Altruist Philosopher Auguste Comte on This Day in History

This Day in History: Socialist philosopher Auguste Comte died on this day in 1857. He was the man who coined the term "altruism" and believed that man's highest ideal was to live for others. 

Julius Lloyd wrote in 1884:

"The reasonableness and consistency of M. Comte's doctrine suffer by his arbitrary choice of certain names as representative of Humanity in the past. The selection of 'those who have played their part worthily in life," assumes a power of deciding what is worthy or unworthy, which begs the whole question as to what is the governing principle of morals. The entire scheme depends on the manner in which this choice is exercised, for the ideal of Humanity is defined by means of the representative names which are taken. M. Comte's calendar of names exhibits his own ideal, but not that of any one who differs from him. Mankind are far from being agreed as to the chief characteristics of worth. If Dante, Milton, and Goethe, to take three of the most discerning intellects, were to nominate "those who have played their part worthily in life,' their choice would differ widely in the result. A system of morals, in which so much depends on individual judgment, has no right to profess universality. It is really eclectic, and its pretended comprehensiveness is an illusion.

There is an obvious resemblance between Comte's Altruism and Christian morality, which makes it important to note the particulars in which they are agreed, and those in which they are opposed. They have in common the inculcation of brotherly love as a supreme duty, the worship and imitation of an ideal Humanity, the separation of a select body from the world at large. But Comte's system is in other respects not only distinct, but antagonistic to Christianity. God and Christ are excluded with a jealous intolerance. What is retained is a Brotherhood without a Fatherhood, a Body without a Head. What Comte offers as an ideal of Humanity is a Torso of Christianity, which he has mutilated. It is a curious contradiction of the first principle of Altruism, that the modern gospel of unselfishness should be a selfish plagiarism, in which a large part of the Christian morality is republished with the Author's name expunged.

On one point, however, Comte's Altruism advances beyond the limits of Christian doctrine. He teaches that, instead of loving our neighbour as ourselves, we should endeavour not to love ourselves at all. And this, which is the most original feature in Comte's doctrine, is claimed by his followers as an improvement on Christianity.

A fair comparison of the two will show that this fancied superiority is a dream of the study, and betrays a want of acquaintance with human nature. To exclude self-love is to take away the natural provision for self-preservation and self-culture, which are necessary conditions of the welfare of society. On the other hand, to make self-love a standard of brotherly love, as in the precept, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,' is to supply the most effective means by which brotherly love can promote its own object. Altruism without Egoism would be a vague yearning for the happiness of others, without any clear idea of happiness, what it is, or how it is to be obtained. If we suppose a company of pedestrians, each troubled in mind to be sure that his companions' boots fit them comfortably, and indifferent to his own, we should have a picture of a state of society in which Egoism was extinguished and Altruism remained. It would be necessary to find some kind of substitute for Egoism, in order to keep alive the sensibility to pleasure and pain, which is as necessary for the happiness of others as for our own. A man who wishes to make others happy has more power to do so in proportion as he feels sympathy in their pleasure; and thus Egoism has a function preparatory to Altruism. On strictly Altruist principles arts and sciences would languish. That which impelled Columbus to the discovery of America, and led on the inventors of the printing press and the steam engine, was not a prevision of the social benefits to follow, but rather an unsatisfied desire of the mind to accomplish a noble object."

Many today still uphold altruism as the highest moral ideal. I don't. However, Altruism simply does not put food on the table. As Adam Smith remarked back in 1776, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

What Ayn Rand Meant by Altruism
https://fredericbastiat1850.blogspot.com/2017/12/what-ayn-rand-meant-by-altruism.html

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Lysenkoism on This Day in History

 

This day in history: Trofim Lysenko was dismissed from his position as Director of the Institute of Genetics at the Soviet Academy of Sciences on this day in 1965. 

Lysenko's ideas highlights the uselessness of science when mixed with government. "During the late 1940s and 1950s, a pseudo-scientific concept based on Marxist-Leninist ideology became internationally known as ‘Lysenkoism’. Lysenkoism was a neo-Lamarckian idea, claiming that in crop plants, such as wheat, environmental influences are heritable via all cells of the organism. Lysenkoism was applied to agriculture during the Stalin era with disastrous consequences." Source

"Lysenkoism was an extension of Lamarckian evolution which was espoused by the Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko in the early 20th century, and an excellent example of politically-motivated deceit used to 'prove' an ideologically-based theory. Geneticists and biologists in general who disagreed with Lysenkoism lost their positions In addition, many geneticists were imprisoned and executed for their bourgeois science, and agricultural policies based on Lysenkoism that were adopted under the Communist leaders Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong caused famines and the death of millions. Lysenkoism adopted Lamarck's idea of "acquired characteristics," which states that the traits an organism develops during its life are passed on to their descendants. The theory was given enormous political support in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s until the 1950s." Source

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The USSR on This Day in History

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This day in history: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formed on this day in 1922.

From Daniel Pryor, writing back in 2017

This November marked 100 years since the October Revolution and the beginning of the Soviet Union’s disastrous 69-year experiment with communism. While the horrors of Nazism are well-known, half of British 16- to 24-year-olds have never heard of Lenin, let alone the Holodomor terror-famine.

And although explicit apologists for the Soviet Union are no longer a significant intellectual force in Britain (except those who advise the Labour leadership), my generation is largely unaware of what life was like in the USSR. The once vibrant field of Sovietology is slowly dying, and the failures of central planning are fading from memory.

Compared to the US, economic growth in the USSR was anaemic: the gap between the two widened rather than narrowed over time.

The Adam Smith Institute’s new book Back in the USSR, by José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente, aims to illustrate exactly what life was like in the Soviet Union. Were there queues to buy food? How good were Soviet appliances? How did the USSR industrialize so quickly? Was there poverty, unemployment, or inequality? In painstaking detail, Ricón assesses the historical evidence and the claims of leading scholars to provides answers to these questions. The resulting picture is grim.

Economic Stagnation and the Labor Force

At the root of the answer to these questions is the USSR’s productive capabilities. While Soviet GDP growth is sometimes considered to have been exemplary, one cannot look at such figures in isolation. Compared to the United States, economic growth in the USSR was anaemic: the gap between the two widened rather than narrowed over time.

And even this growth came at a cost; with consumption intentionally sacrificed in the name of faster growth rates. Stalin may have managed to achieve a higher level of growth than a counterfactual Tsarist Russia, but this came at a huge price to its population in terms of economic welfare costs alone (without factoring in famine, repression, and terror).

It was also unsustainable, as later stagnation shows. Catch-up growth – adding more capital – is something that planned economies have been able to do. Eventually, however, they reach a point where they need to improve the quality of that capital. That means innovation, something with which they have struggled. Thanks to the inherent problems with central planning, low productivity plagued the USSR. Communism, it turns out, just isn’t very efficient.

Workers in the late Soviet Union were entitled to less than half the amount of holiday leave as OECD countries at the time.

At least everyone had a job, right? Well, sort of. Thanks to Soviet methods of allocating workers to different jobs, factories hoarded labor and created “fake jobs” in case more labor was needed in the future. This resulted in underemployment, with idle workers being underutilized. And working conditions in the USSR fell short of those in more capitalist countries. Workers in the late Soviet Union were entitled to less than half the amount of holiday leave as OECD countries at the time.

As for the idea that high female labor force participation was a feminist triumph for communism, this is difficult to square with Stalin’s abortion bans, legal barriers to divorce, and, by and large, the continuing role of women as homemakers and child-rearers in the Soviet Union. Women didn’t work because they were emancipated from gender norms: they did it because the unsustainable Soviet economic model required it.

Food, Clothing, and Health

These economic shortcomings made day-to-day life in the Soviet Union less than desirable. The average shirt you wear to work cost 10 percent of an average monthly wage: a bargain at just £170 when translated into present-day UK figures. A winter coat to protect you from the Russian cold? A whole month's salary, which might explain why almost a quarter of the Soviet population couldn’t afford one.

When it gets to your lunch break, you’ll only have to queue for a few hours before you enjoy twice as many potatoes as the equivalent American (although you’ll have to make do on half as much meat). Want to keep your leftovers in the fridge? You’ll only have to wait a few years for one. Don’t miss your one-hour collection slot though; you won’t get a second chance. If you want to drive home from work, rather than shiver in your £170 shirt because you can’t afford a winter coat, you’ll have to wait up to ten years for a car. There were only five million cars in the USSR in 1976; Americans owned nearly 100 million.

There were 30 times as many cases of typhoid and cancer detection rates were half as good as in the US.

At some point during your 10-year wait for a car, you might fall ill. Bad luck! The Soviet health system was atrocious. There were 30 times as many cases of typhoid, 20 times as many cases of measles, and cancer detection rates were half as good as in the US. And when compared to other developing countries, the USSR failed to deliver better healthcare outcomes despite having the highest physician-patient ratio in the world (42 per 10,000 population). While you’d be able to see a “qualified” physician, the quality of healthcare left a lot to be desired. Many medical school graduates were not even able to read an electrocardiogram.

As Back in the USSR explores in full detail, the consequences of central planning are dire. Communism promised utopia, but delivered nastier, poorer, and shorter lives.

Reprinted from CapX.

Daniel Pryor

Daniel Pryor is a Young Voices Advocate. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Communist Dictator Joseph Stalin on This Day in History

 

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This Day in History: Socialist Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin was born on this day in 1878. This murderous tyrant who killed more people than Hitler was actually nicknamed "Uncle Joe" by leaders in the West. This started with Franklin Delano Roosevelt who went to great lengths to warm the image of Stalin and the Soviet Union in the eyes of the public. FDR purposefully claimed that the Katyn massacre was committed by Germans, despite knowing that Stalin was behind this mass execution of nearly 22,000 Polish officers. 

I remember this quote from A.J. Jacob's 2005 book _The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World_: "If there’s one ironclad rule I’ve learned about government, it’s this: never trust a politician with the nickname 'Uncle.' You’ve got Uncle Joe Stalin … Ho Chi Minh, whose nickname was Uncle Ho. And for the trifecta, you’ve got [“Uncle”] Paul Kruger, the founder of South Africa’s nefarious Afrikaaner nation… So if you see an uncle on the ballot, do not be tempted to vote for him. He is not actually your uncle. He will not tell you funny jokes and pull nickels out of your ear. Instead, he may try to have you purged. Just to be safe, stay away from politicians named Papa as well."

Here are some quotes from Stalin to help you determine his character:

“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”

“Death is the solution to all problems. No man, no problem.”

“Gratitude is an illness suffered by dogs.”

“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”

“Education is a weapon, the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be struck down.”

“The press must grow day in and day out — it is our Party's sharpest and most powerful weapon.”

“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

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*FDR also admired Fascist Leader Benito Mussolini.

A Marxist Funeral on This Day in History

 

This Day in History: Communist Leader Vladimir Lenin attended the funeral for Laura Marx (Lafargue) on this day in 1911, the daughter of Karl Marx, who died in a suicide pact with her husband.

Laura was not the only child of Karl Marx to commit suicide.

The man that Karl Marx was is summed up nicely by Connor Tomlinson:

"Marx was an alcoholic who never washed. Boils covered his body, preventing him from sitting down.

He refused to work, and drove his family to destitution -- causing the deaths of his two sons from exposure and illness.

He raped his unpaid maid, and had Engels subsidize their illegitimate child.

He wrote poetry romanticizing the ingesting of poison -- the method by which two of his daughters would later commit suicide.

One of those daughters Marx disowned for marrying a Cuban man, who Marx insulted as ‘Negrillo’ and ‘The Gorilla’.

Marx was also explicitly genocidal -- calling for ‘revolutionary terror’, theft, and murder against the ill-defined 'bourgeoisie'.

He said ‘the next attempt of the French revolution’ should be so bloody that ‘beside [it] the French Revolution [would be] child’s play’.

He forecast a dictatorship would inevitably arise from this bloody revolution, and require absolute power to collectivize and redistribute property to achieve communism.

He idolized Mephistopheles from Faust, insisting that ‘Everything that exists deserves to perish.’

No wonder every experiment with Marxism produces mass murder, privation, starvation, tyranny, and Hell on Earth.

Long after his death, Marx's specter of contempt for existence itself haunts our civilization.

We would do good to rid ourselves of it."

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The USSR Changes its Wage System on This Day in History

 

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This day in history: On this day in 1969, the USSR (Soviet Russia) made a partial change in its economic policy to allow employers the option to pay some workers more than others based on production. The move, which one British newspaper commented was "in effect, based on the capitalist policy of higher wages for better workers" and to allow managers to fire inefficient ones, was approved by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party following the recommendations of Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin.

This was a major departure from the radical egalitarian roots of Communism/Socialism.

Communism/Socialism has always had a problem with incentives. "In a communist society there are no incentives, and the idea of profit is absent. People work only for the collective good, which results in a lack of drive towards innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship. There is no competition and there is no reward for going beyond the minimum requirements." Source

"Every communist philosophy comes down to some vague ideals and a lot of wishful thinking"  ~Jonathan Sher

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H.G. Wells and Stephen King on This Day in History

 

This day in history: English writer H.G. Wells was born on this day in 1866. He was a pioneering science-fiction author, novelist, futurist, and political theorist, best known for his science-fiction works, and in particular The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man.

American writer Stephen King was born on this day in 1947. King is best known for his horror fiction in works such as Carrie, Pet Sematary, It and The Shining. 

Both authors are the most popular writers over the past century. 

Both writers are also Leftists. Wells, a Fabian Socialist, despised human liberty, sneering, "Consider the clerks and girls who hurry to their work of a morning across Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, or Hungerford Bridge in London; go and see them, study their faces. They are free, with a freedom Socialism would destroy." An apologist for Stalinism, he visited the Soviet Union in 1934 and denied the Holodomor. In his advocacy of eugenics, he displayed contempt for human life, writing, "No doubt Utopia will kill all deformed and monstrous and evilly diseased births." In a 1932 speech at Oxford University, Wells exhorted his audience, “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.”

King has famously suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome. His obsessive hatred for Trump has even entered his new book Holly, which has reduced him from novelist to propagandist. Decades ago it was common knowledge that he used ghost writers, an idea that should not be dismissed considering that he is also a drug addict and alcoholic. 

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The Great Russian Purge on This Day in History

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This day in history: The Great Purge of the Soviet Union began on this day in 1936. 

From James Harris:  

Between the summer of 1936 and 1938, the regime of Joseph Stalin summarily executed 750,000 Soviet citizens without trial or any legal process. In the same period, more than a million others were sent to the labour camps of the Gulag, from where many would not return. In the history of a murderous regime, this was a period of exceptional state violence perpetrated against its own people.

The episode has always held a certain macabre fascination, but there are other more substantial reasons for drawing attention to it as we reach the 80th anniversary. In 1991, and then again in 2000, huge volumes of archival materials — millions of documents — were released to historians. It has taken years to digest this material and make sense of it, but new and striking findings have made it possible to rewrite the history of what has come to be known as the Terror, or the Great Purge. My recent book The Great Fear is one example of this. These findings help us better understand contemporary Russia, its current, authoritarian leader and the reverence many Russians continue to feel for Stalin.

Khrushchev wanted to insulate himself from blame.

In the West, the public perception of Stalin and the Terror lingers from the period immediately after the dictator’s death in 1953. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, wanted to limit the power of the fearsome Soviet political police. But he also wanted to communicate to the Soviet political elite that they would not be blamed for the violence of the Stalin era, though they had been deeply and directly involved. So Khrushchev blamed the Terror on Stalin and his “cult of personality”, and historians in the West followed his lead.

They – particularly following the lead of Robert Conquest in his 1967 book The Great Terror – presented Stalin as a bloodthirsty, paranoid, political opportunist determined to secure total power over all other considerations. The Terror of 1936-1938 was therefore understood as the culmination of a drive to create a personal dictatorship.

What Kept Stalin Awake at Night

Archival revelations have not, it must be said, established that Stalin was actually a nice guy. Quite the contrary. But they have poked rather large holes in the traditional story.

For example, it became clear rather early on that the majority of victims of the Terror were ordinary workers and peasants — people who presented no direct challenge to Stalin’s power. When Stalin’s private papers were released in 2000, historians initially expected to see a gap between them and Stalin’s public self-presentation as a loyal follower of Lenin and defender of the Revolution. But it wasn’t there. In public and in private, Stalin was committed to building socialism, not to building a personal dictatorship for its own sake.

The purges were motivated by a precise ideological goal.

So what was the motivation behind the Terror? The answers required a lot more digging, but it gradually became clearer that the violence of the late 1930s was driven by fear. Most Bolsheviks, Stalin among them, believed that the revolutions of 1789, 1848 and 1871 had failed because their leaders hadn’t adequately anticipated the ferocity of the counter-revolutionary reaction from the establishment. They were determined not to make the same mistake.

So they created elaborate systems for gathering information on external and internal threats to their revolution. But those systems were far from perfect. They painted threats in far darker colours than was warranted. For example, the Bolsheviks spent much of the 1920s and 1930s anticipating invasion from coalitions of hostile capitalist states — coalitions that did not exist. Other perceived threats were also exaggerated beyond all proportion: scheming factions, disloyal officials, wreckers, saboteurs.

Stalin interpreted failure as treason.

Many of these “threats” were products of Stalin’s overambitious plans. He had demanded 100% fulfillment of production targets that could not be met, and he and his colleagues in the Kremlin misinterpreted the resultant dissent, resistance and breakdowns as evidence of counter-revolutionary conduct. And certain workers and peasants – who had reason to resent the regime – were viewed as dangerous potential recruits to this fictional counter-revolution.

The Preemptive War at Home

By the mid-1930s, the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the militarists in Japan, both stridently anti-communist, posed a very real threat to the USSR. War was then on the horizon, and Stalin felt he had no choice but to take preemptive action against what he saw as a potential fifth column – a group that would undermine the larger collective.

The resultant maelstrom of violence massively weakened the USSR rather than strengthening it, but the ultimate victory of Soviet forces in World War II appeared to justify the Terror. And the emergent Cold War seemed to justify the view that the capitalist world would stop at nothing to undermine Soviet power.

The KGB portrayed itself as the heroes.

The Soviet political police, renamed the KGB in 1954, never recognised the monstrous crimes that they had contributed to under Stalin’s direction. They perceived themselves as heroes of the story, brilliantly anticipating and intercepting the evil deeds of the regime’s enemies.

Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, rose from the ranks of the KGB in the 1970s. He was trained in its methods and steeped in its mentality. While one should not leap to the conclusion that he is a prisoner of his early career, the echoes of the KGB (and Stalin’s) thinking are present in the messages delivered relentlessly by the state-controlled media.

Putin is calling plays from Stalin's book.

The population is told that the US and EU want to reduce Russia to the status of a third-rate power, to take control over her resources and subvert her values. Putin does not propose officially to rehabilitate the figure of Stalin, but he does little to challenge the public presentation of his predecessor as someone who made Russia a great power, and who stood up to the West.

Today, we better understand the exaggerated fears that sparked the paroxysm of state violence that was the Great Terror. But in Russia, the echoes of those same fears prevent an open discussion of Stalin’s crimes, and serve to reinforce Putin’s authoritarianism.

---

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

James Harris

James Harris is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Leeds.

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Philosopher Karl Popper on This Day in History

 

This day in history: Philosopher, academic and social commentator Karl Popper was born on this day in 1902. One of his greatest works was "The Open Society and Its Enemies." 

"An open society is a place that has a lot of intellectual pluralism and a lot of diversity of viewpoints. Instead of trying to eliminate bias by eliminating biased people, or instead of eliminating wrong hypotheses by eliminating the people who hold those hypotheses, it instead tries to pit bias and prejudice against other biases and prejudices.

It does that by forcing contention, forcing critical argument, and forcing people to persuade each other over time. That's really what science is. It's really what journalism is. It's what all the professions that are engaged in the reality-based community are ultimately trying to do: use these tools of critical comparison and discourse to persuade each other. It takes physical coercion off the table. One way to prove that Nick Gillespie is wrong would be to shoot him, right? That's the most traditional way to do it. It gets rid of the hypothesis. It does not advance knowledge.

Karl Popper, among others, pointed out that the open society is incomparably better at producing knowledge than any other society, because it allows us to make errors and not be punished for making errors. It allows us to make errors, in fact, much more quickly. That's the secret of science. You make errors much faster.

It's also a more peaceful society, because you're settling differences of opinion without using coercion to do it. You're marginalizing bad ideas." Source

We need more of that, instead of the present day censorship and cancel culture.

Popper also criticized Hegel and Marx, knowing that their ideas led to the totalitarianism of the 20th century. He agreed with Schopenhauer's view that Hegel "was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense."

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The Contradictory World of Star Trek on This Day in History

Sally Kellerman and William Shatner in "Where No Man Has Gone Before"

On this day in history: Filming began on the second television pilot for Gene Roddenberry's proposed science fiction series, Star Trek, on this day in 1965. "Where No Man Has Gone Before" retained actor Leonard Nimoy as "Mr. Spock", who had played the same role in the first pilot, "The Cage", but now featured Canadian actor William Shatner in the lead role as the starship's captain.

I am a Star Trek fan, but I am a little at odds with the economics of the Star Trek universe.

From Ilya Somin:

"The Federation isn’t just socialist in the hyperbolic sense in which some conservatives like to denounce anyone to the left of them as socialist. It’s socialist in the literal sense that the government has near-total control over the economy and the means of production.

Especially by the period portrayed in The Next Generation, the government seems to control all major economic enterprises, and there do not seem to be any significant private businesses controlled by humans in Federation territory. Star Fleet characters, such as Captain Picard, boast that the Federation has no currency and that humans are no longer motivated by material gain and do not engage in capitalist economic transactions.

The supposed evils of free markets are exemplified by the Ferengi, an alien race who exemplify all the stereotypes socialists typically associate with “evil capitalists.” The Ferengi are unrelentingly greedy and exploitative. Their love of profit seems to be exceeded only by their sexism—they do not let females work outside the household, even when it would increase their profits to do so.

The problem here is not just that Star Trek embraces socialism: it’s that it does so without giving any serious consideration to the issue. For example, real-world socialist states have almost always resulted in poverty and massive political oppression, piling up body counts in the tens of millions.

But Star Trek gives no hint that this might be a danger, or any explanation of how the Federation avoided it. Unlike on many other issues, where the producers of the series recognize that there are multiple legitimate perspectives on a political issue, they seem almost totally oblivious to the downsides of socialism." Source

What makes this all strange is that Gene Roddenberry was a fan of one of the greatest defenders of Capitalism, Ayn Rand. "Roddenberry supposedly named Yeoman Janice Rand as a nod to Ayn Rand....In Gene Roddenberry's sci-fi series, Andromeda, there is a colony called 'The Ayn Rand Station' founded by a species of 'Nietzscheans.'" Source

J. Neil Schulman interviewed Ayn Rand for the New York Daily News. In that interview it was noted that "she watched Star Trek and Spock was her favorite character." Source

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