Explain Like I'm Five
Simplifying Complexity, One Answer at a Time!
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I just want to note that "A system where people take care of themselves and neighbours" is called Mutualism, and is absolutely the single best concept in the world.
Basically everyone can and should practice it in their daily lives, just be kind to and try to greet or at least acknowledge those you meet, and if anyone needs help then do the best you can.
We tend to instinctively engage in mutualism with our family and friends, so just extend that feeling towards as many people as possible.
Propaganda works.
Arguments I hear are usually something along the lines of "it's going to destroy the economy", "it destroys jobs", "I'm rich and they'll tax me a lot" (said by people who aren't actually rich). Also, confusing social democracy (Germany, Nordic countries) with what the Soviet Union and China were doing.
Yeah, capitalism has conspired to make us believe, as a group, that resources are somehow incredibly limited while a small cabal of elites gobble up insane quantities of resources for themselves while depriving the majority of those same resources.
Pure altruistic socialism would evenly redivide those resources, giving to those who need what they need.
It is anathema to capitalism, but it is the only society that would actually work in a post-scarcity world, which we might actually be approaching, assuming that the capitalists don't destroy it first.
The world has had enough resources for post-scarcity for decades, if not centuries. Before, the problem was logistics, now it's will.
even before modern logistics we were broadly post-scarcity, that's kind of the whole reason why humans are so successful, after we invented stone tools and fire we had basically won.
I think very few of the ruling elite would support a post scarcity world. Elon Musk keeps talking about it the most and he is one of the guys I trust the least to intentionally bring it about.
I think this is the biggest one. It's the word, but it doesn't matter which word is used. All the propaganda machines will fuck with it as quick as they can.
Also, confusing social democracy (Germany, Nordic countries) with what the Soviet Union and China were doing.
IMHO remnants from the cold war indoctrination.
Probably US-Americans confusing anything that's not predatory capitalism with Russia and China.
Confusing or deliberately conflating, depending on whether they're the fraudster or the mark.
Propaganda.
People don't know what socialism actually means because of propaganda...
you can ask someone who is against "socialism" whether they like it by talking about elements of it without explicitly mentioning the word "socialism" and they will probably agree with it.
seriously, do this! it's extremely fucking depressing!
Get a list of policies for a socialist party, read it to someone, then at the end say "and that's the policies the socialist party want to implement" and watch the killswitch in their brain activate.
The people who hate it are those who think themselves better than their peers. They think they deserve more than their peers, and that socialism transfers their superior effort to the benefit of their inferiors.
They see socialism not as everyone helping everyone, but as they, the successful being forced to support them, the lazy.
Yes. My one note would be that it may be more to the root of it to say that they see it as the good (anything they like) having to help the bad (anything else). These sorts almost always reduce down to good/bad, me/them, clean/dirty because they (like all of us in our own ways) simply desire understanding and the surety it provides. Framing things as 0/1 is much easier to understand than actually facing the grey of reality. It's easy to want easy. Not often good or helpful, but just so dang easy to abide by.
People don't really like change.
Think about free public libraries. They're fairly popular, and not controversial outside of fringe libertarian types and assholes. People like that you can borrow books and other media for free. Usually there's a bit of a backlash if there's a movement to shut down libraries or limit their services.
Imagine if free public libraries didn't exist, and someone tried to invent them today. People would be having screaming fits about communism. It's stealing from the authors. it's ruining publishing. We don't need tax dollars for this when we have amazon. Blah blah blah.
It's the same with other things we could socialize. health care is a privatized nightmare. If we somehow got a public option in, eventually people would start reflexively defending it.
So what I'm saying is many people don't really have a set of internally consistent beliefs. They just don't like change.
People often confuse socialism with communism. The confusion is deliberate by a lot of right wing propaganda. When talking about socialism with Americans, you have to explain to them that the fire department is an example of socialism. As are other public services, like roads, police, libraries, and some utilities.
Of course in America, some people think profit is more important, so they are doing everything they can to privatize services. For example, in Texas they are slowly killing public education, and toll roads have taken over normal highway construction.
As I mentioned, people are being conned and scared of the word so that they will elect people will be replacing what remains of public services with private ones.
But also, communism isn't bad either.
It's basically advanced socialism, not whateverthefuck stalin and mao were doing. It's like how the full name of the nazi party was "national-socialist worker's party", obviously the nazis aren't actually socialists, the only reason they use that word is because people at the time actually wanted socialism.
Socialism is great as a concept, basically means putting people before capital. Capitalism is the reverse. Even the staunchest capitalist countries practice socialism to some degree. Raw capitalism would be hell.
It’s the same with communism, where the workers were supposed to own the means of production, which means money wouldn’t gravitate around a few ones. Even the staunchest communist countries didn’t practice real communism, deforming it into feudalism.
TL;DR: Socialism is a great concept, just consider that everything we hear about it comes from a culture ruled by capitalists.
The ultra rich have successfully convinced a lot of people that they, too, could become ultra rich some day - but there's no place for ultra rich under socialism.
Then further, a lot of people have been convinced that only the very very poor would be better off and everyone else would be worse off. That is of course also untrue.
The hate against socialism is the idea that someone who doesn't work as hard as you, gets the same benefits as you, and that's not fair.
Something like that could never work under capitalism. Everybody knows that rich people work extremely hard to be rich. I work hard, and I'll be rich some day too.
Socialism threatens capitalists -> Capitalists spend money in media and politics to ensure support for capitalism by spreading fear about socialism -> People are scared of socialism.
It's really that simple honestly. I generally hate oversimplifications but there's not that much more to it
Years of propaganda from oligarchs, their think tanks and their propaganda spreaders. This has been an attack for many decades but especially after WW2 during the red scare and then after 1970 when the Powell Memo was issued. That is the origin of all of our messes, including Reagan and Trump.
Many of the same right wing think tanks are from the same oligarchs from decades ago and/or their heirs. Think Timothy Mellon or Birch Society (Koch Brother father). Even then, there was “the business plot” where the oligarchs of the 1930s wanted fascism because of the threat FDR had to their wealth and power.
It's propaganda. The reality is that much of our system is already Socialized. In fact, some of the best stuff in our society is Socialist.
Schools, libraries, fire departments, police, military, parks, roads, etc. are all Socialist concepts at their foundation.
Fire Departments used to work by subscription. A building owner would pay a local fire brigade for protection. He would get a small cast iron badge that he'd place next to his doorway. If a building caught fire, the fire brigade would show up, and if there was a a "fire mark," they'd fight the fire. If there wasn't a fire mark, they'd let it burn down. That is a strictly Capitalist concept.
It was eventually decided that public tax money would be used to protect EVERYBODY from fire, which is a Socialist concept. The old subscription-based fire brigade concept evolved into the predatory insurance industry, a Capitalist concept which has been preying upon us ever since.
Like most political philosophies, Socialism has its positives and negatives. Any political philosophy, taken to its most extreme ends, would be a disaster. The best governments take the most successful parts of any philosophy, and rejects the bad parts. A pure Democratic/Republican/Socialist government would be terrible, but a combination of the best elements, could be really great.
MAGA is not a legitimate political philosophy. it's core tenets include treason, corruption, racism, bigotry, violence, pedophilia, misogyny, intolerance, ignorance, and incompetence. MAGA is a criminal enterprise disguising itself as a legitimate political movement, and it's influence must be fully purged from our government and our society.
It is due to lobbying and astroturfing.
Simple as.
It's definitely not based in data, because that overwhelmingly shows massive economic and happiness growth happens in these states
There are various kinds of socialism. Some "take care of themselves and neighbors" & some merely claim to.
One of the merely claims types is authoritarian socialism, which includes Marxism–Leninism.
Authoritarian socialism, or socialism from above, is an economic and political system supporting some form of socialist economics while rejecting political pluralism. As a term, it represents a set of economic-political systems describing themselves as "socialist" and rejecting the liberal-democratic concepts of multi-party politics, freedom of assembly, habeas corpus, and freedom of expression, either due to fear of counter-revolution or as a means to socialist ends.
That ideology does not respect & protect inherent individual rights & liberties recognized since the Enlightenment. Authoritarian socialism is hated for abusing human rights, and it's often incorrectly assumed that all socialism is authoritarian. That explains the hatred.
Kinds of socialism that respect & protect human rights do exist, however, and they have a better claim to a system of self & mutual care. There's little reason to hate those.
Ask a typical American what they hate about socialism and they will perfectly describe capitalism
And ask them what policies they want to see enacted, and they'll give you a list that looks suspiciously like that of a socialist party.
decades of red scare propaganda and purposefully sabotaging public education
ELI5
People dislike socialism because they often feel like their hard work and effort does not get fairly rewarded. Why would you work your whole life away to become a doctor and save lives when someone else wastes their time lost in vice.
Well you're 5 you piece of shit and your efforts at not pissing the bed have been pretty minimal at best. But do you still eat? Do you have a roof and a bed to piss all over? Who cleans that mess every time? People hate socialism because it sucks to be the provider. It also sucks to suffer. And in life we often forget this. We forget it takes all of us. We forget what it is to be helpless. We forget those who provided for us. And we get angry when we have to provide for others when we feel so left out of the party.
In short dont forget. Don't forget what you have been given and don't forget to share. Dumb kids.
To me the hate is quite simple to understand. Socialism means that the extremely rich will be worse off financially. The 1% have an unnatural love for money, and the idea of being less wealthy for the greater good is totally abhorrent to them.
For generations they've been able to demonise socialism using their disproportionate influence through the media, to the extent that the majority of the population now fear it.
We've really not moved on that far intellectually from the witch trials. People are collectively ignorant and fearful, and with the right nudges are easy to control to the point where they'll literally vote against their own good. They are the proverbial Turkeys voting for Christmas and I honestly don't know how we will ever get past it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
It's pretty much all US propaganda that makes people hate socialism
Because some of the worst dictators of all time said they were communist and socialist, despite dictatorship being fundamentally antithetical to both.
Then a bunch of idiots watched a dictatorship, the USSR, burn up their economy with a space and arms race, so now they think socialism kills economic progress. It wasn't that the USSR didn't invest properly in the populace, or infrastructure, or that they were fundamentally a kleptocracy with a massive military, it's that they called themselves socialist. That's what killed them.
Note that the reason they called themselves socialists and communists is because a lot of people at the time considered this good, it's like how many countries these days have "democratic republic" in their name, despite obviously being neither of those things.
Evil people can't call themselves evil, they have to lie about what they are for people to get tricked into accepting them.
The US is run by very rich people who benefit from the current system.
Minor massive correction: The world is run by very rich people who benefit from the current system
~~Well, not entirely... One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders..~~
It's mostly thanks to USA propaganda and the whole "Red Scare" that began in the 1950s
I mean doesn't it mean a system where the people take care of themselves and neighbors?
Not really, the system is supposed to be about a government and economy that cares about the well being of its people first, such that several wealth distribution methods would be applied to ensure minimal inequality.
The rich don't want equality. They need people to be suffering and in dire want, so they have exploitable people to profit from.
Actual five year old explanation:
Some people, who bake a birthday cake with their mom and dad, want the entire cake for themselves. If mom or dad take a piece anyway, they think that's not "sharing" but "stealing". Even though mom and dad helped bake the cake too. They think cake being taken from them is socialism.
long form:
- When "socialism" started, it started in a BLOODY way. I mean, the Russian revolution, before that it was mostly just theory, but still "the poors" doing it, so that was ew for history writers. The Russian revolution itself did achieve some kind of no longer aristocratic system, but for many many people, the outcomes were not positive. There were some positive outcomes on average, literacy and food supply improved a lot over time. But we're talking about the negatives here. Then the whole stuff Stalin did and being in power for decades in a system that's supposed to be democratic didn't exactly improve the reputation. Don't forget that for a long time, world domination was the literal declared goal of the international communist party. They were legit "coming for you" because they were coming for everyone. So that's one whole topic covered.
- Have you ever worked in a group project and someone didn't pull their weight? "The" argument against socialism is that that is going to be everyone. And then nothing gets done. But because society still does need some things to function, like food supply, electricity, etc. society will collapse, because nobody will do what's necessary. Because the mindset of people against socialism, is that external reward is always necessary for people to do things. If everyone has the same, unconditionally, there is no reward and no punishment. To finance the system anyway, the fear is that "socialism" would just tax everything or seize your property and redistribute it.
So when someone says "that's socialism", they fear that they will be robbed or killed or at least threatened. And to be fair, the thought of being robbed or harmed is scary.
Socialism by its barest definition is great.
Socialism as outlined in Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto is a little sketchier because it makes a lot of unrealistic assumptions about human nature and is just generally super hard to implement without creating a power vacuum.
Socialism as in the USSR's Socialism is a century old practice of the cruellest and most war hungry culture imagineable, having taken advantage of the afforementioned power vacuum to starve and torture millions at home, ally with the Nazis in WWII and then change sides halfway through, tear down democracies around the globe, and push us all the closest we have ever been to thermonuclear annihilation. A threat so great that even 30 years into its grave is still a great stone over our heads, having crafted a world power balance that will threaten our destruction for generations to come.
But Socialism by its barest definition is great.
One reason I can think is we haven't yet seen a working socialist society, which often fail for external reasons.
For example, the socialist government in Cuba was severely undermined by the USA imposed blockade.
A more recent example is Venezuela, while you can think what you want about its current government, I don't think USA should interfere with any sovereign nation.
There's almost like a pattern, like someone, somewhere doesn't like the idea of socialism to succeed.
The vast majority of the hate for socialism is decades long propaganda and indoctrination, which is mostly false. Socialism is a threat to the wealthy, so they programmed people to hate it.
With socialism or socialism-like policies, the general population gets more, at the expense of the wealthy elites who would get less. The wealthy control or lobby or have a say in our education system, media, entertainment, etc.