Psychology of Socialism - by Gustav Le Bon

Date read: 2016-02-02
Tags: The State
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Key ideas: Published in 1899, the book details Le Bon's view of socialism as a religious movement.

NOTES

Social inequalities are born of natural inequaliteis

Socialism, whose dream is to substitute itself for the ancient faiths, proposes but a very low ideal, and to it appeals but to sentiments lower still...

To the crowd, no longer satisfied with political and civic equality, it proposes equality of condition, without dreaming that social inequalities are born of those natural inequalities that man has always been powerless to change...

Theoretically, the means of annihilating social inequalities are very simple. The State has only to intervene and proceed to the distribution of wealth, and to establish in perpetuity the equilibrium destroyed for the profit of the few. From this idea, so little novel and yet so seductive, have issued the Socialistic concepts...

The differences that divide individual from individual will disappear, and we shall created by the Socialists. have only the average type so well described by the mathematician Bertrand:

Without passions or vices, neither mad nor wise, with average ideas, average opinions, he will die at an average age, of an average malady invented by the statisticians.

Individualism vs Collectivism

The modern theories of social organisation, under all their apparent diversity, lead back to two different and opposing fundamental principles Individualism and Collectivism.

By Individualism man is abandoned to himself; his initiative is carried to a maximum and that of the State to a minimum.

By Collectivism a man's least actions are directed by the State that is to say by the aggregate; the individual possesses no initiative; and the acts of his life are mapped out.

The two principles have always been more or less in conflict, and the development of modern civilization has rendered in conflic more keen than ever.

Demi-Savants and Doctrinaires

Demi-Savants and Doctrinaires. apply the term demi-savant to those who have no who other knowledge than that contained in books, and consequently know absolutely nothing of the realities of life.

They are the product of our schools and universities, those lamentable factories of degeneration whose disastrous effects have been exposed by Taine, Paul Bourget, and many others.

A professor, a scholar, or a graduate of one of our great colleges is always for years, and often all his life, nothing but a demi-savant.

It is from the ranks of the demi-savant [...], that the most dangerous disciples of Socialism are recruited...

The discontented demi-savant is the worst of malcontents. It is this discontent that explains the frequency of Socialism among certain bodies of individuals schoolmasters, for example, who always consider themselves ill-used and unappreciated...

Social failures, misunderstood geniuses, lawyers without clients, writers without readers, doctors without patients, professors ill-paid, graduates without employment, clerks whose employers disdain them for their insufficiency, puffed-up university instructors these are the natural adepts of Socialism.

In reality they care very little for doctrines. Their dream is to create by violent means a society in which they will be the masters.

Their cry of equality does not prevent them from having an intense scorn of the rabble who have not, as they have, learned out of books...

If they became masters their despotism would be no less than that of Marat, Saint-Just, or Robespierre, those excellent types of the unappreciated Demi-Savant.

The hope of tyrannising in one's turn, when one has always been ignored, humiliated, thrust into the shade, must have created many disciples of Socialism.

The doctrinaire

To this category of demi-savants belong most often the doctrinaires who formulate, in poisonous publications, the theories their ingenuous disciples at once begin to propagate.

These are the generals who appear to direct the soldiers, but who really confine themselves to following them. They form a small majority whose influence is far more apparent than real...

There is not a Socialist who does not constantly invoke the work of Karl Marx on Capital, but I very much doubt if one in ten thousand has even turned over the leaves of this indigestible volume...

The doctrinaire, then, may be highly educated that in no way saves him from being always obtuse and ingenuous, and most often an envious malcontent as well.

Struck only by one side of a question, he remains in ignorance of the march of events and their recurrence. He is incapable of understanding anything of the complexity of social phenomena, of economic necessities, of atavistic influences, of the passions which really rule men.

Having no guide but a bookish and rudimentary logic he readily believes that his ideas are about to transform the evolution of humanity and overcome destiny.

The lucubrations of all these noisy doctrinaires are sufficiently vague and their ideal of the future society sufficiently chimerical but one thing is not at all chimerical, and that is their furious hatred of the actual state of society, and their burning desire to destroy it.

The Unadapted

This multitude of incapable, disinherited, or degenerate persons is a grave danger to civilisation. United in a common hatred of the society in which they can find no place, they demand nothing but to fight against it...

The only methods that have hitherto been proposed for the benefit of the unadapted have been private charity and State aid.

But long experience has taught us that these are insufficient methods at the outset, and afterwards highly dangerous. [...] The true unadapted would promptly be joined by the semi-unadapted, and all those who, preferring idleness to labour, work to-day only because they are driven to work by hunger....

Herbert Spencer has spoken with great energy on the same subject:

Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty.

It is a deliberate storing up of miseries of future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles and idlers and criminals. To aid the bad in multiplying is, in effect, same as maliciously providing for our descendants a larger host of enemies.

It may be doubted whether the maudlin philanthropy which, looking only at direct mitigations, ignores indirect mischiefs, does not inflict more misery than the extremest selfishness inflicts.

Refusing to consider the remote influences of his incontinent generosity, the thoughtless giver stands but a degree above the drunkard who, absorbed in today's pleasure, think not of to-morrow's pain, or the spendthrift who buys immediate delights at the cost of ultimate..."

See Bastiat's warning about the danger of only considering the immediate effect of an action: That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen

Summary

If we set aside the fantastic portions of the innumerable Socialistic programmes, and consider only those parts which are essential, and which are rendered possible of realisation in certain countries by the natural evolution of things, we shall find that these programmes may be reduced to four principal points:

1. The suppression of the too great inequality of wealth by progressive taxation, and especially by sufficiently high death duties.

2. The progressive extension of the rights of the State or of the collectivity which will replace the State, and will differ from it only in name.

3. The resumption of the soil, capital, industries, and enterprise of all sorts by the State ; that is to say, the expropriation of the present proprietors for the profit of the community.

4. Suppression of free competition and equalisation of salaries.

The Socialistic ideal [...] of base equality and humiliating servitude, which would necessarily conduct the nations which should submit to it to the last degree of decadence. When we see such a programme proposed by educated people we perceive at the same moment the headway and the mischief which the Socialistic ideas have accomplished.

Herein lies their chief danger. Modern Socialism is far more of a mental state than a doctrine....

Here, I repeat, is the danger of the present hour. We are possessed of the same sentiments of sickly humanitarianism which have already given us the Revolution, the most despotic and bloodiest that the world has ever known — Napoleon, the Terror, Napoleon, and the death of three millions of men.

What a service would be tendered to humanity by the benevolent divinity which should suppress, to the very last example, the lamentable race of philosophers, and at the same time the no less lamentable race of orators!

The experience of a century ago was not enough; and it is the renascence of 'this very vague humanitarianism - humanitarianism of words, not of sentiments - the disastrous heritage of our old Christian ideas, which has become the most serious element of success of modern Socialism....

Now Socialism is far more a religious belief than a theory of reasoning. People submit to it, they do not discuss it...

The Socialists detest modern society, but they detest one another more bitterly.