People often make the claim that their utopian dreams fail only because human nature is flawed and evil. Because they can't be trusted with their "perfect" communist or "perfect" green or "perfect" religious tyrrany, democracy is simply the best that they can do. I've seen this attitude a lot, and not only on the left!!

Someone I read in an article made the witty observation - "So then, if people were more perfect, had more moral integrity, were more intelligent, then they would be worthy of having their decisions made for them by a despot? Then they would be worthy of totalitarianism?!"

Makes you think.
Aaron | Email | Homepage | 03.29.07 - 8:19 am | #

This post is very good and certainly makes you think about the underlying motivations of people like those teachers in Seattle. They have an agenda and their holier than thou attitude justifies them in propagandizing and indoctrinating those poor kids into their ideology. Any parent who allows this is guilty of child abuse and its no better than sending the kid to a madrassa.
AnotherGuy | Email | Homepage | 03.29.07 - 10:41 am | #

Way back in college more than 20 years ago I had to write a report in a PolySci class about a book entitled "The Zero Sum Game" that tried to defend that theory. My paper ripped holes in the book's premise, as it is obvious that nothing is truly a zero sum game as you can always add items to the mix. I showed how if there is a demand for certain products and services in a free-market society that other folks will join in to make more of those products and services available to all. I also showed that socialist/Communist (centrally-planned) societies do try to keep things as a "zero sum" where folks have to compete for scarce resources. Also when nobody has an incentive to produce more, then nobody does do any more than the absolute minumin, which is why socialist societies collapse of stagnation.
Garry K | Email | Homepage | 03.29.07 - 12:36 pm | #

- HUMANS ARE COALITIONAL
We tend to form into groups of 25 - 150 most easily.

I have heard of this before under the name "trooping limit". The idea behind this label was that humans literally cannot think of a group of more than 100-150 -- the size of a hunter-gatherer tribe or Army company -- as people, only as an abstract number. (i.e. "The People")

"One death is a tragedy.
One Million deaths is A Statistic."
-- Comrade Stalin

Of course, this limit can very from individual to individual; with sociopaths, the trooping limit seems to be only one (guess who?) and for the rare saints, the trooping limit just might be Everyone.

In which case, when education (such as the Comrades at Hilltop) starts out trying to teach kids to go gung-ho for World Peace (TM) or Save The Planet (TM) without anything smaller-scale, this immediately puts the kids into Stalin's Abstract Statistic Land.

Said Progressively Educated Children will have never encountered an Important Situation (TM) where those involved are people instead of The People (TM). Couple this with Self Esteem (TM) towards the one that always remains a person no matter what (i.e. "ME!)and the result will be simple:
SOCIOPATHS.

Sociopaths who know how to duckspeak the Party Line and game The System.
Headless Unicorn Guy | Email | Homepage | 03.29.07 - 12:45 pm | #

A fine analysis of the psychology of economics and economic systems.

IMO there seems to be a sense of "fairness" as a part of our genetic makeup. So many who advocate for socialism/communism seem to see everything in economics in terms of fairness. In their eyes only equal outcomes are fair. And that is why they so desperately want to impose such a system. They are not willing to look deeper and see that owning of private property backed by courts, allowing free economic exchange among willing parties, and the willingness of people to take risks for economic rewards produces far superior economic results for all people.

Your analysis points out quite well, just why the fairness of equal outcomes does not work. It should be required reading in all university economics programs and also all teacher education programs. Maybe then the socialist impulse for fairness will finally begin to be overcome.
Jimmy J. | Email | Homepage | 03.29.07 - 12:58 pm | #

HALL OF MIRRORS

" . . . the social theorists at Hilltop saw . . . [that] . . . : '. . . children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys' . . . ,"

soooo . . . they asserted their own misconceived 'assumptions' about their 'social power' and the apparent 'ownership' they feel is exclusively their own.

So, how do they raise a new level of leaders inbued with their own philosophy if they don't allow them to prictice it themselves? (I can't think of any natural way of a child acting like these 'adults' do without other kids setting them straight,as it were - if unhindered by adult interference; and that kind of thing can't be force-fed without causing damage)

The only ones who will grow up like them are the ones who want to compete with, replace and subjugate them, as that lesson teaches.

Rather than working in the healthy competition and mutual respect which they have been deprived of learning about at a time in life when that sort of thing is meant to be learned, they instead are more likely to become yet more repressive than those who instructed them.
ytba | Email | Homepage | 03.29.07 - 4:04 pm | #

"... a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.”

So then - who put them in charge of deciding what's just and what's unjust?

As teachers, they're part of a union that works to preserve their entitlements to the exclusion of others.

As you say, human nature keeps any system from being perfect. Plato thought the philosopher king was the ideal, but even in his day, when it was tried - one of the Pythagoreans (I forget the name) went on to become governor of a district, and was so bad he was thrown out - it didn't work. Solon was another close call, but even he realized that people had to work things out by themselves, and so he took a 10-year sabattical.

In our early days of capitalism, wealth did concentrate in the hands of a few: Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller,... Carnegie, for one, thought of himself as a conservator of all that money - it was in trust to him. And he made possible the public library system.

I like to use Bill Gates as an example. Suppose we took all his money and divided it equally among everybody else. After that, how many foundations would be formed, how many grants, how many endowments?

Sure, there were excesses in our capitalist system - the "robber barons" of the 19th C, but their excesses have been covered over by the sands of time, while those of Marx and his ilk loom today like vultures over places like Cuba, Darfur, North Viet Nam, ...
ZZMike | Email | Homepage | 03.29.07 - 4:28 pm | #

“evolutionary psychology”

Cro-mags probably got past the physically and possibly mentally superior Neanderthal partly because of the omnivorous vs. carnivorous thing (of course), but IMO mostly because or their much greater genetic temperamental/intellectual diversity (relatively flattened bell curve), which combined with larger ‘coalitional comfort zones’ (“25 – 150”) vs. 5-20 for Neanderthals, would inspire better ideas for survival.

”HUMANS ARE COALITIONAL”
Since there may be no perfect human possible (even with extensive genetic engineering), we must be coalitional in order to ‘complete the whole.’

”HUMANS ARE HEIRARCHICAL”
Somebody once said that inside each and every one of us is a control freakish psychopath, but obviously, this would be a matter of degree from person to person.

”HUMANS ARE ZERO-SUM THINKERS”
In regards to primitive and prehistoric environments, “their gain is our loss” is obviously true. But being social creatures, isn’t everybody also, at some level of consciousness, on the lookout for anomalies in ‘the system?’ (Including the psychopathic, who’ll exploit any anomalies that are of use to them..)

”PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE NATURAL”
In a social animal isn’t territoriality a tribal thing? Or is it natural for the top dog to own the pack that owns the territory?

”MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL EXCHANGE IS NATURAL”
No, it’s naturally rational. The psycho in everyone always wants to place the burdens on somebody ‘weaker.’ Mutually beneficial exchange is the goal.

”WE CAN NAVIGATE THE "US" vs."THEM" CONUNDRUM BY TRUST” Natural trust in individuals is a matter of degree and this fact can be far more easily exploited by the globalized modern human than it ever could any caveman. For me, this new breed of political skeptic/independent (Amy Goodman, Lou Dobbs, David Kuo..) usually have ideas about the scope and limits of “trust.”

If I was that teacher in Seattle I would have put that Lego situation to a vote, including a ‘Laws of Lego Conduct’, and then observed the result. If any bullies adapted themselves into a role within the limits of those Laws of Lego Conduct I might consider ‘the vote’ a success and that kid to have leadership potential. But if they simply became more devious and manipulative I’d quietly take them aside and proceed to beat the living crap out of them.

But maybe that’s why I’m not a teacher.
americafirst | Email | Homepage | 03.29.07 - 4:55 pm | #

Revision:

“evolutionary psychology”

Cro-mags probably got past the physically and possibly mentally superior Neanderthal partly because of the omnivorous vs. carnivorous thing (of course), but IMO mostly because of their much greater genetic temperamental/intellectual diversity (relatively flattened bell curve), which combined with larger ‘coalitional comfort zones’ (“25 – 150”) vs. 5-20 for Neanderthals, would inspire better ideas for survival.
americafirst | Email | Homepage | 03.29.07 - 5:01 pm | #

"Neuroeconomics?" Neurononsense!

If the "researchers" in this field were honest with themselves -- and with their grant-making institutions -- they'd admit that they're practicing economics. That is, they're studying the behavior of individuals confronted with choices that impinge on their desires and their value systems. Nothing else, and nothing more.
Francis W. Porretto | Email | Homepage | 03.29.07 - 5:30 pm | #

Francis, it is economics with an eye to the evolutionary reasons human beings make the choices they do---which is a very important distinction. Economics that pays attention to the fact that this information economy is being run by the brains of hunter-gatherers.

Should be quite fascinating.
R S | Email | Homepage | 03.29.07 - 9:25 pm | #

Perfections and totalitarianism--here's an insightful passage from Aldoux Huxley:

"In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet--the scientific poet--of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard an inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection...the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence."
david foster | Email | Homepage | 03.29.07 - 9:46 pm | #

Americafirst where have you been?

Amy Goodman is a caveman, been around longer than warranted...believes George'barking moonbat' Galloway is an intellectual. Further, she is the nutcase who advocates the insane idea that corporation CEOs 'control the news' when in fact, except for ted turner, the new organizations are such a small percentage of corporate holdings that CEO's actively avoid having any connection to what producers/editors say and do.

Producers/editors are the gatekeepers of information, not the CEO, which explains why they never expose Amy Goodman's insane Democracy Now, or United for Peace and Justice/ANSWER real agenda, or COde Pink or why they en mass give Cindy Sheehan 24/7 coverage.

Americafirst I am sorry you have fallen for Goodman's propaganda
syn | Email | Homepage | 03.30.07 - 7:20 am | #

So then - who put them in charge of deciding what's just and what's unjust?

"There will be some who say that what we do is illegal. Before they can, make sure WE are the ones who say what is legal and what is not."
-- L Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology
Headless Unicorn Guy | Email | Homepage | 03.30.07 - 12:49 pm | #

syn,

"CEO's actively avoid having any connection to what producers/editors say and do"
That might explain the Sumner Redstone and Mary Mapes confusion. But where do you get this opinion?

"Americafirst I am sorry you have fallen for Goodman's propaganda"
So no muckraking is better than bad muckraking? (Remember, I don’t completely trust anybody.) Are there any political skeptic/independents that you like?
americafirst | Email | Homepage | 03.30.07 - 1:25 pm | #

Read "Before the Dawn". He lists pretty good eveidence that humans are still evolving and the reason that we now form groups of larger than 150 is that we evolved to be able to do it. I remember reading about an animal experiment where in the face of scarcity, animals started practicing simple capitalism.
hoopster | Email | Homepage | 04.01.07 - 1:23 am | #

Hi there. Clearly you are very intelligent. However, there is at some point that grounding human systems of thought in biology - ie your claim humans are intrinsically predisposed against Marxism - fails to be relevant. You cite that the variegations of human behavior, individual pathologies etc., bring about the failure of totalitarian systems, but while this is true, consider the other direction from which emerge subjects who cause these systems of totalitarian authority fail: the enlightened subject who recognizes there is no intrinsic authority over her head and employs reason in communication to build free, civil society institutions. My point is biology cannot account for all variables, which effectively cripples the claim that certain social systems are incompatible with human biology - ie we are not ruled by an essential, deterministic force, but both pathological degeneration and enlightened subjectivity are at least as approximately important as the role of biology in determination of social systems. Let's take each perspective and draw it to its full conclusion: it is possible both that total biological knowledge completely proves capitalist and democratic systems as features of the human genome; so too can we envision that each and every human being will become an enlightened subject would embrace a socialist and collective governance scheme; at any rate, I wager the future will be somewhere between biological essentialism and total emancipation of human subjectivity; between absolute capitalism and absolute socialism; between representative democracy and collective consensus.
greg | Email | Homepage | 04.03.07 - 10:01 pm | #