Why is socialism so attractive to millenials and
hippies? To me it’s a mystery. I don’t know how anyone can advocate a
socioeconomic model that is repressive and usually ends in disaster. The CATO Institute held a policy forum to
discuss that very question. Here is an excerpt
from Reason Magazine:
One problem they quickly encountered was
how to define socialism in the first place. Is it pervasive, state-directed
central planning? A Scandinavian-style safety net? Something else? Sen. Bernie
Sanders of Vermont, who pursued the Democratic presidential nomination while
describing himself as a socialist, attracted a big following among voters under
age 30. But most of those voters actually rejected the idea of the government
running businesses or owning the means of production; they tended to besafety-net
redistributionists who
want to tax the rich to pay for health care and college education. And this
was, in fact, the platform Sanders was running on.
I came across that same scenario. The millennials I ran into wanted a
single-payer health care system, but abhorred government takeover of private
business. There seems to be a disconnect
from reality with these people.
Cosmides suggested
the contemporary left/right divide rests on the question of whether people are
inherently good or bad. The liberal thinks people are good but are ruined by
exploitation; the conservative thinks people are bad and their selfish impulses
must be reined in by cultural norms and controls. In fact, she continued,
evolutionary psychology shows that human nature is composed of an extensive set
of neural programs that are triggered by different experiences. Human beings
evolved to handle the social challenges encountered in small bands of 50 to 200
people. Globe-spanning market economies strain our brains.
Another
phenomenon is an abhorrence of organized religion and a reverence for
multiculturalism. Millennials I spoke
with told me religion is the number one killer of all people. Of course, they would have to ignore the past
two centuries. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and
Pol Pot weren’t actually killing people over the Eucharist or the Trinity. These mass murderers killed people to
maintain power over the state. Hell, the
French Revolution was overtly anti-Christian and look at how many people they
murdered over their version of equality, liberty and fraternity.
And as for
Islam, I don’t consider that a religion at all.
Yet, I will concede that reprehensible socio-political ideology in the
guise of religion is responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths since its
inception.
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