Fraser Institute
‘New Socialist Man’ was a selfish corrupt cheat
From the Fraser Institute
It’s a common trope that capitalism corrupts. Anyone who has spent time with our species knows that we can be avaricious, materialist and selfish. Tempting as it may be to think that socialism would make us better, it seemed to make us worse.
The communist revolution sought to reshape the economy by giving government control over the means of production. But socialist revolutionaries had more than the economy in their sights. They aimed for nothing less than an extreme makeover of human nature. Unfortunately, actual socialism seemed to make people worse, not better.
Why did socialists seek to change man?
Marx believed that “the essence of man” was “no abstraction inherent in each single individual.” Instead, this essence was “the ensemble of the social relations.” And by changing social relations, he believed man could be changed for the better.
For his part, Stalin saw that certain aspects of human nature were stumbling blocks to the socialist dream. In 1935 he told a conference of collective farm labourers that “a person is a person. He wants to own something for himself.” It will “take a long time yet to rework the psychology of the human being, to reeducate people to live collectively.”
But Stalin and others believed that, given enough time, socialism would create what they called the “New Socialist Man.” He would be intelligent, healthy, muscular, selfless and supremely dedicated to the cause. Basically, he’d look like everyone in the socialist “realist” paintings that the government compelled artists to paint.
He would care less about his private life and his family and more about society-at-large. It was in this vein that Soviet education theorists taught that “By loving a child, the family turns him into an egotistical being, encouraging him to see himself as the centre of the universe.” In the place of such “egoistic love” the state encouraged “rational love” of the broader “social family.”
Socialists had a practical reason for remaking man. Without economic freedom, citizens had little incentive to produce. In a capitalist society, Adam Smith’s butcher, brewer and baker serve us dinner because they are incentivized to do so; it puts money in their pockets and food in the bellies of their children. But in a state-run canteen the workers were paid whether they served decent food or not. The socialists hoped that by remaking human nature—by creating a New Socialist Man motivated to serve others and not just himself and his family—they could solve this incentive problem.
How did people change?
As I’ve explained in an earlier post, the incentive problem was never solved. The New Socialist Man never got very good at serving others, so socialist societies were systematically poor.
But what happened to human nature? Did they succeed in changing it? The species evolves over generations so, of course, the seven-decade socialist experiment didn’t alter human genes (when Marx sent a copy of Das Kapital to Charles Darwin, it apparently sat unread on Darwin’s shelf). But socialism did have a profound effect on cultural norms and attitudes. And these changes were almost entirely for the worse.
In my book on Poland with Pete Boettke and Konstantin Zhukov, we quote one Pole from the late-1980s who observed: “one can make a generalization that everybody in Poland who has the chance engages in a good deal of stealing, cheating, and supplementing his or her income by illegal means.”
Another complained: “Why must I so often do things to get a promotion or improve my family’s living standard that run against my conscience? Why and how has it become true that I am a swine? When did I realize it, and when did I stop caring?”
Socialist planners also worried about cultural decline: “What is going to happen to the character of the young generation,” a state planner asked, “if from the very beginning of their working career in the enterprise, they are being taught and morally forced to cheat at the expense of the whole society?”
In our Estonia book, we quote Václav Havel, the poet-playwright-dissident who became Czechoslovakia’s last president. He identified the problem in his New Year’s address of 1990:
We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities… I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact, and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—though naturally to differing extents— responsible for the operation of totalitarian machinery, none of us is just its victims; we are all also its cocreators.
Even Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev complained in his autobiography of “a gradual erosion of the ideological and moral values of our people.”
Why was the New Socialist Man a worse man?
The control problem is one explanation for this gradual erosion of moral values. With no carrots in the form of market incentives, socialist leaders deployed a terrifying array of sticks—mass deportation, widespread surveillance, arrests and slave labour. They even weaponized children against their parents (a topic I plan to cover in a future post). And since the socialist revolution was built around the notion of class warfare, the socialists felt justified in using these sticks against any class that stood in their way: kulaks, capitalists, ethnic minorities, nationalists, internationalists, left deviationists, right deviationists, religious leaders, cultural icons and intellectuals.
In the face of such widespread terror, it’s no wonder that the socialist state bread cultural habits of anger and distrust. But terror was not the only source of cultural rot. The dysfunctional economy, with its everyday contradictions and absurdities, was another source.
Despite the promise of material abundance, shortages were endemic to the socialist economy. Consumers routinely faced shortages of soap, coffee, sugar, laundry detergent, cigarettes, rubber, transportation, household appliances, cars, housing, clothing and—above all—meat. The shortages arose in part by accident. Without market-determined prices, planners were often flying blind. But shortages were also purposefully engineered by bureaucrats to solicit bribes from rationed consumers.
The only legal way that people could get what they wanted was to wait in line—sometimes for weeks on end. And even then, thugs could jump the queue. Those who didn’t want to wait would resort to bribery and the black market. Even socialist planners and factory leaders had to use the black market to meet their targets in the Five-Year plans. People commodified their relationships, using friends and family to supply them with what the socialist economy would not. This gave rise to what was called “an economy of favours” and the saying that “One must have, not a hundred rubles, but a hundred friends.”
The political scientists John Clark and Aaron Wildavsky describe the dynamic:
When the need for social or political contacts to accomplish anything—from getting enough steel in order to meet one’s factory’s plan quota to finding chocolate for a child’s birthday party—become indispensable… human relations suffer. People expect both too much and too little from friends, family, and acquaintances: too much, since almost every aspect of your life depends on what others can do for you; too little, since the instrumentalization of these relations means that they are sucked dry of any inherent pleasure.
The anthropologist Janine Wedel describes the effect on a Polish woman who manipulated her connections to obtain curtains: “[She] feels a kind of revengeful pride—she is happy to manipulate a system that has humiliated her all her life.”
As we put it in our Poland book: “The new socialist man was not the selfless creature of Marxist writing. He was a grifter who had no choice but to make his way by cheating the rest of society, just as the rest of society cheated him.”
It’s a common trope that capitalism corrupts. Anyone who has spent time with our species knows that we can be avaricious, materialist and selfish. Tempting as it may be to think that socialism would make us better, it seemed to make us worse.
The communist revolution sought to reshape the economy by giving government control over the means of production. But socialist revolutionaries had more than the economy in their sights. They aimed for nothing less than an extreme makeover of human nature. Unfortunately, actual socialism seemed to make people worse, not better.
Why did socialists seek to change man?
Marx believed that “the essence of man” was “no abstraction inherent in each single individual.” Instead, this essence was “the ensemble of the social relations.” And by changing social relations, he believed man could be changed for the better.
For his part, Stalin saw that certain aspects of human nature were stumbling blocks to the socialist dream. In 1935 he told a conference of collective farm labourers that “a person is a person. He wants to own something for himself.” It will “take a long time yet to rework the psychology of the human being, to reeducate people to live collectively.”
But Stalin and others believed that, given enough time, socialism would create what they called the “New Socialist Man.” He would be intelligent, healthy, muscular, selfless and supremely dedicated to the cause. Basically, he’d look like everyone in the socialist “realist” paintings that the government compelled artists to paint.
He would care less about his private life and his family and more about society-at-large. It was in this vein that Soviet education theorists taught that “By loving a child, the family turns him into an egotistical being, encouraging him to see himself as the centre of the universe.” In the place of such “egoistic love” the state encouraged “rational love” of the broader “social family.”
Socialists had a practical reason for remaking man. Without economic freedom, citizens had little incentive to produce. In a capitalist society, Adam Smith’s butcher, brewer and baker serve us dinner because they are incentivized to do so; it puts money in their pockets and food in the bellies of their children. But in a state-run canteen the workers were paid whether they served decent food or not. The socialists hoped that by remaking human nature—by creating a New Socialist Man motivated to serve others and not just himself and his family—they could solve this incentive problem.
How did people change?
As I’ve explained in an earlier post, the incentive problem was never solved. The New Socialist Man never got very good at serving others, so socialist societies were systematically poor.
But what happened to human nature? Did they succeed in changing it? The species evolves over generations so, of course, the seven-decade socialist experiment didn’t alter human genes (when Marx sent a copy of Das Kapital to Charles Darwin, it apparently sat unread on Darwin’s shelf). But socialism did have a profound effect on cultural norms and attitudes. And these changes were almost entirely for the worse.
In my book on Poland with Pete Boettke and Konstantin Zhukov, we quote one Pole from the late-1980s who observed: “one can make a generalization that everybody in Poland who has the chance engages in a good deal of stealing, cheating, and supplementing his or her income by illegal means.”
Another complained: “Why must I so often do things to get a promotion or improve my family’s living standard that run against my conscience? Why and how has it become true that I am a swine? When did I realize it, and when did I stop caring?”
Socialist planners also worried about cultural decline: “What is going to happen to the character of the young generation,” a state planner asked, “if from the very beginning of their working career in the enterprise, they are being taught and morally forced to cheat at the expense of the whole society?”
In our Estonia book, we quote Václav Havel, the poet-playwright-dissident who became Czechoslovakia’s last president. He identified the problem in his New Year’s address of 1990:
We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities… I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact, and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—though naturally to differing extents— responsible for the operation of totalitarian machinery, none of us is just its victims; we are all also its cocreators.
Even Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev complained in his autobiography of “a gradual erosion of the ideological and moral values of our people.”
Why was the New Socialist Man a worse man?
The control problem is one explanation for this gradual erosion of moral values. With no carrots in the form of market incentives, socialist leaders deployed a terrifying array of sticks—mass deportation, widespread surveillance, arrests and slave labour. They even weaponized children against their parents (a topic I plan to cover in a future post). And since the socialist revolution was built around the notion of class warfare, the socialists felt justified in using these sticks against any class that stood in their way: kulaks, capitalists, ethnic minorities, nationalists, internationalists, left deviationists, right deviationists, religious leaders, cultural icons and intellectuals.
In the face of such widespread terror, it’s no wonder that the socialist state bread cultural habits of anger and distrust. But terror was not the only source of cultural rot. The dysfunctional economy, with its everyday contradictions and absurdities, was another source.
Despite the promise of material abundance, shortages were endemic to the socialist economy. Consumers routinely faced shortages of soap, coffee, sugar, laundry detergent, cigarettes, rubber, transportation, household appliances, cars, housing, clothing and—above all—meat. The shortages arose in part by accident. Without market-determined prices, planners were often flying blind. But shortages were also purposefully engineered by bureaucrats to solicit bribes from rationed consumers.
The only legal way that people could get what they wanted was to wait in line—sometimes for weeks on end. And even then, thugs could jump the queue. Those who didn’t want to wait would resort to bribery and the black market. Even socialist planners and factory leaders had to use the black market to meet their targets in the Five-Year plans. People commodified their relationships, using friends and family to supply them with what the socialist economy would not. This gave rise to what was called “an economy of favours” and the saying that “One must have, not a hundred rubles, but a hundred friends.”
The political scientists John Clark and Aaron Wildavsky describe the dynamic:
When the need for social or political contacts to accomplish anything—from getting enough steel in order to meet one’s factory’s plan quota to finding chocolate for a child’s birthday party—become indispensable… human relations suffer. People expect both too much and too little from friends, family, and acquaintances: too much, since almost every aspect of your life depends on what others can do for you; too little, since the instrumentalization of these relations means that they are sucked dry of any inherent pleasure.
The anthropologist Janine Wedel describes the effect on a Polish woman who manipulated her connections to obtain curtains: “[She] feels a kind of revengeful pride—she is happy to manipulate a system that has humiliated her all her life.”
As we put it in our Poland book: “The new socialist man was not the selfless creature of Marxist writing. He was a grifter who had no choice but to make his way by cheating the rest of society, just as the rest of society cheated him.”
From the Fraser Institute
By Tom Flanagan
When Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015, he memorably said that the welfare of Indigenous Canadians was his highest priority. He certainly has delivered on his promise, at least in terms of shovelling out money.
During his 10 years in office, budgeted Indigenous spending has approximately tripled, from about $11 billion to almost $33 billion. Prime Minister Trudeau’s instruction to the Department of Justice to negotiate rather than litigate class actions has resulted in paying tens of billions of dollars to Indigenous claimants over alleged wrongs in education and other social services. And his government has settled specific claims—alleged violations of treaty terms or of the Indian Act—at four times the previous rate, resulting in the award of at least an additional $10 billion to First Nations government.
But has this avalanche of money really helped First Nations people living on reserves, who are the poorest segment of Canadian society?
One indicator suggests the answer is yes. The gap between reserves and other communities—as measured by the Community Well-Being Index (CWB), a composite of income, employment, housing and education—fell from 19 to 16 points from 2016 to 2021. But closer analysis shows that the reduction in the gap, although real, cannot be due to the additional spending described above.
The gain in First Nations CWB is due mainly to an increase in the income component of the CWB. But almost all of the federal spending on First Nations, class-action settlements and specific claims do not provide taxable income to First Nations people. Rather, the increase in income documented by the CWB comes from the greatly increased payments legislated by the Liberals in the form of the Canada Child Benefit (CCB). First Nations people have a higher birth rate than other Canadians, so they have more children and receive more (on average) from the Canada Child Benefit. Also, they have lower income on average than other Canadians, so the value of the CCB is higher than comparable non-Indigenous families. The result? A gain in income relative to other Canadians, and thus a narrowing of the CWB gap between First Nations and other communities.
There’s an important lesson here. Tens of billions in additional budgetary spending and legal settlements did not move the needle. What did lead to a measurable improvement was legislation creating financial benefits for all eligible Canadian families with children regardless of race. Racially inspired policies are terrible for many reasons, especially because they rarely achieve their goals in practise. If we want to improve life for First Nations people, we should increase opportunities for Canadians of all racial backgrounds and not enact racially targeted policies.
Moreover, racial policies are also fraught with unintended consequences. In this case, the flood of federal money has made First Nations more dependent rather than less dependent on government. In fact, from 2018 to 2022, “Own Source Revenue” (business earnings plus property taxes and fees) among First Nations bands increased—but not as much as transfers from government. The result? Greater dependency on government transfers.
This finding is not just a statistical oddity. Previous research has shown that First Nations who are relatively less dependent on government transfers tend to achieve higher living standards (again, as measured by the CWB index). Thus, the increase in dependency presided over by the Trudeau government does not augur well for the future.
One qualification: this finding is not as robust as I would like because the number of band governments filing reports on their finances has drastically declined. Of 630 First Nation governments, only 260 filed audited statements for fiscal 2022. All First Nations are theoretically obliged by the First Nations Financial Transparency Act, 2013, to publish such statements, but the Trudeau government announced there would be no penalties for non-compliance, leading to a precipitous decline in reporting.
This is a shame, because First Nations, as they often insist, are governments, not private organizations. And like other governments, they should make their affairs visible to the public. Also, most of their income comes from Canadian taxpayers. Both band members and other Canadians have a right to know how much money they receive, how it’s being spent and whether it’s achieving its intended goals.
Author:
From the Fraser Institute
The average entrance grade at the University of British Columbia is now 87 per cent, up from 70 per cent only 20 years ago. While this is partly because the supply of available university spots has not kept pace with growing demand, it’s also likely that some B.C. high schools are inflating their students’ grades.
Suppose you’re scheduled for major heart surgery. Shortly before your surgery begins, you check into your surgeon’s background and are pleased to discover your surgeon had a 100 per cent average throughout medical school. But then you learn that every student at the same medical school received 100 per cent in their courses, too. Now you probably don’t feel quite as confident in your surgeon.
This is the ugly reality of “grade inflation” where the achievements of everyone, including the most outstanding students, are thrown into question. Fortunately, grade inflation is (currently) rare in medical schools. But in high schools, it’s a growing problem.
In fact, grade inflation is so prevalent in Ontario high schools that the University of Waterloo’s undergraduate engineering program uses an adjustment factor when evaluating student applications—for example, Waterloo might consider a 95 per cent average from one school the equivalent of an 85 per cent average from another school.
Grade inflation is a problem in other provinces as well. The average entrance grade at the University of British Columbia is now 87 per cent, up from 70 per cent only 20 years ago. While this is partly because the supply of available university spots has not kept pace with growing demand, it’s also likely that some B.C. high schools are inflating their students’ grades.
Sadly, grade inflation is so rampant these days that some school administrators don’t even try to hide it. For example, earlier this year all students at St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic High School in Aurora, Ontario, received perfect marks on their midterm exams in two biology courses and one business course—not because these students had mastered these subjects but because the York Catholic District School Board had been unable to find a permanent teacher at this school.
The fact that a school board would use grade inflation to compensate for inadequate instruction in high school tells us everything we need to know about the abysmal academic standards in many schools across Canada.
And make no mistake, student academic performance is declining. According to results from the Programme for International Assessment (PISA), math scores across Canada declined from 532 points in 2003 to 497 points in 2022 (PISA equates 20 points to one grade level). In other words, Canadian students are nearly two years behind on their math skills then they were 20 years ago. While their high school marks are going up, their actual performance is going down.
And that’s the rub—far from correcting a problem, grade inflation makes the problem much worse. Students with inflated grades get a false sense of their academic abilities—then experience a rude shock when they discover they aren’t prepared for post-secondary education. (According to research by economists Ross Finnie and Felice Martinello, students with the highest high school averages usually experience the largest drop in grades in university). Consequently, many end up dropping out.
Grade inflation even hurts students who go on to be academically successful because they suffer the indignity of having their legitimate achievements thrown into doubt by the inflated grades of other students. If we want marks to have meaning, we must end the practise of grade inflation. We do our students no favours when we give them marks they don’t really deserve.
Just as our confidence in a surgeon would go down if we found out that every student from the same medical school had a 100 per cent average, so we should also question the value of diplomas from high schools where grade inflation is rampant.
Author:
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