Dear Friends,
It seems to me, communists and fascists, despite their rhetoric, see people as cogs in a great machine, while free marketeers see our fellow human beings, as possibilities in a great complex potential. What is the world? It cannot be a machine invented by man, since it preexists man. Machines are contraptions that mimic the animations of life, but are dead, and incapable of self expansion. The world is a complex system because it grows, evolves and exists as interacting, interconnected and interdependent organisms. Which suggests that the communist and fascist worldview is brittle. It only fits that which it wants to fit and shatters when it comes in contact with reality. Leading to famines, wars, and final solutions. A more nuanced view might behoove us. Don’t you think?
The great machine is the world as we know it. A world where the strong take from the weak and call it just, one where the strong are empowered to oppress the weak, to protect the weak from the strong, and a world in which people are ground like flour in a grist mill. Every day we march back to the rights of kings. Where the aristocracy was unlimited in power and the hoi polloi were serfs, but now it is worse, the masses are fashioned into cogs, and fitted to sprockets on a great wheel. If a few don’t mesh and are crushed, that’s good. No more misshaped cogs. A machine however is not able to evolve, it can only be upgraded or replaced. Thus it’s potential is limited by the engineer who upgrades or replaces it. It can never surpass its design and function, no matter if it has unlimited power, its potential is limited.
The world is complex potential in that almost anything is possible. If people are allowed to be free. Where people are unlimited possibilities, the world is unlimited potential. Even a kind of utopia is possible. A utopia that is unimaginable to us, but cannot manifest with a human with a limited imagination at the helm of a great machine. A bulldozer in a swamp. Either God or Complex systems created the world. It’s possible God created complex systems to do much of the work for him… as we do machines. Nevertheless, the world is a complex system of potential, made up of complex organisms. To force a view of it on oneself that does not comport with reality, no matter how comforting, is madness. One engages in madness at one’s own peril.
The machine concept of mankind is the fundamental weakness of communism and fascism (socialism). Oh, there are myriad failures of those two systems of organization, but those other failures are the result of the fundamental failure, that of understanding. The world of Man is not a machine. Mankind is a complex system of potential. We are complex organisms. No system of management can function with a warped understanding of what it is managing. Communists and fascists believe that they are so smart, wise and imaginative, they can upgrade the machine to be a utopia. For the cogs that fit anyway. The world could be anything they imagine, and only what they can imagine. If we accept the free marketeer vision, that the world is a complex organism of potential, our futures could be unlimited.
That’s why I maintain that mankind will never reach its potential under communist or fascist (socialist) rule. No matter how wise, smart or ruthless the rulers. Their worldview is fundamentally flawed. Other explanations why they all failed spectacularly… the “wrong” leaders, real communism has never been tried, cultural defects, communism needs to be worldwide, or the capitalist apologies, the lack of price feedback, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the distribution of information, are all consequences of a warped worldview. Only with the understanding that Mankind is a complex system, and working with it instead of at odds with it, is the way to allow mankind to reach our true potential. Not as cogs in a machine but as evolving organisms, in an complex system of potential.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
