It is easy– almost obvious– to dismiss far-left ideology as unrealistic and unattainable. Whether you have only a perfunctory understanding of the modern world or you’re a serious historical scholar, you are likely to reach the same honest conclusions about human nature and social constructs: humans are selfish, submissive, hierarchical, and generally stupid, and society is most when structured accordingly.
Certainly, there is an element of “confirmation bias” to this assertion: the predominant society that has thus far prevailed through most of history is built on these suppositions, and so of course it indoctrinates us from birth to perceive the world through this lens and propagate the same beliefs and values. As with any concept that challenges our accepted worldviews, we will instinctively reject the concept because it violates so many foundational aspects of our psyche.
Of course there’s a God and an eternal soul, how preposterous to think that everything is random and we become dust when we die.
Of course there’s no God or eternal soul, how infantile to think there is some figure judging our every action to reward or punish us for infinite time.
Of course collectivist anarchism will fail, people are greedy and selfish and require motivation and coercion to contribute to society.
Our brains are evolutionarily sculpted upon a foundation of pattern recognition and deductive reasoning; the many subsequent layers of self-identity and high-level reasoning demand a certain permanence from these patterns. If the sun didn’t rise tomorrow, most of us would lose our psychological shit as our fundamental understanding of existence would be disrupted.
So then, it is fair to say that our indoctrinated belief system is presented with observation of the modern world and historical evidence and concludes that selfishness and laziness are human nature, unfortunate problems built right into our firmware due to evolutionary pressure, original sin, a careless creator, or the devil or something. Any attempt to restructure society to be more egalitarian, cooperative, or self-determinant is doomed to fail because it goes against human nature.
The most common socioeconomic counter-argument is the age-old “nature vs. nurture” debate, suggesting that what we define as human nature is really just social conditioning, brought about by the same cycle of indoctrination and confirmation described above. There is, however, a different approach: human nature is selfish and lazy, but we should aspire to overcome it.
This is not a novel thesis; in fact, it’s pretty much the summary of every religion, like, ever. Whether it’s Dharmic transcendence or eternal salvation, this premise is at the root of religious teachings concerning individual behavior. Even atheistic morality is built upon the same concept of suppressing our instinctual urges to harm others. Why, then, are we so averse to the idea in the context of societal behavior?
To put it more plainly, of course modern society could not immediately transition to an anarchist utopia, free of police and hierarchy and debt and coercion. And in fact, we will probably never be able to do so, particularly if we wish to retain individuality and cultural heterogeneity; we may find that there are limits to how much we can “reform human nature.” Interpersonal conflict will still arise, power imbalances will occur, tribalism and moral righteousness will stifle progress, and almost certainly a host of other challenges that we can’t even foresee.
But why wouldn’t we try?
When most of us are struggling to achieve a spiritual or personal transcendence of our human shortcomings, why are we so afraid to strive for social transcendence? Why do we feel beholden to the current structure? We are the structure. The structure weakens with every person that refuses to participate, and once a critical mass of non-participants is achieved, it ceases to exist altogether.
It’s not a fantasy. It’s more real than most of us imagine.
We just have to try.
