The End of Equality and The Technocratic Imperative

Chinese communism received copious support from Chinese intellectuals. There were intellectuals in China protesting for a simpler writing system before Mao implemented the simplified writing system, for example. However, the movement quickly turned away from any semblance of intellectual input.

The foremost major failure of Mao's regime during this period was the great leap forward. During this time, grain was planted densely because the idea was that grain wouldn't compete against others of the same kind. This reduced grain harvests, and my friend has a personal story about this. His grandmother witnessed a farmer telling a commune that they were stupid for planting grain so thickly, "you could lie down on it!", they said. They got their tongue cut off for spreading "false information" about the regime. Millions starved. Other policies included "communal furnaces", where people were told that they could make high quality metals communally without economies of scale. The truth is that in order to manufacture high quality steel instead of pig iron, you need industrial scale furnaces because "communal furnaces" can't reach heat capacity. Despite this obvious failure waiting to happen and the academics warning Mao of this possibility, the plan continued. The result? High quality metal, turned into pig iron.

My grandmother starved and her entire village almost died of malnutrition. They starved because of bad farming policies, and a complete inability to automate or move up the abstraction hierarchy. Mao ordered sparrows to be killed because they were pests that ate crops. The result? The locusts that sparrows preyed on grew enormously in population, and they ate all the produce. Everyone starved. But it doesn't matter anyways, because communism is cool. Because an ideology that created generational trauma for two generations is fashionable. People who have never experienced direct or indirect influence from this communist regime still have the audacity to believe this set of failures was caused by the CIA.

After China reverted its socialist policies, it became an economic powerhouse. The modern day CCP lifted almost a billion people out of poverty, which is the greatest quality of life improvement in human history. It is my opinion that the USA attempted to destabilize China during the Tienanmen Square protests, but this didn't fundamentally alter China's ability to become capitalistic. In spite of possible CIA involvement in destabilizing China, China's new economic policy reflected unforeseen progress. What changed in Deng's period? It turns out that foreign investment and private equity doesn't destabilize nations, and capitalism isn't always a CIA plot. But hey, maybe it's not real socialism. Maybe the idea is still good and that was just one really bad implementation.

The Khmer Rouge was one of the deadliest regimes within its lifespan in human history. They smashed babies' heads in en masse, and they broke up families on the basis that people should value their nation more than their families. Within three years, they orchestrated the deaths of two million, making it one of the deadliest three years in history, reducing the Cambodian population by 25%. Cities were emptied, and anyone that resisted the regime was executed. It was almost a fifth of the Nazi regime's total death count, and ran for one fourth of the time. After Pol Pot's death, none of the leaders were formally tried for their crimes. The leaders' remaining lives were spent comfortably in their home country, while American academics such as Chomsky, one of the most cited public intellectuals in linguistics, denied the genocide occured. The Nazi regime was de-nazified and all their collective fiction was turned into pulp. The Khmer Rouge regime's leaders were at large until they died of natural causes, and their Western defenders faced no consequences. But hey, maybe… that's just another unlucky instance?

What started as a proxy war in Korea turned into one of the most brutal modern day regimes. Their propaganda today is a genuine preservation of cold-war era mentality. So let's look into their modern day regime, and maybe we can reconstruct what it was like living in all of these countries.

Their prisons are torture camps, where prisoners catch mice and snakes to eat because they have nothing. Nobody can leave their country. North Korea's biggest money makers today are in fraud and in extortion. The people are desperately poor, and the bureaucratic class are living it large. And let's not forget that there's a natural experiment that played out in Korea. There's the other side of the DMZ, where, despite its problems, people have economic freedom and are happier, despite living in a dystopian, cyberpunk state. Let's not forget that there's always the other side of the wall. Speaking of which…

The first and foremost thing one can look at for quality of life is people voting with their feet. The Berlin wall wasn't built to prevent people from getting in; it was to prevent people from escaping. The West side and East side were split by this wall. On one side, consumers had all the choice in the world, enormous wealth for the middle class and even the poor. On the other side, almost everyone was poor.

It isn't just in Europe and in Asia that Communism has proven to be a failed system. It failed in many rogue militant regimes in Africa. It has failed in south America in Venezuela. Venezuela should have been rich like the OPEC countries. Instead they nationalized their oil industry and now they are desperately poor. It failed in Laos. It failed in Vietnam. It has failed in almost every continent. One of these failures alone was almost as bad as the Nazi regime. When failures happen like this, we usually scrap the idea, not just the practical implementation. Most intellectuals think that it's only a bad idea in practice, without considering that it might just be based on bad principles.

If communism isn't about centralization and brutal dictatorship, how come it plays out in the same predictable way, every time?

And we know that all these ideas are bad in practice, but what about in theory? We know, according to modern day neoclassical economics and public choice theory that Communism as an ideology is broken. The labor theory of value doesn't hold up inasmuch as it doesn't describe the subjective value placed on goods by individuals, which is the basis of the original Marxist scientific socialism. We know that private individuals allocate capital more efficiently than governments do on average, and nobody denies this simple fact.

Communism is built on a foundation of collective ownership, but also it is a rejection of the idea that hierarchies in capitalism are justified. The core tenet of the idea is that equality in economy ownership is of utmost importance because of dirty capitalist exploitation. So we see the reason: academia is in a civil war with the capital owning class, and although they aren't communist anymore, they share the same principles ("it's bad in practice but good in theory") – what if the theory should be scrapped? And how are academics, who are the smartest people in the world, so wrong? What does it say about these people that the smartest people in the world cling onto this failed theory? And what does it say that our entire urban society is built on a milquetoast version of these ideas, after the ideas outright didn't work?

Communist arguments usually involve pointing out both the exploitation of the working class by the managerial class, and arguments based on universal access to public goods. When liberal democracies presuppose the universal access to goods, they are making the exact same arguments. The end result is similar. Instead of centrally planning the production of wheat, you are subsidizing wheat production in order to guarantee universal access. But this model has the same failure mode: it just happens in 100 years instead of 10.

The world isn’t held together by sentiment. It’s held together by incentives. Governments, corporations, and institutions can preach about fairness, justice, and equality all they want, but at the end of the day, none of these ideas survive unless they align with reality. And reality is governed by efficiency.

Every major human rights movement that succeeded – whether it was civil rights, women’s suffrage, or LGBTQ rights – didn’t win because it was morally right in some abstract sense. It won because it became economically impossible to ignore. The same businesses that once refused service to black customers now fight for diversity. The same corporations that once wouldn’t hire women now push for gender parity. The same industries that once ignored LGBTQ rights now celebrate Pride Month with corporate sponsorships. Not because they cared, but because it made sense.

You can moralize all you want about what’s right, but the world runs on what works. And when something works, you don’t need to force it. It wins on its own. Progressives spend so much time trying to manufacture empathy that they fail to ask whether their solutions are actually efficient. Do LGBTQ rights need to be forced onto businesses, or do they emerge naturally because an inclusive workforce is more productive? Does it make sense to give away land to Indigenous groups based on historical guilt, or does it make more sense to integrate them into the economy with productive incentives?

A system that forces people to care is a system that doesn’t trust efficiency to do its job. If your worldview depends on mandating compassion, then maybe it was never that compassionate to begin with. The truth is, the most compassionate thing you can do in such a situation is to tell them the truth – that you don't care about them at all.

The great irony is that when efficiency is maximized, humanism emerges as a side effect. A prosperous, innovative society needs people who are educated, mentally stable, and free to explore their talents. It needs diversity – not because of some ideological quota, but because different backgrounds provide different solutions. It needs to reduce discrimination – not because of sentimental morality, but because a workforce that hires the best talent regardless of gender, race, or identity is simply better at producing results.

If we get rid of the false god of “equality” and replace it with a system that selects for results, we don’t become less human. We become more human – because caring for people is no longer a top-down directive. It becomes the inevitable consequence of doing things right.

The best part? Most humans want to be compassionate anyways, when they're not constantly forced to. They'll give every excuse to themselves to be compassionate to you, if they like you, even if they're convinced they're doing it for self interest. At the end of the day, every efficient system is comprised of feeling human beings. And at the end of the day, what's the more compassionate system? The one that tells you it doesn't care about you when it does, or the one that tells you that it cares about you – and then doesn't?

A future built on competence won't come from Elon or Trump. It doesn't start with hostile takeovers of the current government. It first starts with a collective disillusionment with the current cultural narratives around equality by spreading awareness, paired with a new belief – the belief in a deep Deng style practicality. And it starts from the ground level – treating people as individuals instead of as ideological symbols in a cultural battleground, and a deep commitment towards enriching those around you. Activism in its modern form often replaces real solutions with performative change. Instead of walking into this progressive trap, we should aim to create a culture where our best business leaders, workers, and investors are recognized and rewarded for their contributions to greater economic and technological progress.