Man’s Spiritual Nature.
It is a part of the nature of homo sapiens that we desire to understand where we fit in the universe – to understand where we came from, why we are on the earth, and whither we will go when we leave mortality. Whatever the answer to these questions, it will instinctively be perceived as being related to the question of the existence of a divine Creator of the human race.
The desire for religion and for worship is so natural and so strong in mankind that in many individuals it expresses itself as a commitment to worship the Creator. Thus, one finds various forms of worship and religion in all historical cultures. It is the reflective individual’s nature to sense a more spiritual side of man. This spiritual nature makes man receptive to a different set of values from those of his secular world in general and from those of politics in particular.
A later and arguably higher expression of this human spirituality takes the form of Christianity. Many, like Karl Marx’s followers, have objected particularly to this religion, presumably because it does not provide natural support for a revolutionary movement. In spite of its strong advocacy for relief for the sufferings of the poor, it nevertheless teaches adherents to be patient and to avoid being preoccupied with one’s material conditions. Those doctrines and advocacy were not favorable from the perspective of Marx.
The Decline of Religion in the Secular Western World
The secular intellect has been so concerned about the development and splendors of scientific endeavors it has not had time for much concern about organized religion, although until recent decades many of the great lights of physical science were very religious and acknowledged a higher power at work in the creation and operation of the universe.
A particular set of critical intellects, however, has been inclined to push back against the traditional ideas of religion in Western culture. Marx, Darwin and others have provided intellectual leadership for secular atheism and their influence has been profound, even though the “scientific” thought of these two towers of intellectualism have had their works thoroughly debunked in most of the particulars of their thinking. But their ideas have demonstrated remarkable staying power among those who don’t pay much attention to their actual theories.
How has this worked out in our culture historically? The allegedly scientific ideas of these social forces have fixed themselves in secular programs of education that were not ingrained in the schools of my earlier generation. Back then, religion was not taught in secular schools, but the moral values of Christianity were inevitably present in the curriculum. Over time, the anti-religious movement made socialism the ideology of most of our schools. The natural, inherent need of our children and our youth for a spiritual expression of religious feeling was to be satisfied by the message of socialism. In many cases this school-promoted ideology became the primary basis for personal conviction, since no religious training was undertaken in secular households.
The secular religion substitute argues somewhat as follows: That which is good in human society is that all individuals are valued, thus man’s greatest need is for equality. Virtue has to do with overcoming the poverty of too large a part of the human race. Moreover, every individual has rights, and the powers of governance should therefore be employed to guarantee the individual’s common wants and needs, which must be seen as “civil rights.” In this environment, freedom is no longer taught to be the avoidance of external forces to limit the exercise of the citizen’s liberty. “Freedom from” is no longer a concern. The concern is that the individual should be guaranteed “freedom to” pursue the realization of personal desires at the expense of the state.
The individual citizen thus expects to be enabled by a principle long accepted in western society as an intermediate solution to the problem of inequality, which is the governmental practice of the redistribution of income, the transfer of wealth to those who do not create it. But one retains in constant remembrance that when the socialist revolution is completed, society will produce (mostly by machines) goods and services which the government will distribute. Until then, with the government not yet in charge of the entire economy, it merely redistributes privately produced products. Students receiving this socialistic ideology are encouraged to be actively engaged in promoting political developments that will transfer economic activity from the private to the public sector.
The triumph of this ideology is very recent in our society and has taken form only in the last decade or two, becoming apparent with the advent of the current generation of millennials on our social and educational scenes. Preparatory propaganda goes back at least to the 1960s however.
This ideology has little appeal to those of earlier generations. Previous cohorts of mankind have watched historical disasters, mostly associated with the Cold War, grow out of early socialist attempts to achieve the political panacea. Their children and grandchildren are easily convinced by their socialist mentors that one need not be disturbed by past disappointments. Now that the more intelligent generation has arrived, they will simply be responsible for getting socialism right as soon as it can be adopted in its permanent utopian form.
Now permit me, please, to review very briefly, first, why socialism can’t work and second, what might be done for the younger generation’s natural religious needs currently being diverted into a deceptive and dangerous religion substitute – socialism!
Why Socialism Inevitably Fails.
I have answered this question from numerous perspectives through the publication of four volumes that have reviewed the historical evidence and its interpretation by the greatest minds who have understood the economics of socialist countries.
The two main problems are that socialism, first, divides the nation between the factions of those who are productive and those who are basically little more than consumers. It pits the haves against the have nots. People are basically in agreement that redistribution of incomes is humane, compassionate, and civil as it enables the care of the poor. It is a positive and appreciated force in society UP TO A POINT!
When it is extended to socialist extremes, people become quickly weary of socialist largesse. When even the middle class are called upon to give up their own property to the all-powerful state, they quickly tire of socialism. At some point they may be prepared to support the counter-revolution feared by the socialists. Ownership of resources becomes the cause for warfare, and the socialists will introduce military control to maintain their power. They may be elected into power, but they will not willingly abandon all their struggles to gain political power, to restructure the entire economy, to own and manage all the country’s businesses, and to ensure their retention of power.
The second main problem of socialism is that it is impossible to replace the millions of plans of consumers, farmers, small businesses, corporations and multinational corporations with the single, nation-wide plan of the socialist administration. Socialism is an economic overreach by the government, which insists on owning and managing the millions of firms, large and small, in a plethora of economic locations. It must order a planning bureaucracy to organize and control everything that is done in the economy. The bureaucracy is subject to all the tremendous problems of information management and logistical control that no socialist administration has been able to manage. Moreover, the introduction of planning and state management is destructive of incentives and productivity so that equality is reached at the level of social poverty.
When the computer was developed, planners hoped for a time that everything could be calculated almost instantaneously with computers, which thus represented a panacea for the planning process. But they soon learned that you must have good information to calculate a good plan. Under socialism, the actors are often motivated not to provide good information. Moreover, the information must be gathered and entered into the computers. Gathering all the information for an annual plan would probably take five or ten years, as the Soviets found out.
I could actually substantiate and validate these points carefully on paper. Wait! I already did that in the publication of the three individual volumes that became Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline and the Attempted Revival in the United States and in its sequel, Socialism Revealed: Why Socialism’s Issues Have Never Permitted Success in a Real Economy. In these works I elaborated on the points suggested above and provided thorough documentation.
Is Socialism and the Socialist Religion an Inevitable Outcome for our Children?
What could be better than teaching the victims of our schools that we should engage spiritually for social equality, human “rights,” and the elimination of poverty? The current religion substitute advocates that the pupil join a movement against all the owners of property, the managers of small businesses, the millions of stockholders of public corporations. It advocates hatred for all those who don’t understand group think, and that human wants and needs should be satisfied through governmental provision of subsidies paid for by someone else who pays taxes.
The substitute for this might be supplied by a revised religious form, some of the characteristics of which have been a part of our cultural heritage. The ancient contemporary religions of Christianity distorted and lost the original message of Christ in the New Testament. To restore that doctrinal purity the individual would have to be taught, first, that she or he is actually related to the Creator of the universe.
Since I am an economist, formally trained and experienced over numerous decades with the economic system of socialism, I will not elaborate on this potential return to a form of religion far more genuine than socialism. A set of four simple propositions will suffice for my purposes.
1. There is a God who actually is a parent of each human spirit – we are all his children and are, therefore, brothers and sisters. He has counselled us to love each other as siblings should. Therefore, we might recognize the brotherhood of the whole human race and commit our lives to helping others voluntarily, so that there need be no poor among us.
2. God sent his own son to the earth in the person Jesus Christ to save mankind from the sins which beset all of us and which would keep us from returning after this life to our Heavenly Father. If we learn to overcome our negative behaviors and accept the offer of Jesus Christ to save us from our mortal imperfections, we can indeed return in a future life to our spirit home.
3. Jesus established an organization while he was on the earth and taught its leaders how to guide his followers. He gave them authority and power and guided them through divine communication, through revelation, to lead his church and take it to all the nations. As had been prophesied, this church was lost through apostasy in the centuries following the crucifixion and the resurrection of the Savior, Jesus Christ. The church became politicized and corrupt, with the rich priests and popes purchasing their offices and the original teachings being perverted and lost.
4. Also according to prophesy, the time came when the Lord restored the original church organization and teachings through a prophet such as Moses, Isaiah, or Moroni. The complete, divine religion of Jesus Christ was thus restored. For an individual this can be important in the acquisition of truth and happiness, which any interested individual might pursue by reading more here. For us as a society, the important values associated with these truths could be taught to our school children and youth in a purely secular form by teaching the values of independence, general concern and love for our fellow beings, self-reliance, honesty, appreciation of real freedoms, and good, old-fashioned patriotism for whichever is our own nation and culture.
