INSTINCTUAL COLLECTIVISM

Ah, the 26-year-old Karl Marx expounding on the glories of Communism. Well, his certainty makes him out to be a naive idealist in retrospect. Even if this were a humbly stated hypothesis of an excited young man, its speculated natural "humanism" has been burned to cinders by its actual implementation as a practical theory by those who have taken his words seriously. It is horrible that there is a resurgence of this antiquated and disproven nonsense in 2021. 

"Collective" is a fancy word for a working group, or cooperative exercise. Collectivism is the formation of a group to achieve common goals, for good or bad. "Instinctual behavior" is action motivated by conscious or unconscious instincts, or animal reflexes. 

Collectivism is a word used by artists and community activists alike. But the collective has been used as an evil tool by government. Stalin's collectivization of farmland in the Soviet Union was an appropriation of land by the Soviets which pushed the peasants on the land back into state-enforced serfdom. This was an inevitable evolution of Marx's Communism in action. The State eventually lives for The State, not its citizens. The scientific analysis of bureaucracies over millennia has shown this to be a predictable and repeated process. 

Stalin's collectivism led to famine and the starvation of millions. My own great uncle, John Rozhko, died in the gulag after his Belarus farm was raided by Soviets and collectivized. John had retired to Belarus after working decades in the textile mills of Massachusetts. His wife was made a slave of the collective, cooking and cleaning for the 30 families relocated onto the farm by the Soviets. John's two adolescent sons were taken away and forced to become Soviet soldiers. So, Communism isn't the soft and fuzzy solution that is often sold to the destitute to manipulate them into street armies. 

I have spent a good portion of my life working in and for community. Prior to becoming a nurse, I worked in a small community hospital as an aide. After nursing school, I worked in community mental health for The Commonwealth of Massachusetts in two positions, the second position as a clinical supervisor of the state's first government-funded mental health center for homosexual and bisexual clients. My last job in nursing entailed directing the care in a community-funded residential hospice for dying AIDS patients. 

All this has given me some insight in human behaviors, individual and in groups. I know for certain that there is an instinctual drive within human beings to group together under duress. I also know that sometimes the response to that instinct can be productive and sometimes destructive. 

There are many natural stressors upon the human condition, like genetic defects, contagious diseases, aging and the awareness of mortality. Added to these are the stressors inflicted on structured societies by environmental problems, social problems, economic problems and government mismanagement. 

The most threatening stressor of our current age is not a synthesized virus. It is human overpopulation at odds with advanced technologies which make non-technological human labor more and more dispensable. And this huge stressor goes ignored because the large majority of humanity are still heavily invested in supporting irresponsible and/or unintentional human reproduction, primarily at the expense of the female population. 

The hormonally driven propensity for humans to love puppies, kittens and infants combines with the allure of feeling the power of creation: That illusion of power over Nature and mortality. But humans are also horrified by the evidence of decrepit aging. Most human populations condition their children to respect the elderly to the degree that elders are seen as vulnerable holders of wisdom and/or wealth. However, overpopulation's stress has eroded the respect for the elderly and dependent. 

Old people are increasingly warehoused in developed societies which extend their longevity. In some societies, the majority of elderly citizens absorb massive economic resources in the form of guaranteed health care and retirement benefits. In America, the stresses of living on fixed income for a large segment of elderly people led to the formation of AARP, a lobbying collective which asserts influence on government and secures group discounts. 

Black Lives Matter is a collective formed in reaction to the stress of media-evidenced Black fatalities in police encounters. However, the actual statistics of police-instigated fatalities in the US, relative to the statistics on the racial distribution of perpetrators of violent crime, would support speculation that Black Lives Matter is more likely a collective stimulated by the economic stresses of overpopulation, capitalism and technology on one minority, approximately 13% of the US population. 

Competition for resources in an environmentally deteriorating and overpopulated world is inevitable. Magical thinking about colonizing other planets as a solution may comfort some. Human beings, social creatures with deep evolutionary history, don't operate solely on thinking or fantasizing. Today's pandemic crisis, fomented by poor governance, has triggered the panic and hoarding that lies just below the surface of our rational minds. 

My point here is simple. Rushing to various forms of collectivism which are counterproductive is part of human history. We have evolved beyond this to a degree since the mid-20th-century, It made conscious to anyone who can read history that human beings can collectivize in horrific ways when threatened with shortages or mobilized by leaders manipulating for their own gain. 

Recent revelations about one organizer of the Black Lives Matter collective is an example. That person, while advocating Marxism and inadequately condemning violence, has accumulated over $3 million in equity since co-developing that organization which has raised $90 million dollars from well-meaning supporters. Instinctual collective action can be exploited. The challenge is to recognize the real threats which stimulate some collectives and proactively seek more conscious and rational solutions as a whole society.