communist rule, the less happy the population.
Other measures also suffer a special “communist penalty”: lower interpersonal trust, loneliness, corruption and poor public health lingering on for decades. In terms of cultural and political progressivity, these societies also relapse dramatically: Poland turns to tradition and Catholicism, East Germany generates more than its fair share of neo-nazis, Russia becomes chauvinist (and born-again Orthodox) and forgets its former communist cosmopolitanism and dreamy gaze at space colonization, China’s new openness is only skin deep, still being profoundly authoritarian and nationalist—and North Korea becomes a downright patriarchal, racist caste system on surveillance steroids, literally worse than anything Orwell could have dreamt up.
Phew. Where were we? So communism is bad, which has to do with a vicious spiral that grows from an inefficient way of organizing the market, a case of jammed real-time information processing —rather than any romantic notion of a violated “human freedom” or vague general speculations about the nature of humanity. The violations of human rights flow from this jamming of the information system, from a chronic failure to successfully coordinate human behavior in the millions. See you in The Hague, comrade.
The non-moralistic point is important here—and obvious, in a way. We all have a tendency of casting our beliefs about humanity and society in moral terms. And we tend to flatter ourselves: If only people “realize” that our own beliefs are the correct ones, if they could only bring themselves to see the true beauty of what we see, then life would be so much better. But sustainable, fair and dynamic societies are not created by the purity of your soul and its habits of self-flattery. Good societies are created by A) correct analysis, B) smooth information processing for the coordination of human agency, C) the dynamic balancing of different powers—and D) the dialectical conflict and mutual interdependence between different political interests and ideas.
These features of a good society can be brought about more or less deliberately; they emerge either as the result of planned actions, or through blind processes that occur beyond our understandings (but for which we often like to snatch the credit)—and most often as a strange dance between these two: the deliberate and the stumbled-upon.
There was really nothing morally “lower” about the communist experiment, compared to the ideas of the American Revolution, (or the French Revolution for that matter). If you look at the “founding fathers”, Thomas Jefferson kept slaves, even got one of them pregnant, and Benjamin Franklin fabricated juicy lies about British atrocities—writing in the papers under several false names and claiming to have witnessed colorful barbaric acts committed by Indians, purportedly orchestrated by the British, in effect relying on racism. Most of the Declaration of Independence is not about human rights and equality, but raging against the crimes of the British “tyrant”. After all, this was the writing of fiery revolutionaries, not human rights activists.
These guys weren’t necessarily any “nicer” than Lenin and Trotsky; and certainly not nicer than people like Emma Goldman or Rosa Luxemburg. They just happened to be on the beat with some ideas and societal developments that turned out to be highly competitive, hence leading to relatively sustainable societal structures. The American ideas of 1776 were simply better aligned with the long-term attractors than the Russian ones in 1917.
Marx Had the Wrong Meta-Ideology
Both versions of modernity, capitalism and communism, brought great good and great evil. Communism enriches and modernizes society, and it kills lots of people. So does capitalism. But one version still turned out to be preferable to the other and thus won out: capitalism allied with a multi-party system.
A lot of the weaknesses of the purportedly Marxian societies can be explained by the fact that there weren’t several parties (with minor exceptions, such as the contemporary Chinese tolerance of small opposition parties). This is a major difference to liberal democracy. Even in disorderly and corrupt Italy, one government can always be exchanged for another. This guarantees rudimentary accountability.
So why were the communist societies one-party systems? Because the Marxists believed that they alone embodied the meta-ideology ; that they embodied the actual, deep structures of how societies evolve and operate. As such you can legitimize the self-organization of society as a whole : The meta-ideology is not any one position within society, but it constitut
es overarching ideas about the very fabric of society. So Marxism does not compete with liberalism, but with liberal parliamentary democracy itself. It is not just an ideology, but an attempt at a meta-ideology—like liberal democracy. If communism reaches a certain level of influence, it thus wipes out all competing parties.
If Marxism is a meta-ideology, it makes sense to organize society as a whole within the framework of what is viewed as analytically true either way to the communist mind. As such, communism was prone to be built on top of formerly autocratic, pre-democratic societies where it could simply supersede the earlier form of governance, inheriting the strong state institutions that were not balanced by a strong parliament and division of powers.
But this is not unique to communism. When the American Revolution took hold, the elites of the early days also worked to keep a one-party system. This however broke down during the early 19th century when the vote was extended to non-elite groups and there was a rise of populist politics under President Andrew Jackson, with an electoral base in the southern states. All meta-ideologies set the framework for society as a whole, for its very definition of what society is.
As mentioned, the words “holistic” and “totalitarian” are in effect the same word . When you have a theory about the whole of society, it makes sense to relate to it in a way that tries to grasp, and change, the whole of it. To relate to the “whole”, we must relate to the “totality”, even try to steer and navigate it. A challenge presents itself: How can we be holistic without falling into the traps of 20th century totalitarianism?
In truth, of course, the meta-ideology of modernity turned out to be not communism but rather what I have called Green Social Liberalism, the attractor point modern societies gravitate towards. Not communism, not fascism, not the night watchman libertarian minimalist state, not anarchist communes, not even social democracy (nice try, though)—but Green Social Liberalism.
The more modernized a society becomes, the more clearly it manifests Green Social Liberalism, something the Nordic countries have become prime examples of. In countries like Sweden, all parties in effect have more or less become one version or another of “green social-liberals”.
Much can be said in the analytical (and moral) defense of Marx, but after all, he did not claim that a huge middle class would grow up through the dynamic interrelation between private enterprise and public welfare, or that these populations would increasingly adopt individualism and cosmopolitanism, identity politics and ecological awareness as the ecological limitations of society’s growth became apparent. That’s just not what he wrote, I’m sorry.
Marx tried to identify the meta-ideology, to formulate it clearly, so people could create political movements around it or otherwise navigate the world with its help. He made some important contributions, but he got some of the fundamental dynamics wrong. Analytical—not moral—mistakes that nevertheless cost many millions of lives. Oops.
But still, the very fact that communism was an attempt at a meta-ideology, and that Marx got some important dynamics right (that capitalism is crisis-prone, for example), gave the organization of “The Communist Party” some nearly transcendental qualities in the eyes of its followers; attracting large parts of the 20th century intellectuals, most noticeably perhaps in France. The party was seen not only as “a party” with some “opinions”, but, not unlike the American creed, a kind of manifest destiny, of history’s dialectics made flesh. That’s of course also what made it so dangerously seductive, so blinding.
What we tend to forget, however, is that our current political status quo was created by a similar kind of meta-ideology; that of liberal democracy and the Enlightenment. Its structures were brought about by abrupt turns, and the carefully engineered ideas of leading thinkers were instituted under political struggles for monopolies of violence (we mentioned Montesquieu, but there were of course many others). A jerky ride of revolution, counter-revolution, conservation and reformation produced the current meta-ideology and its supremacy.
Why then am I saying all this? I want to draw your attention to the fact that communism failed to change the games of everyday life , whereas other meta-ideologies have been successful in doing so, and future meta-ideologies can do the same.
The conclusion, then, is not to avoid all holistic visions of society, to avoid all meta-ideologies, but to make damn certain you get them right from the beginning.
Again, so if Marx ended up non-linearly killing a hundred million—how many did Montesquieu save? How many instances of torture has he prevented? It’s a fair question.
Communism Is “Game Denial”
The central issue of communism’s failure was not that of some eternal, God-given “essence of humanity” being violated, but something far more mundane: that the games of everyday life were misunderstood and/or denied .
This led to a serious glitch in the self-organization of society, which—over a period of decades—led to a painful form of social disintegration and resulting oppression. Amidst all their atrocities, communist societies were relatively functional for a while, but their social sustainability was limited—much more so than liberal democracy with capitalism and welfare (the sustainability of which is, of course, also limited in time, as all things under the sun). And hence they lasted for shorter periods of time.
From this viewpoint, two conclusions become apparent. The first one is, again, that the relative failure of the communist experiments does not permanently discredit all attempts to change the games of everyday life, to evolve the dynamics by which we live, love, trade, compete and cooperate. If anything, the victory of liberal democracy, and its gravitation towards Green Social Liberalism, shows us that such developments are indeed possible.
Rather, the failure of communism serves to underscore that you must make correct assessments of people’s behaviors—in these particular times and places in history—in order to create a sustainable social order. If you make unrealistic assessments regarding how people function, you set in motion vicious cycles that lead to truly terrible results. But on the other hand, if you fail to understand what attractors lie ahead, you stall historical progress, taking the losing side in history, which in the long run causes even more abrupt changes and catastrophic outcomes—for instance, that we might have global ecological catastrophes.
The second conclusion is that “game change” already has occurred throughout history, and that it is a measure of society’s progress: If, and only if, the games of everyday life become fairer and more forgiving, can “progress” be said to have materialized .
So this leaves us with the understanding that the rules of the game—in markets, in work life, in governance, in family life, in love and sex and friendship—can and will change and develop. The question is only how , when, and under the auspices of which meta-ideology.
The basic idea is that the meta-ideology of liberal capitalism is becoming less viable in the globalized information age; and that we should look for a new one: My suggestion for which is political metamodernism, a.k.a. the Nordic ideology, leading us towards a listening society and a Green Social Liberalism 2.0—through the method of “co-development”.
The Marxist critique and the failure of communism serve as fruitful starting points for seeing how a metamodern society can evolve from the modern one.
But to be very clear: the Nordic ideology and its metamodern politics is not communism. It’s much smarter than that.
Appendix B:
THE FOUR FIELDS
If you still don’t feel entirely convinced why we should discard Marxism as a theoretical starting point for changing society, it is because I have saved the best for last.
In this chapter I’ll guide you through the four fields of development and show you how Marxism is utterly inadequate since it only addresses one of these equal
ly crucial fields. And when you have acquainted yourself with these, you will find that it not only helps to further understand the failures of communism, but also how we can achieve a metamodern society.
However, before we go on to the four fields, a brief recap of one of the main points from Book One should be helpful.
Value Memes in Populations
Of all the ideas presented in Book One, this is the most important one: The average effective value meme of a population is the single most important factor determining whether it is possible for a society to progress to a new stage of development or not. If you don’t get it, then you haven’t understood this book or its prequel.
You may recall six such value memes, each of which builds upon the former, being a “later” or even “higher” stage of development:
Animistic
Faustian
Postfaustian (or traditional)
Modern
Postmodern
Metamodern
It is hard to overstate how crucial it is to raise the average effective value meme. The most brilliantly designed constitution and all the best democratic institutions in the world are null and void if the majority of the population subscribe to a Viking warrior ethos; e.g. gravitating towards the Faustian value meme. Likewise a listening society cannot fully materialize as long as the vast majority remains firmly imbedded within a modern, rationalistic worldview.
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