Devon Eriksen can be counted on to write some thought provoking and challenging ideas.

This is the socialist worldview in a nutshell.
Socialists believe the following:
1. All progress is social. This means that all human problems are solved by rearranging collective human behavior.
2. How to rearrange human behavior to solve problems is already known.
3. Problems therefore exist because there are people who don’t want to behave in this known fashion.
4. Therefore, problems exist because certain people are in the way of progress. Socialist politicians may be grifters who believe in nothing, but their (living) voters, the socialist true believers, hate you, and this is why.
They believe you, your existence, your non-compliance with their plans, is all that stands between humanity and paradise. This is why they will always murder you if they have power. This is why unchecked socialism always leads to the censor, the secret policeman tapping your phone, the neighbors dragged away in the night, the torture chamber, the gulag, the mass grave. Because if you think that nothing stands between you and paradise but stubborn people, then you think you can murder your way to paradise.
When a socialist demands socialism, you either comply or you do not. If you do not comply, he wants to murder you. If you do not comply, then the socialist policy he enacts not only fails to bring about paradise, it makes things worse, so he demands a further socialist policy. If you do not comply, he wants to murder you. If you repeatedly comply, then eventually things get very bad indeed, and the socialist casts about for someone to blame. Surely there must be some non-compliant person around here somewhere. Some counter-revolutionary. He must be found and murdered, and then paradise will be attained.
This isn’t about religion. “Religion” is merely the label they paste on your non-compliance. If you were an atheist, they’d just use another label. That giant finger in the drawing isn’t your beliefs. It’s you. They think you are evil. Not wrong, evil. And they want to kill you. Not all of them think they do, of course. There’s a group called “democratic socialists”, who append the word “democratic” to the front, to mean “I don’t want to kill you, I only want to use the political process to force you to comply.” But when they do, your society enters the same downward spiral described above.
So they eventually decide to kill you.
They will always, eventually, reach the point where they decide to kill someone. Because they always think their utopian plans will work if they kill just one more person, and their utopian plans will never actually work no matter how many people they kill.
What actually works isn’t socialism, it’s technology. Here’s how:
1. All progress is technological. This means that all human problems are solved by figuring out a better understanding of the universe, and creating a piece of technology based on that understanding.
2. Creating new science and technology is hard, and requires a lot time, money, and effort.
3. Problems therefore exist because not enough time, money, and effort has yet been invested to produce the necessary technological breakthrough.
4. Therefore, there is absolutely, positively, 100% no way to solve all human problems right now by acting differently. But we can optimize society for technological progress.
In other words, the “star trek future” isn’t waiting for us to become atheists, because atheism doesn’t produce technology faster or better than any religion that isn’t anti-technology. That “star trek future” is instead waiting on us to invent warp drives, teleporters, and matter nanoassemblers. And every single piece of progress that humanity has achieved came not from social activism, but from technological advancement. The 40 hour work week was merely demanded by unions. It was actually enabled by industrial technology.
Democracy, republicanism, and other forms of populist government were merely demanded by revolutions and philosophies. They were enabled by the rifled firearm. And so on. For every positive change in society and civilization, there is one or more critical pieces of technology that allow it to happen. Once that technology exists, the change is trivial. When it does not exist, forcing that change is disastrous, not positive. A 40 hour work week would exterminate a civilization of bronze age agriculturalists. Democracy would destroy a medieval kingdom. Progress is technological progress.
This is why socialism must be stopped.
Because socialism interferes with technological progress, which is the real driving force behind progress of any kind.
You cannot murder your way to utopia.




6 comments
October 8, 2024 at 6:17 am
tildeb
There’s certainly an element of truth to tying some social progress to technology but I think of the reversal of popular opinion 90% against to 90% for interracial marriage over a decade and can’t see what technology was necessary for this social progress. And the same case seems to exist for the advancement of many other areas of human rights.
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October 8, 2024 at 8:06 am
makagutu
Human problems are varied, nuanced and complex. The solution to unhealthy working hours wasn’t technology but union movement. The gay rights movement wasn’t solved by technology. And I can list others. The question of how to organise society is a complex one that requires debate. It is not settled as someone claimed in the end of history. And you might conflate the problems of communism that lead to dictatorship and the religion of the man at the top and socialism.
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October 8, 2024 at 5:48 pm
Vala
Religions and the religious will want to kill you too, if you don’t go along with what they believe. Any belief system – political or religious – that wants to force changes on the population at large from the top down will frequently be fine with murdering the non-believers.
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October 9, 2024 at 6:54 am
The Arbourist
@Tildeb
Making sweeping statements like Eriksen does in this piece does leave his assertions in a place that would require a long form to fully address all concerns.
Charitably I would think that your concern might fall under point #1 – “This means that all human problems are solved by figuring out a better understanding of the universe […].”
As our knowledge of the concept of race has grown and matured over time we have realized that (despite the best efforts of the activist Left) one’s race *isn’t* an important factor in determining the value of a human being – and thus through a advancement of our understanding of race, we’ve made interracial marriage essentially a non issue in the West.
You have to append the “Create a piece of technology bit” for that to work – I’m not Eriksen, but if I was, that is how I’d address your concern.
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October 9, 2024 at 6:57 am
The Arbourist
@makagutu
I agree. We need to ensure that the values of the Enlightenment remain central to how we address and attempt to solve problems here in the the West. Debate, the testing and proving/disproving of hypotheses, and the Socratic method are all necessary avenues of advancement in our free societies.
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October 9, 2024 at 6:59 am
The Arbourist
@Vala
Agreed. Any system that discourages individual rights and thought must be treated carefully – whether it be religious or Marxist in nature.
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