The Disintegrating Definition of Socialism.

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most people don't think about politics in terms of problem solving they think about politics in terms of personal identity if you live in england you are a conservative or you are a liberal that's how people think about and talk about their politics and that's what politics means to them it's not the solution to any particular kind of problem if you live in england do you think that prisons should be operated by private corporations for a profit or do you think they should be run exclusively by the state on taxpayers dollars on a nonprofit basis do you have some other perspective do you think they should be run by the church or by charities there are other possible perspectives do you begin or end with a kind of pragmatic concern about how to make the best out of your prison system no i mean almost nobody thinks about and lives with politics in this way people wake up and eat their breakfast and go to sleep after dinner as a conservative or as a liberal as a socialist or as a capitalist that's how they chew their food that's how they dream in their sleep so they live with their political identity the political identity they adopt something they feel beholden to it's something they have to live up to it's an expectation they impose on themselves it starts to define what it means to be a good person right we chase after that idea once we've sort of set it up as an idol in our own minds and then we don't we don't question in an open-ended pragmatic way oh well you know take a look at the worst prisons that are run by the government they're socialists they're perfectly socialist and now take a look at the best prisons run by the private sector run by private corporation oh gee it looks like we have some examples here where private companies are doing a better job running a prison than a socialist government services i would be the first to admit by the way that's disturbing to me i'm not some rabid free market pro-capitalist person i'm not and on an ethical level i can't help but feel there's something evil about one person trying to make as much money as possible out of keeping another person in a cage you know where this birth it's not your customer it's not your client it's a prisoner that's been handed you by the state and your job is to make this as profitable as possible for your shareholders to have the greatest return on investment keeping this human being in a cage maybe feeding them as little as possible or whatever things it's disturbing it's shock and yet if you're willing to learn from real world experience there's a reason why so many western first world countries including england including the united kingdom engaged in an experimental basis on trying to bring the private sector in to run prisons in part and in whole of involving more and more private for-profit companies in doing that right what's the best way to run a train system what's the best way to run a hospital system what's the best way to run the telecom system to provide telephones and internet access to people if you wake up and go to sleep and live your whole life with this identity of being a socialist right you're never going to in an open-minded pragmatic way question and examine the often contradictory and often disturbing evidence of why and how it is that the real world works the way it does from sector to sector from from case to case from instance and look guys i was just clicking around youtube every so often i think about changing the genre i'm trapped in a little bit you know a lot of my time lately is reading books big heavy awful imposing books like this and yeah what's what's going on in hashtag booktube booktube is the genre of people who devote their lives to reading and reviewing books and what i saw almost at random you know youtube works it shows you shows you some information you're not exactly searching for but it's also not exactly a random there's this controversy within booktube about who is a real reader and who is a fake reader people calling each other a fake reader right i can understand why once you adopt this identity once you decide i'm a booktuber so i'm gonna i'm gonna read this book this week and on schedule i'm gonna upload a book review and then next week it's gonna be this book you don't want to let your fans down you don't want to let yourself down you have a sense of your own ego invested in this project and maybe you end up just reading the introduction of the conclusion maybe your book review isn't isn't really reflecting a familiarity or the depth of knowledge of the whole text maybe you really didn't put as much time into it as you should and maybe maybe your channel is successful because you're handsome or charming or you're a good-looking woman who wears a tight sweater while you're doing the book reviews and other people get jealous and other people have read the whole book and they start denouncing you as a fake reader anything anything can get appropriated in this way into your own sense of pride and ego and identity right it's like being a reader being a book reviewer right of course of course people in this way become attached to the notion of being a socialist or of being pro-capitalist and then that sense of personal commitment comes first and forms before for any any pragmatic real-world sense of what these terms mean politically or economically all right there was another youtuber who made a couple of really stupid videos uh criticizing socialism and whenever i see these things i am myself the world's harshest critic of socialism i was the world's harshest critic of bernie sanders and i actually did read his book i uploaded some detailed criticism bernie sanders in his campaign for president all right i am a very harsh critic of socialism if i watch anyone else criticizing socialism i feel totally alienated from them i feel like we have nothing in common i feel like we're not even living on the same planet to be honest with you i'm a critic of capitalism not socialist not communist when i criticize capitalism if i then turn and look at the other people who are engaging in critique of capitalism of course those people are communists those people are socialists and i feel like we are not even living on the same planet i feel like they're not in touch with the same reality that i'm trying to examine i saw this other youtuber criticizing socialism and one of the main points he relies on or falls back on again and again is this he complains that in 2021 different people are using different definitions of socialism which is true the bernie sanders definition of socialism would not be recognized as socialism in europe many socialists would not recognize bernie sanders socialism so it's true there is more than one is a contentious term um and then he goes on to complain if you ever try to confront or criticize socialists whatever critique you offer they're gonna wriggle out of by claiming oh well that's not really socialism implicitly or explicitly that's not really what they meant and then he goes on to say understandably but i think he's quite wrong here he goes on to say well the problem is these people haven't actually read karl marx these people haven't actually read the definitive tomes that establish what what socialism is like they're marxists in name only but they're fake readers you're a fake marxist they call themselves marxists but they haven't really read marks they called themselves socials but they have natural red socials so that's not my perspective that i think he's 180 degrees wrong brief digression i had an interview with a 24 year old woman on this channel more than one year ago but a year and a half ago today she was 24 years old at that time she was a die-hard card-carrying communist she was a member of a communist party she supported communism and i debated with her i was basically trying to convince her to give up communism on camera live for the entertainment of random people on the internet right now if you just watch that video you might think i made no impact on her at all you'd be dead wrong in that conversation it had huge impact on her while she was on camera with me she didn't she didn't renounce or give up on communism but obviously i had kind of cracked the shell and doubts started to seep in and within just the weeks immediately following that conversation we had she sat and she watched more and more of the videos on my channel where i'm talking about the history of communism the economics of socialism and capitalism what these things really mean and within just a few months she had completely renounced communism she ceased to be economist okay in that discussion in that debate um there's something i didn't get to say right toward the end toward the end i'm asking her well look how is it that you think you know what communism means now we could say this in parallel about socialism where did you get your idea your definition of communism where does that come from there are a bunch of distractions there are other people trying to interrupt the debate it goes where it goes right but the answer she gives i think is perfectly sincere she says she read karl marx she says she read vladimir ilyich lennon i think she also mentions one book by stalin but she mentions some of these big big authors the history of communism and ministry of studies she says she feels she knows what communism is because those are the books she's read and what i wanted to say to her and what i want to say to you now is how would you feel if you met a 24 year old person today in 2021 they tell you they're a nazi and you ask them well how do you know what happened during the nazi period how do you know about the history of the nazi party how do you know what nazism really is and what this really means and they tell you that they've read adolf hitler that what they've read they've only read propaganda written by and for that extreme political movement all right what i see as the problem with socialists what i see is the problem with communists is not that they're unaware of karl marx it's not that they haven't read books from within the canon that define socialism it's that they've only read those books right they have read you know the equivalent of adolf hitler for their political movement and what they haven't read is the narrative of what really went on at the gas chambers it's the equivalent you know in terms of the producer they haven't read about what went wrong very often they know the abstract meaning of terms like class war and i've tried this many times sit down and say do you know what class war really means have you ever read first-person perspective descriptions of what it was like during the russian revolution when they went from door to door and they beat and robbed and raped and murdered people when women were raped in front of their own children when women's husbands were killed so the women could be raped there were by the way there was also ethnic cleansing there was persecution especially of jews anti-semitism was a very interesting part of what happened in the russian revolution have you looked at the human face if you look at the political reality and practice of what class war means i had a vivid account in one of the essays i wrote where they you know the communists show up at a mining camp and they decide they're going to kill the privileged class within this mining camp it's ridiculous it was a modern mining setup it's not the case that there were slaves and slave owners or something and they try to divide the mine workers amongst themselves and say okay who can we recruit into our ranks to be communist extremists and carry on with the looting and pillaging and raping and murdering which they do there's a lot of rape in that particular historical that chapter of history and who are the people in this mind that we can single out to be persecuted to be tortured to have their belongings stolen and you know ultimately to be to be killed um in public show trials or otherwise you know the the reality of what class war means most people become committed to socialism just as a series of lines up on a chalkboard right very very abstract ideas without being informed by history history written from any perspective but certainly without being informed by history written from an anti-social spread a critique of social respect and i'll be the first one to admit as i've just said the vast majority of people or critics of socialism the vast tree people are anti-socialists i find deeply embarrassing i find impossible to listen to i feel like they're not living on the same planet that i'm on so it's hard for me to blame socialists for not knowing this stuff now how do people become socialists they will have probably heard an argument like this in university or maybe even in high school or maybe while they were still in primary school somebody somewhere stood up in front of a chalkboard and said hey this is social inequality here are a couple lines you can live in a society where there are a few billionaires there are a few hundred million errors and there are huge numbers of people living in poverty is that the kind of society you want oh and here's socialism equality no millionaires no billionaires no poor people which one sounds better to you which one are you going to choose obviously if you approach this equation with just some real world mud and blood knowledge of what class war meant of what really happened in the russian revolution of what happened when they reorganized the farms and reorganize the factories in order to achieve so-called ecology what happened pragmatically and managerially when people took this simple equation on the chalkboard and put it into practice right it was bad for everyone it was bad for the farmers it was bad for the factory workers it wasn't just bad for the people who got massacred the implementation of socialism in in russia in china and cambodia we could go on with more uh examples of this kind right um but we're given this abstract idol up on a chalkboard and told to to make our choice it's an incredibly effective form of propaganda and most people go on to live their whole lives with commitment to this completely abstract ideology and then they will force the facts to fit that ideology because they feel it's part of their personal identity because they feel that any morally good person would support socialism and during the last four years by the way you've seen the other side of that equation under donald trump you've seen that there are millions of people who from the other side of the aisle they feel all they need to do to discredit you all they need to do to prove that you're a crackpot is prove that you're a socialist that as soon as your name or your policy or your reformed healthcare as soon as that can be identified as socialist you're discredited because socialism is this terrible immoral philosophy right which indeed history has proven to be a to be a great failure so you know these two tendencies in 2021 i feel they're both gaining impetus i think they're both gaining impetus in opposite directions and i think they're both well informed i think all the people involved are reading books but tragically they're reading the wrong books they're digging themselves in deeper and deeper to a knowledge that is narrow and blinds them more than it informs them even to the meaning of what you know communism and socialism and capitalism and so on uh really are in practice now there's another way to teach this there's nobody teaches to children so that we teach us the high schoolers and university students that doesn't rely on that kind of abstract reasoning you can invite people to instead think about these things in a managerial pragmatic hands-on problem-solving way well we're not asking the question who do you want to be do you want to be a good person or a bad person and then we managed to associate being a good person with being a socialist or something we said you know what look i used to live in a poverty stricken third world country called laos at that time there were several initiatives ongoing to build um infrastructure for the internet so people could use cellular phones modern telephony connect the internet and change the whole world it changed people's lives okay i remember one of the single greatest impacts was that farmers in remote villages were just able to find out how much money their crops were worth if when they loaded it onto their cart sometimes a cart pulled by a donkey so it was a cart with a pathetic little engine okay but when they loaded their crops out of their cart many of them had to ask the question am i going to roll this car to the east or i'm going to roll it to the west you know and oh if i sell it over there right now the price is high if i sell it over there right now the price is low they might have four different places they can get to to sell their rice or sell their mangoes whatever it is they're harvesting that's what they really need to know and in the past they didn't know they didn't know until it was too late they didn't know so they'd rolled their cart several miles in the wrong direction that they should have been going somewhere else right really basic fundamentals and of course of course you know while i was there you saw the internet opening people's eyes because they'd grown up in a country where the only newspaper was published and controlled by the communist party and now suddenly they can get every newspaper from everywhere in the world they can know anything they want to know they can answer any question they want they want to know right i remember actually being inside a communist party um office you know and at that time they launched the first version of google earth so people forgot that there was google maps and they spun off this separate app that at that time you had to download and run off your hard drive your computer it was called google earth and it wasn't that different from google from google maps but it would give you this 3d model of the whole planet the whole world there it was rotating on your screen and you could you can click and drag around and you know there was still a country admired in such third world ignorance they had really i could tell a million stories about this but you know um i met people who really believed that the map of the world was like pac-man it was like the video game pac-man was like a square map but if you went off the bottom you came back on the top and they actually thought the reason why there were white people in australia was that if you went south from australia you'd be in europe like if you went south or east off the map from australia and new zealand boop you're back in your like that's how they thought the world worked and they you know i was trying to explain no no no no no this actually there was colonialism and genocide there's a whole different you know um so you know the arrival of the internet here uh it's true of every every third world country but especially a post-war post-communist third world country it makes a huge difference in people's lives it's gonna make a huge difference the future of the country okay how are you gonna do it how are you gonna build the cell phone towers how are you gonna install the electrical lines the lines that carry the data so on and so forth there is one school of thought that will say passionately the government should do nothing at all the government should just sit back lower taxes and let the private sector do its thing leave it up to that and the free market will innovate and companies will come in and bid and tender and it'll get done okay you'll get them when five years from now 15 years from now 20 years oh and it'll get done where all right you know one of the contrasts between the national postal service which is socialist and private career companies is that private career companies only thrive in places like los angeles manhattan island where there's a lot of business and a lot of money to be made who's going to take the mail out to alaska out to remote areas where it's unprofitable okay so yeah maybe some private companies come in just to provide internet services and cell phone services in the the densest part of the capital city who's going to take this out to the farmers in remote areas right so there's another school of thought that says no the only way to get this done and the only way to get it done today is for the government to declare a monopoly to create a socialist service call it the national telecoms administration and start building the capacity start installing what you need so that everyone can get the internet and and that'll be everyone that won't just be the the urban center it'll be the rural periphery not just the places where it's profitable just the same way the national highways department builds roads that are never going to make any money that go to remote areas just because politically and erratically it matters to provide roads to those people in the same way you're just going to provide internet connection to the most remote the most poverty-stricken people you're going to do it with taxpayers money and let's let's take it all by the extreme so it's talking about creating a government agency to do this if you want it done today you want done immediately you could it could be the military you get the military corps of engineers those could be the guys you hire or whatever it's okay we already got these guys who work for the army they don't want to make bridges they don't make tunnels they know how to make a bunker they know how to do electronics for this stuff you know well we're going to train them and we're going to have them set up cell phone towers and start building the infrastructures people get internet okay internet connectivity all right these are real world problems each of these solutions right from my perspective is wrong in as much as you begin and conclude the inquiry in a dogmatic way all right if you begin with the dogmatic assumption or the dogmatic assertion that there's only one way to build the third world country and this is it whether it's free market in the government both it's all wrong all right real life is full of contradictions solutions that work in laos won't work in cambodia solutions that work in cambodia won't work in canada you have a good idea and a good government program but there's maybe just one bad person in charge and it's a disaster right i mean the fact that morally i feel much more comfortable with a non-profit prison than a for-profit prison doesn't mean i'm blind to the fact that many worldwide a shockingly large percentage of purely socialist prison systems are awful and individually if you're looking at prison conditions prison by prison you start to ask yourself why is the government so bad at running prisons maybe the government does such a terrible job at this that we should invite the private sector get involved because this is terrible just feeding and closing and housing people and giving them a decent quality of life in prison why why is why does a socialist approach to that fail so often those are really meaningful questions when you live with it especially when you've got skin in the game there's a there's a phrase that was in fashion about 10 years ago in politics what about when you have your own skin in the game what about if you're choosing a prison that you have to go to if you're just in prison you're going to spend 10 years in and you're looking prison by prison and which ones are well managed which ones are a disaster what if you're choosing the university that your child is going to attend you just assume that a government administrative university is better than a private sector university or one that's owned by a charity what about when you're the one who has to go to the hospital which hospitals are you looking at do you just start from a dogmatic assumption that a government socialist non-profit hospital is superior than a private sector for-profit hospital right when it's with something of yours or your life that's being risked maybe you'll start inquiring into what works and what doesn't in a much more dynamic and incisive way right real life in practice is full of these kinds of contradictions sort of undiscovered underlying principles that can't be generalized about on a chalkboard there is a cost there's an unseen invisible cost to just employing the military to build your cell phone towers right and that is that you're not developing the private sector capacity for innovation now private sector there's nothing glorious or inspirational about it right what the military can do in laos or if they create a government national telecom service some of this socialist system they can take an already existing technology from china and already existing technology from europe united states and they can build it in laos that's not really what you want that's a short-term single stage of analysis type of solution right what you really want is to have a bunch of guys in a bunch of offices and a bunch of small companies competing with each other for what's going to happen next you want people innovating about the new what's on the leading edge of telecoms what they don't have in china yet what's just coming out in silicon valley even if they're still following guys who are following that news and we're figuring oh how can my company make a little bit of extra money out of implementing others how can we do something new and better and different and more right how do you have those companies training the next generation of people to to innovate in the telecom sector when you look at things as just a single stage of analysis you know sometimes sometimes that's all there is okay the people need a bridge and you say okay the government is going to build a bridge the opportunity cost isn't clear to you say well if the government builds this bridge we're never going to have a bunch of private sector companies setting up ferries and making money out of running boats but hey it's worth it we're going to build this one bridge and then nothing's going to change for 50 years sometimes that single stage of analysis isn't that misleading right but there is actually cost there are disadvantages to excluding the private sector to having an absolute government monopoly on anything um including healthcare all right what is the best way now in 2021 to provide health care to the people of cambodia to the people of canada to the people of scotland right it's actually not easy at all to come to the conclusion that what we need is a monolithic non-profit government monopoly that that will work well there are plenty of horror stories there are plenty of signs that there are plenty of reasons why none of those countries today canada scotland cambodia they're really good reasons why actually they have this kind of complex convoluted compromise between private sector for-profit for-profit elements government elements socialist elements and this weird world in between of uh socialist sorry pardon me this weird world in between of civil society charitable foundations that are neither entirely socialist nor entirely private sector that are involved with some other reasons uh some other mix of motives now all right first things last what i started this video by saying is that i feel the most important problem is the way in which these beliefs become part of our personal identity that we think of ourselves first and foremost as capitalist or as socialist or as conservative or as liberal and we think this is who i am therefore this is how the world has to be or therefore this has to be the the policy or the institution that's going to be optimal that's going to work the best and what that precludes precisely is a genuinely skeptical assessment of what works in practice now we're also conditioned to think in terms of these very simplistic equations on a chalkboard like well do you want to have an unequal society with a few millionaires and huge numbers of poor people or do you want everyone to live in equality and and social harmony your pick two incredibly simplistic equations okay what makes the telecom system work what makes a good 21st century telecommunications infrastructure the answer is never going to be that simple it's never going to be some kind of chalkboard equation like oh well don't you believe in equality don't you believe in social justice well then you must believe that the government should declare a monopoly and should directly administer directly handle the provision of the internet and telecoms infrastructure can't you can't you read what's on the chalkboard do you really want to live in a world where there were these easy to vilify figures like bill gates the owner of microsoft uh the owner of amazon.com and so on where there's a small number of millionaires and billionaires getting rich off the internet as opposed to socializing it and distributing everyone equally one of the easiest services imaginable for the government to take over would be amazon.com at this stage after they build it up government they could have the military take over those warehouses you could have a completely non-profit socialist government bureaucracy take over the administration of of amazon as it exists today right and then it's harder to see what's going to be lost it's harder to see the positive contribution that's made to your society by bill gates and jeff bezos by these corporations it's hard to see the role of innovation that you know there's actually profoundly different if you compare what government bureaucrats do what even in running a prison even in running a university campus right compared to what the private sector can do right and then apart from all this it's not just a question of what people can do but of what they actually will do right because again you could say the something that's the best business in theory or in principle it's something that's the best government bureaucracy in theory or principle very very often they fail in practice and looking at that and looking at the richness of all the contradictory details and say oh well they tried to imitate the french system in cambodia and for some reason the french system of medical insurance just doesn't work in cambodia let's look at why oh they took this idea that seemed to work out okay in scotland and it doesn't work so well in canada our university system was created largely an imitation of the scottish system as an example you know that somehow something went right in one place and it's going to be for reasons that can't be captured easily and can't be generalized about easily on that chalkboard all right um so in conclusion i feel that i'm living in a world now where nobody's asking the the most important question about socialism um the socialists know what they know by reading books written by and for socialists and [Music] i mean the selection of examples it's so telling it's so damning let me ask you i have some viewers in the audience you know who are socialists and you guys probably have heard the same positive examples of socialism working very well even though some of them might be incredibly obscure and incredibly remote involve small numbers of people for a small amount of time it's like you know the anarchists always want to mention this commune that came about in southern spain during the spanish civil war for five minutes you know three months of anarchy in one town in southern spain and they want to immortalize as this example and the socialists can pick and choose oh well there's this one kibbutz in israel that works on socialist principles that's okay myanmar has been on the news so much lately have you ever once heard myanmar referred to as a socialist country have you ever once heard myanmar referred to as as a failed socialist country you know what do you think about the prisons in myanmar what do you think about the hospitals and healthcare in myanmar if you make a map of africa and fill in all the countries that either were socialists in the past or some still are now okay and you look at those countries and yourself how did health care work out there how did the telecom sector work out there how did any of these things happen under socialism you know people live their lives with these carefully selected examples that favor in some cases a totally pro socialist agenda in some cases of course in an anti-social agenda and yeah i do see a lot of this mind game being played i have heard socialists insist that venezuela is not an example of socialism venezuela disaster is still ongoing today and then you hear the pro-capitalist and says no no yes it is this really matters this really shows you what happens when socialists get into power um so on and so on so it goes around the map you know what i see is the fundamental problem is that indeed the marxists are reading karl marx the socialists are reading socialist propaganda people on youtube are living within you know categories of viewing that only reinforce their own delusions and they become further and further unstuck from reality um there's a very subtle and very pervasive form of propaganda that i think for most of us begins in high school just in learning about politics from those abstract principles up on the chalkboard because what are you being asked okay so this is the theory like inequality versus equality capitalism versus social justice however it's over it's opposed to you you know and then the question is which one are you the question is what kind of person do you want to be that's the wrong question to ask that's not the question at all right the question you've got to lead people through even if it's just as a thought exercises okay what if you were the prime minister of cambodia today this is the healthcare system you've got this is the telecommunication system you've got this is the train system you've got okay do you think it's really a simple straightforward solution do you think it's a simple decision to make just say nope we don't want any private enterprise we don't want any private companies involved in the trains we're gonna do that just with taxpayers dollars just on a socialist bureaucratic but no we don't oh all these christian charities that are providing healthcare these private corporations that are providing healthcare we're just gonna kick them out we're gonna have a 100 socialist not-for-profit healthcare system in cambodia if you do that right now people are going to die you think that's a simple solution even if you just look at what if you were in cambodia right now you have to choose which hospital you're going to go to and you take a look at what the government is providing and you take a look at what the private sector is providing laos was still a communist country when i lived there and i remember i remember being so astonished being so freaked out because you wouldn't just see that comparing private hospitals to the public communist socialist hospitals you know look at the dental offices look at the eyeglasses shops i'm sorry the optometrist where they test your eyes inside the eyeglasses and you look at that you think how is it possible socialism got this wrong like it's so easy like it's so easy to test someone's eyes and sell them a pair of eyeglasses and here's this private sector shop doing it and they do a great job and like two doors over just up the same street there's the official like soviet style apparatchik government department of get your eyeglasses and it's more expensive and it's slower and it's worse and it's they're fundamentally incompetent in all the ways that the private sector i got this job is is comp you know and there isn't one simple equation on a chalkboard you know to explain any of it um you know my concern ultimately is about people taking on socialism as a personal identity and then viewing the world in this way dogmatically while being completely aware of the depth of their own dogmatism