LIFE
the same bottle. He reminded me of
a pharmacist trying to flog thalido-
mide to an expectant mother while
making no attempt to hide the fact
that it has caused the deaths of at
least 2,000 children and serious birth
defects in more than 10,000 others.
And yet, nearly 13 million Britons
voted for Corbyn. Could it be that
they just don’t know about all the
misery and suffering that socialism
has unleashed?
That’s a popular theory on my
side of the political divide and has
prompted a good deal of head-
scratching about how best to teach
elementary history — such as that
more people were killed by Stalin
than by Hitler. One suggestion is
to create a museum of communist
terror that documents all the peo-
ple murdered in the great socialist
republics — and full credit to the
journalist James Bartholomew for
getting some traction behind this
idea. But is it really historical igno-
rance that prompts people to invest
their hopes in Corbyn? An inconven-
ient fact for holders of this theory is
that those who voted Labour at the
last election tended to be better edu-
cated than those who voted Tory.
To try and solve the puzzle of
socialism’s enduring appeal, we have
to turn to evolutionary psychologists
and in particular Leda Cosmides and
John Tooby, two of the leading think-
ers in the field. They contend that we
don’t come into the world as tabulae
rasae, ready to take on the imprint
of whatever society we happen to be
born into. Rather, we are more like
smartphones that come pre-loaded
with various apps, including a set
of moral intuitions. The problem is,O
ne of the mysteries of our age
is why socialism continues to
appeal to so many people.
Whether in the Soviet Union, China,
Eastern Europe, North Korea, Cuba,
Vietnam, Cambodia or Venezuela, it
has resulted in the suppression of free
speech, the imprisonment of political
dissidents and, more often than not,
state-sanctioned mass murder. Social-
ist economics nearly always produce
widespread starvation, something we
were reminded of last week when the
President of Venezuela urged peo-
ple not to be squeamish about eating
their rabbits. That perfectly captures
the trajectory of nearly every socialist
experiment: it begins with the dream
of a more equal society and ends with
people eating their pets. Has there
ever been an ideology with a more
miserable track record?
Why, then, did 40 per cent of the
British electorate vote for a party led
by Jeremy Corbyn last June? It wasn’t
as if he acknowledged that all previ-
ous attempts to create a socialist uto-
pia had failed and explained why it
would be different under him. There
was no fancy talk of ‘post-neoclassical
endogenous growth theory’ or ‘pre-
distribution’, as there had been by his
two predecessors. No, he was selling
exactly the same snake oil that every
left-wing huckster has been peddling
for the past 100 years, and in exactly
these apps haven’t been updated for
40,000 years. They were designed for
small bands of hunter-gatherers rath-
er than citizens of the modern world
and prompt us to look more favour-
ably on socialism than free-market
capitalism. Why? Because in hunter-
gatherer societies, where the pooling
of resources is essential for survival,
the principle of ‘from each accord-
ing to his ability, to each according
to his need’ makes perfect sense.
By the same token, we have a great
deal of difficulty grasping that people
acting in an individual, self-interest-
ed way can create huge communal
benefits, as it does under capitalism.
Back in the primeval forest, our sur-
vival depended upon distrusting peo-
ple who weren’t willing to engage in
reciprocal altruism.
In hunter-gatherer societies, goods
are finite. If someone has more than
his fair share of meat, there is less
for everyone else. That’s not true of
capitalist societies, where successful
entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs cre-
ate wealth without taking anything
away from others; but because we’re
programmed to think of resources
in a zero-sum way we cannot eas-
ily understand this. Instead, we’re
inclined to believe people like Cor-
byn when they tell us the rich only got
that way by stealing from the poor.
So what’s the solution? Are we
doomed to repeat the mistakes of the
past? Hopefully not, but we need to
tell a story about capitalism that is just
as appealing to people’s 40,000-year-
old moral intuitions as the sales patter
of socialist snake oil salesmen.Toby Young is associate editor
of The Spectator.Status Anxiety
The mystery of socialism’s
enduring appeal
Toby Young
MICHAEL HEATH
Corbyn was
selling exactly
the same
snake oil that
every left-wing
huckster has
been peddling
for 100 years