Socialism and Nationalism: Two Failed Ideas
Marx's prediction that markets will inevitably fail was wrong; and there are no true nations on large continental landmasses
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"FAIL stamp" by hans.gerwitz is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Cognitive dissonance is one of the main themes of the Sharpen Your Axe project. As regular readers will remember, it is an uncomfortable feeling that we all experience when faced with contradiction. It is particularly acute when we consider our identity to be under attack.
When we experience cognitive dissonance, our psychology will always lean on the side of rejecting any criticism (or feedback or inconvenient facts) by doubling down on our starting position and counter-attacking against the person who we see as a threat.
Unfortunately, our brains didn’t evolve in circumstances that would have favoured a particularly strong link to outside reality. Our instincts often lead us in the wrong direction - we often prefer to hold wrong views with certainty than we do to rebuild our worldview on more solid ground. People who hold one simplified model of reality with great conviction can be attractive to us. Our ancestors could hold many incorrect opinions and still reproduce; and the same is true today.
Developing a mindset that is reflective (sensitive to feedback loops) takes time and effort. Even if we spend some time sharpening our axes, other people will often find our modest conclusions irritating. This is a problem for those of us who believe in developing a methodology and seeing where it takes us. When we share our findings with the group, we will often provoke extreme cognitive dissonance in some people who prefer to start with the answer and work backwards from there.
Today’s essay will almost certainly irritate many people on the left and many people on the right. The reason is simple. Both sides of the horseshoe are dominated by failed ideas - socialism in the case of the left and nationalism in the case of the right. Regular readers will be unsurprised that I have turned off the comments due to such a shocking conclusion!
I hate to break it to my friends on the left but Karl Marx’s infamous prediction that a market-based system would inevitably fail due to its own contradictions is rather like an amateur engineer sitting in the British Library and announcing to the world that bicycles are impossible. The rider is never perfectly balanced, so he or she will inevitably fall off.
This argument sounds quite convincing if you have never seen someone riding a bike. There is just one small problem: the combination of forward motion and constant adjustment means that cyclists can stay upright despite their lack of balance at any one time. Likewise, markets might have their ups and downs, but they are here to stay; and attempts to replace them have been outright failures every single time.
Marx also developed one simplified model of reality, which involved a strong link between our economic circumstances, the ideas in our heads and the allegedly inevitable direction of history leading to socialism. Later thinkers, most notably Antonio Gramsci, tried to save his philosophy from its failures by adding ideas back into the picture and giving them a little autonomy, but it wasn’t quite enough. Sadly for Marxists, we should abandon ideologies that have failed at a fundamental level instead of trying to patch up some of their minor flaws.
If you are a convinced socialist, you will probably be experiencing cognitive dissonance right now. Do you feel words like “neo-liberalism” and “trickle-down economics” of “fascism” bubbling away in your head right now? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: socialism doesn’t work, but social democracy is a fine worldview. A market-based economy really does work better if you combine it with a welfare state and liberal democracy (a cross-ideological approach I call institutionalism).
I hate to break it my friends on the right but nations don’t exist in nature, particularly on great landmasses like Europe or Asia. There might be the odd exception, particularly on islands like Japan, but they are few and far between. Mostly, modern states create popular sovereignty and not the other way round. Packages of social norms face evolutionary pressures, but diversity within modern societies is always a given, particularly due to personal freedom, immigration and emergent trends.
Any talk of common ancestry is tricky. Nationalists might be troubled to know that if we go back far enough, we all share the same ancestors. Any differences between modern populations are mostly wafer-thin. We are one species. Nationalists might want to split up different groups of people like insects, but we all have much more in common than you might realise.
Nationalism was probably invented in Tudor England. The ideology has a troubled history. Attempts to divide Europe up into different nation-states after World War I failed miserably and led directly to World War II; just as Russian imperialism is leading to war in the contemporary world (as well as backing regressive nationalist movements within Europe).
The post-War European project is based on sharing sovereignty. The nation-state, standing alone, is a failed project. Any possible exceptions are largely based on creating safe spaces for groups of people who have been persecuted by their nationalistic neighbours, but even then they will have more secure futures if they find a way of pooling sovereignty with other countries in the same neighbourhood.
If you are a convinced nationalist, you will probably be experiencing cognitive dissonance right now. Maybe I am just proposing a slightly different national project from you? Sadly not! I believe in countries pooling their sovereignty; lightly regulated immigration; and democratic institutions that can help us get rid of flag-waving elected officials when they inevitably become toxic. Sorry!
There are dangers to the critical approach I have described in this essay. If we point out the failures of socialism, we will find many nationalists agreeing with us; and if we discuss the many failures of nationalism, we will find many socialists agreeing with us. It is important to be thoughtful about how we frame our criticism.
Ideas matter. Socialism has a gravitational pull on the left of the horseshoe; while nationalism also has a gravitational pull on to the right. It takes a certain amount of stubbornness to dig in and resist being pulled in either direction. Being a floating voter can be helpful in this context.
The observation that socialism and nationalism are both failed ideas can help us understand the UK election, which is due on 4 July. Labour leader Keir Starmer is ahead in the polls by a country mile after moving the party to a centrist social-democratic platform and away from old-school socialism. Meanwhile, Conservative leader and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is due to receive an epic loss at the polls after his party has spent the best part of the decade embracing British nationalism.
Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn (an old-school socialist, who led the UK Labour Party between 2015 and 2020), would have been a terrible Prime Minister; but that is not an endorsement of Brexit (a nationalistic project promoted by the Conservatives around the same time). By the same token, Brexit is a terrible idea and deporting refugees to Rwanda from the UK is shameful, but that is not an endorsement of Corbyn or the hard left.
Funnily enough, Corbyn only offered lukewarm and token opposition to Brexit in 2016. The horseshoe theory of politics is very credible. The left-right spectrum bends; and people at the ends who embraced failed ideas often have more in common with each other than they do with moderates on the same side, who tend to install the updates in their worldviews.
We can see this particularly clearly in Spain, where peripheral nationalists and old-school socialists often see eye to eye, despite in theory having very different perspectives on how the world is meant to work. Stubborn attachment to failed ideas is a big part of the picture. We can see something similar with the supposedly internationalist members of the left who adopt Palestinian nationalism.
People who believe in socialism and nationalism will often be drawn to populism, which is another failed approach to politics. Populist leaders are often narcissists, who can’t handle honest opposition and indulge in democratic backsliding. Power slowly corrupts them, leading to bad results for society.
It is also worth mentioning that fascism is such a dreadful ideology because it unites revolutionary socialism with nationalism - the worst of the left and the right, respectively. At the same time, the centre left and the centre right have split classical liberalism between them, with the former inheriting socially progressive views and the latter inheriting economic liberalism.
Socialists and nationalists also have a somewhat top-down vision of society. Politicians are seen as architects, who can redesign society based on a blueprint. More fruitful approaches instead see politicians as gardeners, who can create the conditions for change, while trimming unwanted developments and nurturing good ones.
There are many gardener-like ideologies that can fit within institutionalism, as long as the basic ideas are held lightly by pragmatic moderates. Progressivism (the idea that society will gradually move away from historical injustices), feminism (the idea that women have historically been dealt a poor hand), environmentalism (the idea that we need to stop emitting quite so many greenhouse gases), social democracy (the idea that capitalism works better with a welfare state), liberalism (the idea that society flourishes when you mostly let individuals and families take decisions for themselves), centrism (stealing the best ideas from left and right), centre-right conservatism (the idea that we should be slow to do away with actually existing institutions that have stood the test of time) and Christian democrats (who helped rebuild a war-torn Europe) will all tend to give society better results than top-down ideologies like socialism or nationalism.
If you are a convinced socialist or nationalist who has got to the end of this essay, you are probably happening what would happen if you abandoned your failed ideology. What should you believe in instead? My answer might trouble you by seeming much too little and personal. Believe in fact-checking and probability theory. Believe in creating value for other people and friendship. Fall in love with another flawed human being and raise kids together. Read good books. Take a hobby a little too seriously, but think hard about how you talk about it. Volunteer.
If you really insist on changing the whole world, I have two final suggestions for you. First of all, learn to meditate! It is easier to change the way you see the world than it is to change the reality outside our heads. Choosing the attitude you take to everything outside your control is the last freedom. Exercise it.
Secondly, if you really continue to insist on changing the world, found, join or invest in a disruptive startup. The odds will always be against you, but once in a while a project will succeed; and who is to say it won’t be the one you back?
The comments are closed, for reasons discussed above. If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Cognitive dissonance and open-source intelligence
Our instincts can lead us astray
Intellectual virtues and feedback loops
Problems with the left and right
Marx’s failed prophecy (part one and part two)
Misunderstanding critics of socialism
Institutionalism (part one and part two)
Sovereignty, social norms and diversity
Troubling maths for nationalists (part one and part two)
A short history of nationalism
Cooperative apes and dividing people like insects
Nationalism is war, Russian imperialism and Russian interference
The Spanish left and nationalism
Narcissism, democratic backsliding and the corruptive nature of power
Progressivism & feminism, environmentalism, social democracy, liberalism, centrism and centre-right conservatism
Fact-checking and probability theory
Learn to meditate and the last freedom
Further Reading
Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of a Classic Theory by Joel M. Cooper
Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes by Aurelian Craiutu
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef
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