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| from the Lion and the Unicorn, by George Orwell |
- Following is how Orwell saw the battle of Left versus Right:
- Socialism: The only way an economy can be run with sufficient efficacy is when all means of production are OWNED by the state
- Capitalism: The only way an economy can be run with sufficient efficacy is when all means of production are OWNED privately
To make myself abundantly clear I disagree with both of these ideological worldviews. It is an appallingly destructive false dichotomy. Ownership of the means of production is forbidden, in totality i.e. no one or no thing is allowed to own the means of production. Ignorance of this will wreak havoc in any society no matter how your tribe commands you. This neurosis on its own will cause governments of all party's to kill far more of its own citizens than all wars it fights against the enemy, and all pandemics and genocides combined. This is an ideology free observation. It is not an opinion or a theory. It will happen and history testifies to it far more well than it does to anything else that ever happened.
Orwell to start with in this extract is so bang on about the world we call society - the people on the whole, from bottom to top, the weak and the powerful, are selfish and ignorant.Without exception. There is no escaping it, in any time and place. Selfishness and ignorance drives society run by humans from beginning to end.
He then goes on from a point of certainty and sails into a sea of confusion. By falling into the very same traps he's warning us about. This is collective psychology at its best, by the best. An observed fact of the collective psyche.
Orwell was an earnest, brave and intelligent man. The best. But he still believed that land as an asset is the same thing as wealth. A proposition which by implication fully supports slavery. Ultimately it's saying that human beings can be bought and sold too! The very thing he is trying harder than almost anyone else who has lived, to remedy.
This is certainly a form of obedience signalling. The part of obedience theory which commands us to worship the tribe, well before our morals. And is there anyone who can deny that Orwell was not the foremost speaker about morals?
My research shows that he did discover the ideas of his namesake, Henry George - that OWNERSHIP of the means of production is not necessary to create wealth with it and to continue to own that wealth creation privately. And that its only sufficient to confiscate close to and not exceeding the rental value of those means to deliver justice in the distribution of that wealth. It needs no scientific precision to give it perfect efficacy.
To make myself clear, yes, I also investigated Henry George for several years and found that his followers too are constantly confused by their own ideologically driven psyche's, usually in the form of demanding that all landowners get punished in order to get their holy creed satisfied. I've never been a socialist, never a capitalist and never a Georgist either. I agree with George's root cause analysis but not his prescription, which is confiscating the economic rents, BY FORCE. We must all realise by now that has been a complete and total historic failure thanks to the system wide ignorance and selfishness of ALL people, top to bottom.
We developed and delivered an alternative which still collected the rents, but by autonomous means allowing the citizen to volunteer their freebies in exchange for a better alternative. This policy is known as a Location Value Covenant. Georgists hate me every time I discuss it because it means no longer will the land owner or capitalist be punished. Its a red flag, a strong signal, a tell tale of ideological tribal capture. It's very much like the callout for capital punishment - "the perpetrator must be punished". Hate driven ideological tribal capture.
I often talk about this with a wise old man who is a friend of mine - in the end this may all be moot anyway. Because once the great masse of people have decided to end the systemic selfishness and ignorance, none of this would be necessary anyway - we would all just give, not expecting a reward for it or to be paid back for it! That kind of ideal only comes around every 2000 years or so though sadly.
Alas. Amen.
Orwell falls into the same trap he warns us about so well. He said "because George's remedy makes it that much harder to rid ourselves of capitalism and deliver democratic or English Socialism". A more tribal statement cannot be thought of. And its identical to what Marx said on discovering George too. They are of a tribe.
Orwell's intellect was raised on fanatical Marxism. Yes I know, he turned hard against totalitarianism soon after but could not quite shake it off evidently. If you study Marxists for long enough, you will find that even those who are now apostate, still carry the dogma unconsciously. So their obedience to the ideology is still the source of thought for them. And all thoughts we create, we always go on to worship do we not? No matter how high our intellect. Because we all 'think' that thought is just telling us how things are!
Orwell's plight is commonly known in analytical psychology as tribal epistemology - the philosophy of knowledge and how that convinces a social group about what it declares is truth.
What could he have said instead?
Simply the same as above - everything is private property so long as all economic rent is confiscated and taxation of earned incomes(everything else) is 100% abolished. How this could be achieved exactly is a matter of politics, hopefully the people would choose a voluntary instrument, free from the kind of ideological judgement we see Orwell, Marx and Hayek and so on and so on using.
This is sufficient because if the value of land is no longer privatised and only held in common i.e. NOT OWNED BY ANYBODY, then all other derivative assets of it such as monopoly corporate profits, intellectual property etc cannot form - there is no longer any profit in it! Now the value of land is fully held in common and the tax theft killing millions today is no longer necessary. The cost of acquiring un-earned incomes is now greater than the cost of creating wealth by doing work and investing savings. The confiscated rent would be an embedded part of monopoly profits at the source in land value.
Don't keep getting me wrong. I'm a great admirer of Orwell. He is the epitome of a good man for me. It's just that ideology captures everyone, every time, everywhere if we do not remain on constant guard. And Orwell did not quite manage to escape from this either.
Call that guard time prayer if you like.