If the doctrine fits, ...

Personality and Ideology

I think that Communism attracts men who want to rule by force. They subject people to a reign of terror. How does this relate to the content of Marxism, if at all?

I was struck by this question while re-reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. He treats Communism with much more sympathy than anti-Communism. He sees American participation in the Vietnam War as driven by anti-Communism that was irrational, rigid, and old-fashioned. He sees the Communist insurgents as modern and humanist, while “our side” in South Vietnam was feudal and corrupt. For Halberstam, Communism and Vietnam might be suited to one another.

Halberstam’s contempt for anti-Communism seems anachronistic. He wrote his book in the early years of the Nixon Administration, when America was still fighting in Vietnam. That means that it was completed before the fall of Saigon, after which the Communist takeover was cruel, oppressive, and ruinous, leading to a large exodus of what were called boat people fleeing the regime. And he wrote almost twenty years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was widely interpreted as discrediting Communism and leaving only liberal democracy standing at what Francis Fukuyama famously dubbed “the end of history.” After these events, it became harder to see Communism as suitable for anyone.

The Communist states that exist today, such as Cuba, North Korea, China and Venezuela, are all repressive dictatorships, as was the Soviet Union. But I do not believe that Marx and Engels advocated that sort of regime.

Marx did provide the phrase dictatorship of the proletariat. But this could be read as meaning that the working class would seize the “means of production” (factories and equipment) from the capitalists in order to pave the way for a communitarian utopia. How this utopia was going to operate was never spelled out. Indeed, Mises and Hayek argued that it couldn’t work, in what is known as the socialist calculation debate.

But Engels also gave us the phrase withering away of the state, writing

The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not "abolished", it withers away.

So why do Communist regimes turn out to be so evil? My hypothesis is that the Manichean nature of the ideology selects for leaders who are psychopaths and for followers who are willing to rationalize the cruelty of the leaders.

Because you are fighting for utopia against enemies who are trying to maintain the illegitimate status quo, the ends justify violent, repressive means. But I speculate that it is the violent means that appeal to the men who rise to the top of the Communist pyramid. The psychopaths who attain leadership positions claim to be aiming for the ends, but in fact what appeals to them is the moral license to engage in cruelty. What their followers think of as temporary and unfortunate is what the leaders find intoxicating.

Communism works out badly because it provides diabolical men with a moral license and an avenue to obtain power.

It’s not that studying Marx makes men violent. It’s that men with violent personalities find Marxism a congenial ideology that gives them permission to act out.

I think that something similar happens with radical Islam. It is not that studying the Koran turns you into a terrorist or a totalitarian ruler. But if you have psychopathic tendencies, you can find some Islamic doctrine to justify acting out violently.

There is, as with Communism, a Manichean contrast between the ideal promised to believers and the world as it is. This provides a moral license for violence in the pursuit of utopia. This in turn selects for individuals who are attracted primarily by the violent means rather than the utopian ends.

Steven Pinker may be correct that over periods of centuries cultural trends are toward less violence. But there are still people who enjoy violence when they commit it themselves. Others experience enjoy it vicariously. Celebrating the murder of the health insurance company CEO. Or going to a horror movie.

In contrast to Communism, there are doctrines that select for people who are not violent. Some doctrines attract people who are peaceful by nature. Quakerism. Libertarianism. Neoliberalism. I would say that these doctrines are attractive to people who are high in honesty/humility.

Using terms from game theory, I am saying that Communism and radical Islam attract people who are defectors from the social norm of peaceful behavior. Other doctrines are attractive to cooperators.

In game theory, one interesting finding is that in situations where cooperation is mutually beneficial but individually sub-optimal, a “tit-for-tat” strategy works best for getting the other player to cooperate. That is, when the other guy cooperates in one round, you cooperate the next round. But if he defects in one round, you defect the next round.

Humanity consists of a mix in which some people are inclined to cooperate, some people are inclined to defect, and some people are inclined to play the tit-for-tat strategy. People tend to gravitate toward a doctrine that is congruent with their personality.