The Soul of Man Under Socialism

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1. thundergolferJan 2020
   I am surprised that 3.5 hours a day is the threshold where decreased performance begins, as in my little life bubble that seems like an abnormally large amount of TV watching. However Wikipedia[1] tells me the average USA "consumer" is watching 4 hours a day! Yikes.

   To a layman like me this seems like great research. A lot of effort was put in to draw a rigorous conclusion about the effects of TV watching on some aspect of mental performance. I just read Amusing Ourselves to Death though, and I find myself compelled to be a lot more dramatic about the negatives of TV watching, on the late author's behalf.

   Yes it's pretty bad that (excessive) TV watching literally damages your cognitive ability to some degree, but I would say (and please point me to research) that before that damage starts to show it's already near devastated your personal 'knowledge-base'. To try and paraphrase Postman, the content on TV is either trivial or non-trivial but delivered in such a way as to keep you from holding onto any significance, meaning, or theory. TV as a medium is terribly fractured (commercial breaks, 'Now..This' segues) and fundamentally visual (rather than typographic). Human minds thrive in connectivity, interrelation, and continuity. Our minds thrive in the typographic world. At his most polemic, Postman argues that TV at is worst is totally incoherent, conferring basically no knowledge whatsoever. A person's mind might still performance just fine in tests, but having been starved of knowledge it is practically unintelligent.

   Think also of the opportunity cost. At an average of 4 hours a day, as USA 'consumer' watches 1460 hours of TV a year. An average person reads 200-250 words per minute. Taking the upper bound, and the average non-fiction book as 50,000 words. They could finish that average non-fiction book in 4.16 hours. So, they could be reading almost 1 book a day for a whole year instead. Now, that napkin-math result seems implausible to me, but imagine if I was off by an order of magnitude. Say this person could read 35 non-fiction books in a year if that wholesale swapped TV for reading non-fiction. 35 non-fiction books at ~42 hours per book. They would be enormously enriched by this alternative behaviour.

   As an extreme (but unfortunately not uncommon) example, instead of getting all red in the face hearing about Socialism coming to the USA from Fox news, our dear average USA 'consumer' could have read Das Kapital, and The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and The Road to Wigan Pier, and Capitalism and Freedom, and On Liberty, and... etc etc. You get the point.

   So yeah, I'm really onboard with the thesis of Amusing Ourselves To Death.

   1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption

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2. claudiawernerNov 2018
   This was a nice article, especially since I'm a fan of his The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which I'm ashamed to say is the only work I've read by him. In particular, he stands in an odd relation to the other socialist thinkers of his era; Marx known as a thoroughly rational type who went to pains to avoid moral arguments save for the rhetorical devices he was known for even in personal correspondance and Kropotkin apparently seeing no issue with making such moral arguments to argue for socialism. Wilde's stance on morality and argumentation is thus different to both of them - eschewing the rigorous systematic critique of the capitalist system (as the production process of capital, Marx) while also departing from a familiar morality which, at least in their day (and to me even today) moved anyone to the socialist cause (Kropotkin).
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3. ue_Aug 2017
   I take the distinction between private and personal property to be important, as Proudhon and later Marx described.

   >There are different kinds of property: 1. Property pure and simple, the dominant and seigniorial power over a thing; or, as they term it, naked property. 2. Possession. “Possession,” says Duranton, “is a matter of fact, not of right.” Toullier: “Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact.” The tenant, the farmer, the commandité, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors. If I may venture the comparison: a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor.

   https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudho...

   And to learn about why property is against individualism, I recommend Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Bookchin's concerns: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-...

   Even the Stirnerian egoists take issue with private property: http://www.spunk.org/texts/intro/faq/sp001547/secF4.html

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4. ue_May 2017
   >We, as a society, want people to contribute the most that they can to the overall goals of humanity and capitalism acts as a vehicle for that.

   For the point of view that it's not a very good vehicle at all, it's worth reading Oscar Widle's essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which is free to read online (of course!)

   Here's a quick excerpt:

   Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand ‘under the shelter of the wall,’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this.

   If this is interesting, Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread is also a really engaging read.

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5. LesZedCBFeb 2022
   because the kind of work we want the machines to do is degrading and monotonous

   oscar wilde's the soul of man under socialism probably better describes the idea.

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6. barry-cotterMay 2019
   The joy of economic growth is that it enables more and more of us to live the lives of leisure that were the preserve of aristocrats in times past. If you want to live in what Wilde or Adams would have recognised as material comfort and devote yourself to the life of the mind you can get an undemanding part fine job, live in cheap housing and spend the rest of your time at leisure. We live in a world where the norm in developed countries is that people spend a significant fraction of their lives not working, between school and retirement, when people in the bottom decile of income take not just holidays, but international holidays. In many respects in the first world we’re all aristocrats. Most people waste the opportunity to cultivate themselves, to become excellent, but it’s not like aristocrats didn’t mostly waste it too.

   > I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

   > John Adams

   > US diplomat & politician (1735 - 1826)

   > The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

   > OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

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