Socialism and Competition, article in Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine 1910
As to eliminating competition, we might as well speak of stopping the movement of the waves upon the ocean, of the clouds in the sky. How would strength be developed, were there no rivalry, no competition? If you are strong, it is because you have had to do battle with circumstance and competitors. If I am strong, it is because I have been a fighter, from my youth up. As long as the contest is a fair one, nobody is wronged. The loser pays— that's all. Over the whole universe is written by the hand of Jehovah the stern old Roman adage vae victis—woe to vanquished. Good heavens! How bat-like these Socialists are! They ignore the simplest facts that lie right before their eyes. On the earth, in the sea, in the air, is the fiercest competition, going on by night and by day. The race is to the swift, the battle to the strong. Nature has no pity, no hate, no love. She smites all who violate her laws, whether we know what those laws are, or not. You violate some unwritten rule as to health, and down you go, no matter how good and useful your life may be. The Pestilence does not spare the righteous: Famine takes no account of your faith: Misfortune never separates sheep from goats. "Obey my laws, or perish", is the inexorable command of Nature. The man who fails to see this is either hopelessly stupid, or the victim of hereditary superstition. Be honest with yourself, Reader. See things as they are. Be as hopeful as you can; work, like fighting fire, to make the world better; but don't enwrap yourself in delusions.
Competition is the law of life, and the survival is to the fittest. Ever and ever, Nature works to get rid of the feeble. Ever and ever, she labors to evolve the perfect. The wisdom of the sages has been devoted to the fixing of the rules which govern competition; and so long as those rules are followed, competition is as natural and as harmless as the flow of the sap and the birth of the flowers.
Work! Without haste and without rest. WORK! All nature cries it. The constellations on high proclaim it. The restless tides of the seas, bear witness to it. The bounding blood in our veins, the crowding thoughts in our minds, the eager longing in our souls are ever present, never failing reminders that the Hymn of Life sounds the order for the battle and the march. The muffled drums within us beat the everlasting Reveille; and with the sun of each day, begins the fight anew.
Abolish all this? How could we? The stream cannot rise higher than its source, and humanity cannot escape its own limitations.
Co-operation on a small scale is a perfect success. Why? Because it competes. It brings the power of unionized effort to bear against individual enterprise. But no Socialist experiment ever succeeded. It has been tried, over and over again, both in America and in Europe, in ancient as well as modern times. Wayland himself chose a nice lot of human angels, and tried his fad at Ruskin, Tennessee. He discovered that his cherubs were just human bipeds, and Ruskin failed to become a Paradise. Instead, there was a lovely row among the Elect, and the colony was torn to pieces by factions. Scores of times, carefully selected men and women, who imagined themselves congenially altruistic, have turned their self-complacent backs upon us common clod-hoppers, and gone off to themselves to make a Garden of Eden. But never have they succeeded in making one. The serpent invariably enters; and it is the old story of Paradise Lost.
If the selected colonies fail to make a success of Socialism, how could the miscellaneous mass do it? If elemental human traits bring dismal failure to the chosen, congenial, altruistic groups, how can a person gifted with ordinary common-sense bring himself to believe that a similar experiment would succeed, when made with all the wicked people taken into the venture? If Socialism meets with invariable failure, when tried by the best people, could you reasonably expect better results from it, when the worst people are included in the venture?
No comments:
Post a Comment