The Great Collective Delusion: A History of Sharing (By Force)

 

The Great Collective Delusion: A History of Sharing (By Force)

It is one of the more delicious ironies of human nature that as soon as we stepped out of the nomadic savannah—where "sharing" was a biological necessity for survival—we spent the next ten thousand years inventing complex "isms" to trick ourselves into doing it again.

The birth of "socialism" in the 1820s wasn't some divine revelation; it was a panicked response to the steam engine. As the Industrial Revolution turned humans into mere appendages of soot-stained machines, thinkers like Robert Owen and Pierre Leroux looked at the spiraling inequality and thought, "Perhaps being a greedy hermit isn't the pinnacle of civilization." They called it socialism to contrast it with "individualism," which at the time was just a polite Victorian way of saying "I’ve got mine, so good luck with the cholera."

Historically, socialism was the polite dinner guest of political theory—middle-class, reformist, and fond of cooperatives. Communism, meanwhile, was the rowdy cousin smashing windows in the street. When Marx and Engels sat down to write their famous manifesto in 1848, they avoided the word "socialist" specifically because it sounded too much like a high-society book club. They wanted something that smelled of the factory floor and revolution.

Later, the Bolsheviks turned this into a bureaucratic ladder. According to Lenin, socialism is merely the waiting room for communism—a "lower phase" where the state manages everything until humans magically lose their innate tribalism and desire for status. We are still waiting for that "withering away" of the state. In reality, the state didn't wither; it just grew a larger stomach and more teeth.

Whether you call it a "socialist republic" or a "communist utopia," the underlying biological reality remains: humans are wired to protect their own kin and compete for resources. Dressing up these power struggles in the language of "universal brotherhood" is a classic primate deception. We love the idea of the collective, provided someone else is doing the heavy lifting and we still get the biggest piece of fruit.