http://www.isegoria.net/2017/07/i-attributed-his-craziness-to-the-zeitgeist/

I just had a flash of insight that you laid out exactly in the above quote. Does syphilis cause a reworking of the brain to spread itself, free love, just like rats infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii make them want to hang around where cat piss smells are or ants that are infected by the lancet liver fluke climb to the top of grass stems and wait to eaten.

I’m sure this is not a novel idea but I don’t think I’ve seen it put so directly.

I could see where it would be real. The Chinese must think we are all nuts, and certainly anyone clinging to orthodox Marxism-Leninism, even refracted through Maoism, would have some problems with current progressive emphases.

The thing with a lot of this left-wing stuff is that the “activists and revolutionaries” espousing it all are exquisitely skilled at what they call “community organization”, revolution, and getting themselves into power. After that? Not so much.

It’s long been an observation of mine that if you really want to appraise a “movement” or a utopian community, you need to take a long, hard look at things like their communal bathrooms and kitchens–The “commons” where the tragedies take place. Every one of these things I’ve been around in person, the bathrooms are communal hell-holes, filthy and nasty. Same-same with the kitchens. The thing is, you can’t get the average human being to take care of things that they’re never going to see the personal benefit from, and trying to get them to even maintain basic sanitation standards in a communal setting…? Dear God, the horror, the horror.

I lost any faith in the idea of socialism and communistic living the first time I had to deal with just doing basic housekeeping in a military barracks. I’m here to tell you that without an over-arcing authority structure to enforce stuff, the whole thing would devolve to a “Lord of the Flies” situation (literally and figuratively both…) in very short order. The whole idea of “clean as you go” and individuals taking responsibility to keep things nice and clean… LOL. I have personally witnessed the same destructive path described by Garret Hardin take place in real time before my eyes, and I see no way short of somehow genetically engineering responsibility and an ant-like altruism into the human race, socialism of any stripe is never going to work. About all you’re ever going to be able to do is stretch things out, depending on your initial subjects and everything else–No matter what, it’s all going to come crashing down over the issues of who is to take responsibility for cleaning the figurative toilets and taking out the trash.

The fundamental flaw with nearly all of the precursors to socialism and Marxism is that the people who came up with most of the drivel were never people who actually did anything. They were all theorists, men who did not actually run things or who had any actual experience of real-world accomplishment. Because of this, just about the entire sorry edifice of this school of philosophy has proven to be unworkable in the real world, with real human beings.

Collectivism has only worked when it’s been implemented on the small scale, supported by outside economic scaffolding. Every time it’s been tried on a larger scale, it has crashed and burned on implementation, generally because of what has been termed “the tragedy of the commons”. Human nature is not sufficiently altruistic for these ideas to work, whether we’re talking the early Christian ascetic movements, the various utopian socialist communities, or things like Venezuela and the former Soviet Union. You may get enough people sufficiently engaged to make things seem to work for a short while, but the inevitable human tendency to do the least possible within the strictures of the system leads to the inevitable long-term collapse.

You want communitarian philosophies to work, you need to be working with ants, not human beings. I’m pretty sure that even if you were to somehow genetically engineer humans to be capable of making a communitarian society work, well… The resultant creation would likely not be something we’d recognize as human, for any given value.