This article explores the differences and similarities between three seemingly unrelated things: the behavior of social insects; families among the species Homo Sapiens; and socialism / communism.

 

Robustness:

One estimate is that social insects (think ants and bees, wasps, and termites) have been around for perhaps 160 million years or so. There’s maybe 30,000 species, in damn near every habitat. Just counting ants alone, it has been estimated that there are 20 quadrillion ants in the world, or over a million per human being. Point is – this is an incredibly robust way of life. Social insects will, essentially, be around forever, in massive numbers. This organizational structure WORKS.

Families in homo sapiens have existed in every known tribe for the entirety of known human history. Not nearly as robust as social insects, but again, this way of organizing life works pretty damn well.

 

Socialism / Communism:

The Communist Manifesto was published in the mid-1800s, and the first government organized using this set of ideas occurred around 1900. The more hardcore of these two ideologies, communism, has uniparty states in China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. The big dog is China, with 1.4 billion people. Roughly 20% of the world’s 8 billion or so people live in communist countries. Throw in the longer list of countries currently run by socialist governments, and the people in non-socialist countries personally identifying as socialist or worse, and you get perhaps half of all humanity living under, or believing in, this ideology. Bottom line: not nearly as robust an organizational structure as the other two things. It could vanish entirely in a geological eyeblink of time. We hope.

 

How do these three ways of life work?

Social insects have a single queen per nest, who produces a large number of literal sisters who are chemically neutered and mind-controlled zombie slaves serving her. Seriously. Look it up. This wildly dystopian thing exists, everywhere.

Human families, while they have a lot of variation in structure (gay families, single parent families, infertile older couples, etc.), are in their most robust evolutionary form a delivery device to produce children. This Rube Goldberg contraption consists of a man and a woman who are chemically bonded to be a mild form of slaves to each other, thus inducing them to reproduce and take care of the resulting children. The formula for these chemical cocktails changes over the course of relationships: an initial potent mix that causes infatuation, the fun mix you get during sex, a medium-term mix that causes you to want to keep staying together once that initial heady mix wears off, a long-term mix that causes couples to enjoy each other long after the mid-term mix goes away, the chemicals formed during birth and nursing that causes a mother to love her offspring. And so on. Bottom line – we WANT this form of mild slavery. It feels GREAT. And every society has these chemically induced behaviors, because otherwise we’d wanna kill those crying little helpless bastards known as babies when they keep us up all night, leaving us sleep-deprived and staggering around like zombies.

Socialism is a bastard mix of the above two. It strips out the (oftentimes perverse) incentives to preserve lives because you’re closely genetically related, aka the thing that makes social insects and human couples so evolutionarily stable. It tries to create the hive mind of social insects using ideology instead of chemical bondage. It tries to create a family type of relationship – the brotherhood of man, socialist worker solidarity, protecting the motherland (international socialism, such as Soviet Russia), protecting the fatherland (national socialism, such as the Nazi party, which voicing that inconvenient fact to “real” socialists will get them reeeeally mad at you, because that’s not the “real socialism” that is fuzzy bunnies and rainbows and all that is good and nothing that is bad – aka what they * think * socialism is.)

So, socialism in uniparty countries ruled by that ideology, usually consists of a ruler controlling minions under them using indoctrination (carrot), and a terrifying propensity to murder anyone perceived as not being ‘all in’ to being thusly ruled (stick). The minions apply the same tactics to the rest of the populace.

In non-socialist countries, the carrot approach alone is used. At first. Until the CB (commie bastards) seize control of the government.

Socialism is, biologically speaking, a “ecological sink” —  that is, it kills vast numbers of people living under it, or inhibits them from reproducing, and thus periodically needs to attract or conquer new victims from the “ecological sources” around it that produce the fodder for that ideological machine. Think famines in North Korea, China’s One Child Policy, Stalin starving the wreckers and kulaks and traitorous Ukrainians, Pol Pot purging about a quarter of all Cambodians, the Nazi concentration camps, Soviet Russians choosing not to reproduce because life there was so shitty. And so on.

The thing causing socialism to be a sink rather than a source is that the one ruler, essentially owning all the slaves under them, isn’t biologically related to the masses of proles and serfs, and thus carelessly tosses their lives away for ideological reasons, or to hang onto power via violence. Or just for fun, because such immense power attracts psychopaths.

So, that fatal flaw – rulers not being close kin to the ruled – makes socialism really really unrobust over the long haul.

Hopefully.

 

About the Author:

“Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses.”  –George Orwell, 1984

Prolefeed is, in the parlance of Newspeak, a doubleplusungood crimethinker. He’s happily married to a black-ish woman with a sexy big booty who is a self-described bleeding heart liberal. This is his first article for Glibertarians.com