Why I’m a Socialist and not a Communist

Working through my thoughts as I go along. Thanks for reading.

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Some people are born psychopaths.

Some people are born with no emotional empathy for others’ experiences due to brain structure.

Many more people are consciously splintered off from their emotional empathy in early childhood due to trauma.

Transitioning from capitalism to a more egalitarian system would help to greatly reduce the preponderance of traumatic situations. Nevertheless, both groups of people mentioned above would still exist in a post-capitalist society.

People with deficiencies in emotional empathy seek power more ambitiously than those of us with greater empathy. They will still do so in a post-capitalist society.

There is an implicit danger in failing to acknowledge the existence of antisocial power-hungry people at a societal level.

In shifting to a system where all class distinctions are dissolved, this group of people — somewhere between 1 and 10 percent of the population, or somewhere between 80 and 800 million people — will still seek power to a greater degree than the average person even if they do not own greater material wealth.

I believe this is an inherently unstable situation. The resentment of this group of people in a society where all divisions in private wealth are eliminated would inevitably impel them to strike out at society as a whole — just as they do in a capitalist society, only with less material resources to deploy. This resentment poses an existential threat to society as a whole.

You might argue: well, if they’re antisocial and power-hungry either way, then so what? Do they not pose an existential threat to society in socialism and communism both?

Yes, they do… but I believe that socialism mitigates this threat to a greater degree, in that it does not stoke the resentment of these people as much as communism does.

You might say: so we’re going to hold our entire societal system hostage to the antisocial people among us? F*#% that!

Well.. as we’ve just established, they hold us hostage in a sense no matter what. But I am arguing they are a bigger threat when their power has been suppressed through an elimination of private wealth.

You might say this sounds contradictory and stupid.

I would reply: reality itself is a paradox. We both exist and don’t exist; we’re everything and nothing; we’re always alive and we’re already dead.

Paradoxes are inherent in existence.

In this case, I believe that allowing antisocial humans to retain some of the surplus wealth they accumulated through an exploitative authoritarian system… would actually be less dangerous to our species as a whole than would entirely depriving them of this wealth.

I also believe that acknowledging the existence of these people at a societal level, and embracing them as being among us rather than considering them our enemies and ignoring them out of fear, bodes better for our prolonged existence as a species.

Rather than to deny that human nature includes evil, and through psychological splitting pretend that the evil among us comes from a dehumanized external force, as our major religions typically teach — whether that force is Satan, demons, lizard people, etc. — we as human beings must recognize that we are evil as well as we are good.

Our fictions perpetually depict an ongoing struggle between good and evil. I do not believe this struggle is fictional.

I believe the struggle between benevolent and malevolent tendencies is an ontological fact.

And I believe our society would have a better chance at saving itself from an apocalyptic collapse — as likely or eventual as that may be — by consciously accepting, embracing, and discussing the balanced coexistence of prosocial and antisocial behavior in our species… rather than ignoring and suppressing our awareness of this perennial balance.

Put simply, and with the acknowledgment that this is a complex and highly debatable position: I argue that — on a global level, while recognizing the inevitability and benevolent potential of locally communist societies — a socialist system would be better suited to the conscious embrace and cultural discussion of our inherent antisocial qualities than would a communist system, and hence would be more conducive to the continued existence of our human civilization.