Einstein vs. Einstein

on socialism, capitalism, the individual and the State

(…he changed his mind sometimes)

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules.

~ Albert Einstein, Why Socialism? (1949)

vs.

It is no accident that Capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Egoism and competition are, alas, stronger forces than ‘public spirit’ and ‘sense of duty.’ In Russia they say it is impossible to get a decent piece of bread. Perhaps I am over-pessimistic concerning State and other forms of communal enterprise, but I expect little good from them. Bureaucracy is the death of achievement.

~ Albert Einstein, The World As I See It: Culture and Prosperity (1954), p.88-89

An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. Force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. … The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; the individual alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

~ Albert Einstein, The World As I See It: Culture and Prosperity (1954) p.13

Every individual should have the opportunity to develop the gifts which may be latent in him. Alone in that way can the individual obtain the satisfaction to which he is justly entitled; and alone in that way can the community achieve its richest flowering. For everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labour in freedom. Restriction is justified only in so far as it may be needed for the security of existence.

~ Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (1950), p.19

thesociologist:

Albert Camus, Between Hell and Reason: Blocnotes (1940)

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Something beautiful

This is a game theory model of people. The people all begin as red squares, meaning they are selfish, can leave people if they want, and and are not cooperating with the people around them. When the people start cooperating and start working together, they turn green, then blue when they are completely  working together. The yellow squares are people who have stopped working together.

This is a visualization of the logic of voluntary cooperation, and it shows how individuals work together voluntarily even when it is entirely out of their self-interest.

IMO, the important points are (1) that human beings voluntarily work together and cooperate even if they’re 100% selfish and (2) that things are better for everyone is individuals are able to defect, if they can stop cooperating when they want. So people don’t need to be forced to work together, to cooperate, to act collectively. We will do that anyway.

This is the academic abstract:

The Outbreak of Cooperation among Success-Driven Individuals under Noisy Conditions

According to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan [1651; 2008 (Touchstone, New York), English Ed], “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and it would need powerful social institutions to establish social order. In reality, however, social cooperation can also arise spontaneously, based on local interactions rather than centralized control. The self-organization of cooperative behavior is particularly puzzling for social dilemmas related to sharing natural resources or creating common goods. Such situations are often described by the prisoner’s dilemma. Here, we report the sudden outbreak of predominant cooperation in a noisy world dominated by selfishness and defection, when individuals imitate superior strategies and show success-driven migration. In our model, individuals are unrelated, and do not inherit behavioral traits. They defect or cooperate selfishly when the opportunity arises, and they do not know how often they will interact or have interacted with someone else. Moreover, our individuals have no reputation mechanism to form friendship networks, nor do they have the option of voluntary interaction or costly punishment. Therefore, the outbreak of prevailing cooperation, when directed motion is integrated in a game-theoretical model, is remarkable, particularly when random strategy mutations and random relocations challenge the formation and survival of cooperative clusters. Our results suggest that mobility is significant for the evolution of social order, and essential for its stabilization and maintenance.

Dirk Helbing and Wenjian Yu
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich - Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (GESS)

National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS), Vol. 106, No. 8, pp. 3680-3685, 2009

In Iran right now there are underground and illegal rock clubs with photos of Kurt Cobain on the walls. In China, there are millions of nominally communist youths listening to Ke$ha and Lagy Gaga. I believe this is a beautiful and useful phenomenon. I see two overarching ideologies among my fellow humans: (1) collectivism and (2) individualism. The former, collectivism, is manifested as nationalism, and sectarianism, and sectarian religion, and statism.. and more severely as state communism, fascism, theocracy, totalitarianism, and mass slavery.

Collectivism says that some “collective” unit is the basic unit of humanity. It says that someone who speaks for this collective knows what’s good for you better than you do. Individualism is its opposite. Individualism says nobody knows what makes your life worth living better than you do. It says that utility subjective. It says “I matter.” In the extreme this can lead to sociopathy or absolute selfishness.

However, in reasserting the basic premise of individualism, one combats the collectivist ideology of the theocrat and dictator. And nowhere is individualism better and more clearly expressed than in modern pop culture.

Some people call it consumerism or “trash” culture. I see it simply as the inevitable evolution of human culture away from atavistic collectivism and toward individualism. Trash culture therefore is a powerful force for good, and this can be seen in action today in places like China and Iran. In fact, I imagine that bombarding Iraq with the Billboard Top 100 and consumer goods (and generally cultural interaction) might have been a more efficient way of removing Saddam Hussein from power and reforming the Ba’ath Party dictatorship for the good of the Iraqi people.