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The gulf between ideologies and their practice.
As I grow older, I realise that any originators and founders of any ideology, whether religions, humanism, nationalism, communism, capitalism, Fascism, whatchamacallit, are all expounding extremist views of the central tenets in their ideologies while placing them in a perfectly benign space where everything and everyone works the exact same way as the system demands and expects them to, while in practice, there are so many nuances and greys, ifs and buts, exceptions and conditionals for things to work in a certain way, so many externalities, especially the unpredictability of human behaviour when it comes to greed, fear, adrenaline, and power, and so many things that can and indeed do go awry, that it is a mug’s game to take an ideology in its purest form and expect it to work right out of the box.
Equally, it is as silly to discard an ideology because it does not work straight out of the box.
The other day, a dear friend of mine (who happens to be a communist) and I were discussing economic theories over a light dinner and casual conversation.
I spoke of the failure of communism as a model for organising society. We briefly discussed the experiments in USSR and China, and touched on Venezuela and Cuba, and so on. She kept pointing out human frailties that caused the breakdown and how the ideology in itself was sound. I kept asking her to give me an example of a perfectly working communist system because, I claimed, the ideology fails to take into account humans and human emotions and drivers (especially greed, the base instinct of building for one’s genetic material/offspring, and of having some kind of faith in something akin to karma, that good begets good and evil, evil, and that there is some kind of a higher power whose actions are beyond the ken of human understanding, or indeed control). She disagreed and said that on the contrary, communism is the one ideology that does in fact take humans into the equation like no other system of organising society does. Then, she said something to the effect that Communism is not so fragile that if one or two or three human experiments with it fail, it can be discarded as an ideology for the good of the society in toto. If a few people cheat and defraud you, or lie and steal from you, or betray you, would that mean all of humanity is a cheating, lying, traitorous, murderous, fraudulent, thriving bunch of people? Forget, for a moment, whether one bad experience with something or someone would immediately create a generalised rule in your head about human nature. Think of whether it should, and if that is a sign of an intelligent, civilised, well-adjusted human.
Yes, Marx was on the money (pun intended) about a lot of the diagnosis of what ails the human civilisation and the prognosis of what path it is likely to take and where it is likely to end if not corrected. And extending the same line of thought, perhaps he also did get the cure right. What if we humans are not taking the medication prescribed by him correctly or in the right dose or at the right time, or whatever?
As for capitalism, she claimed that my own previous post about the big corporates taking over our governments, our economies, and our very minds should show me how my preferred economic system (capitalism) is horrible and evil, how it uses human greed to create even more greed, how it concentrates power and wealth, assets and violence in the hands of a few and creates an unequal, unjust, and therefore uncivilised society. Surely, she said, I can see the ills of this flawed system everywhere today and how, just like fingers are pointed to the USSR and China when it comes to communism’s ‘shining’ examples, capitalism has failed in literally every society it has been attempted to be foisted upon by the very people who have the advantage within that system, by claiming they know better, on those that will bear the brunt of it, by claiming it is done on their behalf and for their good.
I responded to her: I agree I wrote about Amazon and Alphabet, Meta and Apple, and that their greed, coupled with the systemic weaknesses in the international system that they have exploited to their benefit, is cause for alarm and that they need to be slowed, if not stopped, before they destroy all that we hold dear and regress us to the time of colonial companies with royal charters to extract wealth from around the world in the 17th and 18th centuries and robber barons with politicians, bankers, the army, and the media in their pockets that ran amok in the 19th and 20th centuries, in fact, ever since the industrial revolution replaced the feudal system with the nation-state and elevated the entrepreneur-innovator to near-divine status. I also said that governments must do more to stop monopolies and non-competitive environments from being formed and that if need be, break them up and encourage competition, even by slightly skewing the playing field towards the competition, could and should be considered.
That said, it is my firm belief that true and free capitalism is the solution to the excesses of capitalism. So, at least according to me, the only way to stop bad capitalism is good capitalism, and more of it, not less. As for Marx’s diagnosis, to my mind, it was simplistic and frankly, even if true, quite obvious. It wasn’t a revelation (even at the time of his propounding it) that there is a conflict between haves and have-nots that transforms the direction a society takes and that this divide need be as small as possible, else it will result in a destabilised society, perhaps even wanton violence and probably anarchy and the loss of the rule of law, where only the strong survive while the weak perish, with all the ’strength’ concentrated in the hands of the mob rather than a representative body of people chosen peacefully by citizens in a free and fair election. What was appalling was his proposal to put an end to this, viz., for workers to seize the means of production and crush individualism and individual initiative altogether, while not recognising that in reality, humans are highly conscious of their selves and there will always be people who will use the ideology to feed their ego and need for power, rising faster in a system that commands everyone to be equal in everything. By fiat! I vehemently disagreed and contended that democracy and capitalism are the most complementary to each other and are indeed even necessary for each of them to survive, feeding off the freedoms provided within these systems, freedoms that balance the good of the individual with that of the masses. So, the only way towards human happiness is through the exercise of representative government which by definition is a democracy, and which precludes absolutely any other economic system but capitalism as its go-to method of organising wealth, income, production, ownership, and what have you.
Of course, even though I do believe that in free markets lie the solutions to today’s problems, these ‘free’ markets need regulation from an uncorrupt legislature, support from an unbiased and quick-acting judiciary, and constant vigilance from a free and fair media. Unfortunately, none of these exists in any country today. And it scares me that in the absence of these basic democratic ingredients (as I said, I do believe that democracy is a necessary though not a sufficient condition for true capitalism to flourish), we have little hope of companies like Amazon not getting more and more extractive as time goes by, to their vendors, to their workers, to the society around them, to the environment, and finally, to the consumers (that day will come as I have explained in the last paragraph in the previous post). I also think capitalism (combined with democracy) is the only self-correcting of all the systems of organising societies that we have come up with to date. It does not just take into account human nature and human proclivity to greed, fear, and other instincts, but it actually counts on them to make it work. But, and this goes without saying, it must have the solidity of democracy wedded to it for it to truly succeed: politicians who will regulate unfettered corporates from harming citizens, courts that will enforce just laws passed by the representative legislature, an executive that will implement those judgments without corruption or delay, and a free and fair media that will act as a gatekeeper and guard to ensure the entire system works.
We had a spirited debate and parted (obviously) as friends. But, some of what we spoke got me thinking: The difference of opinion we had could very well have been about one religion vis-a-vis another. One type of parenting compared to another. One culture v/s another.
And we’d both have had some pretty strong, and valid, points to make. Every system that has been invented by humans has had its chance in the real world in the short history of humanity over the past 3,200-odd years of history (1200 BCE till date, since the point we have had some sort of recorded historical records). Every system has been tried, tested, and the results recorded for posterity. None of it has ever worked flawlessly.
But the followers of those ideologies have exactly one argument to explain away the failures: ‘The ideology is perfect, the implementation is wrong because humans are flawed.’
This applies to literally everything we believe in.
‘Islam is perfect, but Muslims are not, and so, whatever bad things you see about Islam are not in fact, the fault of the religion or its teachings, but the misinterpretations and misguided actions of its deeply flawed practitioners. Why even the maker of this argument is flawed! <gotcha> In fact, there is no perfect Muslim.’
‘Sanatana Dharma is perfect, but Hindus are not, and so, whatever bad things you see about Hinduism are not in fact, the fault of the religion or its teachings, but the misinterpretations and misguided actions of its deeply flawed practitioners. Why even the maker of this argument is flawed! <gotcha> In fact, there is no perfect Hindu.’
‘Fascism is perfect, but Fascists are not, and so, whatever bad things you see about Fascism are not in fact, the fault of the ideology or its teachings, but the misinterpretations and misguided actions of its deeply flawed practitioners. Why even the maker of this argument is flawed! <gotcha> In fact, there is no perfect Fascist.’
‘Humanism is perfect, but humans are not, and so, whatever bad things you see about Humanism are not in fact, the fault of the ideology or its stated tenets, but the misinterpretations and misguided actions of its deeply flawed practitioners. Why even the maker of this argument is flawed! <gotcha> In fact, there is no perfect human.’
You see how that works?
(Look up the ‘No true Scotsman’ fallacy for more fun)
So, why is it difficult to see anyone else’s viewpoint when it is so simple to see that there are no such ‘true, pure, perfect practitioners’ of your ‘one, true, pure, perfect ideology.’ Why are we so convinced that our ideology indeed somehow holds the key to the ills that plague humankind and that if only more people were to practice it in its purest form, everything would be fine? Why do we debate and fight with each other to prove how badly the opposing ideology has performed over some real-life example while how great our ideology is compared to that?
I think I know the reason: We compare the worst real-life examples in other people’s beliefs with the best theoretical ones in ours.
Since we have spoken so much about economic theories and religious beliefs, let me end this with a simpler example that will be more palatable, and therefore, hopefully, more acceptable to you all: the Indian belief that all Americans are stupid.
I do not need to explain this myth to the Indians reading this. But, for the non-Indians, it goes something like this: Most Indian short-term travellers to the USA come back with stories of Americans not being the brightest of the lot. That they can’t understand basic logic, or do mental arithmetic, or understand common courtesies, or be knowledgeable about the world in general, and so on. They are amazed, amused, and appalled at the general lack of understanding about the world and about their own environment, about science and maths, about global awareness and a sense of their place in humanity, and so on. They come back from their vacations in the USA and crack jokes on how stupid the Americans are, as they hold forth about their stories from their last trip to Boston or LA or NYC or wherever.
This is disingenuous, to say the least. Because those Indians who can and do indeed travel to the USA for vacations come from certain privileged socio-economic strata, with a certain educational background, linguistic skills, and other basic tools of logic, reading, knowledge, and general awareness. They are also most likely those that are aware of American pop culture due to Hollywood, music, the web, and other media exposure. Lastly, the USA punches its weight. It is, for all practical purposes (though not for long), the world’s only superpower, and most people anywhere in the world with an internet connection have heard or read something about it and the goings-on there, in contrast with Americans, who may not have much exposure to non-USA issues.
But that is not material to this post. The argument I make is this: When you go to the USA, who do you meet, engage, and interact with most? Airport staff, cab and bus drivers, hotel bellboys, cleaners and housekeepers, tourist trap souvenir salesmen, waiters, museum guards, burger flippers, cashiers at the mall or money exchange, low-level cops, petty entertainers, and so on. Unless you are there for a specific scientific conference, you hardly meet and talk to their doctors, scientists, engineers, local leaders, lawyers, pilots, coders, chip designers, architects, army officers who graduated from West Point, songwriters, teachers, Nobel laureates, pop stars, movie actors, scriptwriters, astronauts, bankers, entrepreneurs, and so on. Those who do, do not come away with the same impression as yours. Because you, the elite tourist from India, who is probably one of the above list (doctor, engineer, lawyer, scientist, entrepreneur, banker, architect, etc.) are only interacting at a specific socio-economic level (because that is what tourists do). Your sample size is flawed, to begin with, and so you end up comparing apples to oranges (Look up ‘Selection Bias’ for fun), where you match your arithmetic skills or knowledge about the Kashmir issue or literary wit with theirs, and find them wanting, thereby concluding, completely erroneously, that they are somehow weaker than you’d have imagined an American, a citizen of a world-beating super-power to be.
This is exactly what happens to us when we trade barbs on ideology. We take our best, purest, most theoretical example and then contrast it with the other side’s worst, most corrupt, practical one and then point fingers and laugh at the vast difference it shows up, wondering why the other side cannot see it in the same light.
Does that mean all ideologies are equally good in their purest theoretical form and all equally evil in their practical avatars? Absolutely not. Surely, there are objective and valid reasons to choose one over the other. This post is not about pushing this one v/s that on to the reader. This is simply an observation of our biases when it comes to defending and holding up what we believe versus demeaning and mocking what others do.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk! Please collect your bottles of fruit spread on the way out as compensation for reading so far.
P.S: To avoid any misunderstanding by people who (think they) know me, let me declare that I still believe all religions are shit, regardless of their purity in theory or stupidity in practice. This is not an endorsement of any religion or condoning of the argument for a SCOTU. This is just me rambling about human nature and how we tend to argue. This is me introspecting as I await communication regarding a report I submitted. This is me having too much spare time to kill before this annus horribilis finally dies. This is me intellectually masturbating because I have nothing better on my hands (yes, I intended that pun), and if that is a sentence you wish you had not read, it serves you right for reading such long posts.
