“The trouble with socialism,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “is that it takes up too many evenings.”
He was right then and right now, and the insight pertains to “woke” ideology in our time. It consumes one’s life and fills what should be happy days with personal ambition and dreary prattle about endless grievances concerning every manner of intractable realities of the world.
None of the woke ideology flows from common sense experience, much less the “lived experience” of the working classes. In fact, there is a huge chasm that separates the belief systems of woke intellectuals and the working classes, who generally have no time for this wacky nonsense. Wokeism is an intellectual imposition that must be taught and imposed simply because of its implausibility.
In particular, Wilde was bothered by the 19th-century socialist habit of seeking some kind of localized democratic consensus for every statement of belief, as if a committee can and should be in charge of the world. But his insight pertains more broadly, too, and points to the humorlessness of the entire exercise.
Back in the day, socialist theory in its most extreme form imagined the possibility of abolishing private property and money. Today, it has gone much further to imagine the possibility of abolishing biology itself and thus targets all evidence of it with regard to sex and gender, and even the need for economics at all. It has become flat-out dystopian with its push for bug eating, Flintstone cars, and massive population reductions.
Today, it’s particularly attracted to the number zero as an ideal: zero emissions, zero-COVID, zero meat, zero discrimination, zero economic growth, and we can add to that zero humor, art, and good sense. The woke tribe adopts all these tropes as a matter of group identity and not because they are either true or really understood.
That’s why woke theory has become what a friend calls “a dog’s breakfast,” a bowl of mixed and messy leftovers from last night’s party.
The whole enterprise has become so preposterous and anti-populist that only the most educated and privileged elites could possibly believe it. And that is precisely what you find in circles where educated elites gather. Their doctrines of belief are reduced to implausible incantations that no one is allowed to question. Their loathing of popular culture and bourgeois habits of religion and family life are always just below the surface of their misty-eyed sloganeering.
The tendency of leftist philosophizing toward doctrinal reductionism has a very long history. Karl Marx wrote long and ponderous essays and books that made some attempt at rigor, but it never really took hold. Under the guidance of Friedrich Engels, he finally coughed up the “Communist Manifesto,” which put the entire apparatus within reach of people with no time for books but a longing for some creed by which to live.
This is also why the left was drawn to the bloodthirsty pamphlet of Chairman Mao and the publication of the “Red Book.” They read it like a bible so they internalize truths such as “We must have faith, first, that the peasant masses are ready to advance step by step along the road of socialism under the leadership of the Party, and second, that the Party is capable of leading the peasants along this road.”
Oh. I hope you catch the elitism in there. It’s an inherent part of the culture of socialist organization. There’s always a vanguard, always a tiny minority of wise leaders who understand the trajectory of history and are ready to lead the rest of us to their promised land while crushing all dissent. You see that in China today as the party-loyal whites crush the ambitions of the population for basic freedom and rights.
In the old days, I found myself confused by the existence of what people called “limousine liberalism,” which is another way of saying well-to-do, highly educated elites who have a deep hatred for the systems of wealth creation that gave them their privileges. Now, I see that this is an inherent part of socialist ideological structure. The elites in the party are entitled to break all their own rules, as long as they are fervent in their advocacy and impositions of doctrines on others.
Hence, taking chartered flights to Davos to attend meetings that agitate for zero-carbon to save the planet shouldn’t shock us. Hypocrisy is baked into the belief system.
This is also why the left and its vanguard can’t tolerate free speech. The main tenets of its ideology are so implausible and contrary to all real-life experience that they must be protected against any and all criticism lest they crumble into nothingness. They simply are too weak to withstand the slightest scrutiny.
As for the economics of socialist theorizing, it’s the most persistent non-falsifiable ideology on planet Earth. The socialists are like people who swear that gravity doesn’t exist and keep hopping around on two feet, expecting to rise into the clouds at any moment. It never happens, but the faith that there is no gravity remains unshaken.
Socialism is rooted in a very simple error, one so fundamental that it denies a fundamental feature of the world. It denies the existence and the persistence of scarcity itself. That is to say, it denies that producing and allocating is even a problem. If you deny that, it’s hardly surprising that you have no regard for economics as a discipline of the social sciences.
So, for example, just because the stores overflow with groceries, or because internet startups are begging you to download applications, or because we can stick a wind turbine here and there and watch it work if the weather is right, or power your handheld calculator with solar rays, doesn’t mean that we live in a post-scarcity age.
There is no such thing as post-scarcity in this life. Everything consumed must be produced. So long as anything is scarce, there can’t be free, unlimited, collective access to it. If you attempt to make a scarce good collectively owned, it will be overutilized, depleted, and finally vanish following the final fight for the last scrap.
Things can be allocated by arbitrary decision backed by force, or they can be allocated through agreement, trading, and gifting. The forceful way is what socialism has always become. This is for a reason: Socialism doesn’t deal with reality. This is true in economics but is also true in everything from gender to climate. It has become nothing more than a fantasy that only the rich and privileged can afford to believe.
It’s a tragedy of our time that this belief system has made such progress in the world of commerce, media, and art, so much so that it is nearly impossible to move within any “high-end” circles in this country without having one’s ears assaulted with repeated multiple incantations of woke slogans.
Would this ever have happened without the assistance of academia? Doubtful. Such ideological systems can only come about and become entrenched once a class of people become completely detached from the normal demands of commercial life and broad engagement with the normal operations of society. Hence, my favorite cure for this cultural infection: Get a real job and learn a real and marketable skill.
The coming recession might assist many in elite cultures along this path.
