Every so often I peruse books published online by Project Gutenberg, essentially an online library of books whose copyright expired. And every so often I come across a statement or two in those “old” books that foreshadows what I have written. Or, maybe, to be fair to those “older” authors, I should say, “that anticipated thoughts I merely echoed.” Such stumbling upon a foreshadowing idea occurred just minutes ago, when I opened Looking Further Forward: An Answer to Looking Backward by Richard Michaelis (1890). ‘’
Michealis’s book was a fanciful refutation of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a book that extolled the virtues of communism/socialism. In the refutation called Looking Further Forward, the author projects himself into the future as he goes full Rip Van Winkle, waking to find himself the same age after sleeping “113 years, 3 months, and 11 days.” During those 113 years, the world has become Bellamy’s ideal communist/socialist society; everyone gets a “full share” of all “good things produced on earth”; and “people live without cares.” Not quite, of course. That’s where Michaelis's tale and satire hit the ground running awake to the ideal utopia of 2003, I’m guessing probably about the time Bernie Sanders began seriously itchin’ to be our first socialist president.
Ideal. Utopian. But decidedly, just not gonna happen, as you know if you have any experience with human beings. Michaelis writes that, “he [Bellamy] overlooks all difficulties in the introduction of his proposed changes, he really believes his socialistic air-castles must spring into existence very soon and without obstruction, and he populates his fairy palaces with angelic human beings, who would never by any possibility do anything wrong. The surmise, that men and women in a communistic state, would put off all selfishness, envy, hate, jealousy, wrangling and desire to rule is just as reasonable as the supposition, that a man can sleep one hundred and thirteen years and rise thereafter as young and fresh as he went to bed.”
I didn’t have to read far into the book for the gist of Michaelis’s work. In fact, the opening paragraphs of his Preface made me pick up my keyboard to write what you will read here. He writes in that preface:
“Mr. Bellamy …would, …in the name of equal rights, deprive all the clever and industrious workers of a large or the largest part of the products of their labor for the benefit of their awkward, stupid, or lazy comrades! And this would be what Mr. Bellamy is pleased to style justice and equality!”
That there are awkward, stupid, or lazy capitalists, notwithstanding, Michaelis’s point isn’t far off the mark for understanding the outcome of socialist and communist systems. Regardless of the ideal communes of people like Bellamy, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and including those noted failures of such utopian projects like Brook Farm and Cuba, the historical reality is that such people and social structures engender laziness as the fruit of their proposed social equity systems. With no incentive to excel because all are given what the elite predetermine is their due, the subjects of socialist and communist governments have their entrepreneurship and creativity quashed when either or both conflict with government standards of equity.
The absurd claims of those like Bellamy, Sanders, and the like all act like trumpet calls warning us to retreat from such people. But they don’t hear the horns of warning. Their proposed utopias have been mocked by satirists, essayists with brains and a sense of history, and novelists like the late Kurt Vonnegut, whose “Harrison Bergeron” reveals the tragic outcome for those who by virtue of inborn talents, enthusiasm, energy, and skills outshine others in an “equity world.” In Vonnegut’s tale, a Handicapper General’s agents enforce equity by requiring those who excel to wear some limiting device (the stronger, for example, must wear weights; the brighter wear headache-imposing earphones). Gotta be equal in an equitable world, right? And if one can’t elevate the energy, talent, and intelligence of the terminally lazy, untalented, and stupid, then the only recourse is to handicap the superior humans. The goal, not stated but implied, is universal mediocrity.
Of course, one might argue that there is proof of industrialism in people who favor socialism and communism or who are subject to such regimes and that the proof lies in technological accomplishments within China, Russia, and even nuclear North Korea. But one needs to remember that secrets of the atomic bomb were surreptitiously taken by the Soviets and who knows who else, and that much of China’s advances in technology have been piggybacked on the stolen intellectual property of Americans. But skip the military tech and concentrate for a moment on successful small businesses and private ventures that required the risks of entrepreneurship. Those many failed collective farms of the Soviet era stand as a permanent testimony to the degradation of entrepreneurship under communism. Technological advances made on the basis of already existing tech are one thing; a population of self-aggrandizing self-motivated capitalists is another. Which system, socialism/communism or capitalism, made the modern world modern?
Of interest to me is Michaelis’s reference to his hometown as a den of communism. Chicago. Hmmnnn. Isn’t that where Bernie Sanders graduated in 1964. Here’s Michaelis in 1890:
“Chicago has for the last fourteen years been the centre of the communistic and anarchistic agitation in the United States, and in defending the fundamental principles of American institutions against these theories, that were imported from the overcrowded industrial centres of Europe, I became quite familiar with them as well as with the notions and peculiarities of social reformers, who imagine themselves in possession of an infallible receipt to perfect not only all human institutions but also human nature.”
Is there an endless echo of this in all the words of socialist reformers? Things will be different this time. Things will be equitable. Life will be wonderful because everyone will have everything that he needs, leading to peace, harmony, and love among us all.
I’m writing this in 2023 twenty years after Michaelis’s fictional wakeup. He died in 1909, spared the knowledge of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent murders of millions under Stalin and subsequent communist regimes. But he would not have been surprised had he lived to see the subjugation of individuals to the state and the democides committed in the name of the state. He saw long ago the travesties engendered by communism and socialism. Too bad his book was never taught in American schools. Instead, we have arrived at an age when ignorance of socialism’s and communism’s failed promises and inhumane treatment of people—both occurring under the guise of equitable reforms—has enabled the unscrupulous to deceive the naive.
*Project Gutenberg. Richard Michaelis. 1890. Looking Further Forward: An Answer to Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. Chicago. Rand, McNally & Company, Publishers. You can find the down-loadable book online at the Project Gutenberg website.
Michealis’s book was a fanciful refutation of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a book that extolled the virtues of communism/socialism. In the refutation called Looking Further Forward, the author projects himself into the future as he goes full Rip Van Winkle, waking to find himself the same age after sleeping “113 years, 3 months, and 11 days.” During those 113 years, the world has become Bellamy’s ideal communist/socialist society; everyone gets a “full share” of all “good things produced on earth”; and “people live without cares.” Not quite, of course. That’s where Michaelis's tale and satire hit the ground running awake to the ideal utopia of 2003, I’m guessing probably about the time Bernie Sanders began seriously itchin’ to be our first socialist president.
Ideal. Utopian. But decidedly, just not gonna happen, as you know if you have any experience with human beings. Michaelis writes that, “he [Bellamy] overlooks all difficulties in the introduction of his proposed changes, he really believes his socialistic air-castles must spring into existence very soon and without obstruction, and he populates his fairy palaces with angelic human beings, who would never by any possibility do anything wrong. The surmise, that men and women in a communistic state, would put off all selfishness, envy, hate, jealousy, wrangling and desire to rule is just as reasonable as the supposition, that a man can sleep one hundred and thirteen years and rise thereafter as young and fresh as he went to bed.”
I didn’t have to read far into the book for the gist of Michaelis’s work. In fact, the opening paragraphs of his Preface made me pick up my keyboard to write what you will read here. He writes in that preface:
“Mr. Bellamy …would, …in the name of equal rights, deprive all the clever and industrious workers of a large or the largest part of the products of their labor for the benefit of their awkward, stupid, or lazy comrades! And this would be what Mr. Bellamy is pleased to style justice and equality!”
That there are awkward, stupid, or lazy capitalists, notwithstanding, Michaelis’s point isn’t far off the mark for understanding the outcome of socialist and communist systems. Regardless of the ideal communes of people like Bellamy, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and including those noted failures of such utopian projects like Brook Farm and Cuba, the historical reality is that such people and social structures engender laziness as the fruit of their proposed social equity systems. With no incentive to excel because all are given what the elite predetermine is their due, the subjects of socialist and communist governments have their entrepreneurship and creativity quashed when either or both conflict with government standards of equity.
The absurd claims of those like Bellamy, Sanders, and the like all act like trumpet calls warning us to retreat from such people. But they don’t hear the horns of warning. Their proposed utopias have been mocked by satirists, essayists with brains and a sense of history, and novelists like the late Kurt Vonnegut, whose “Harrison Bergeron” reveals the tragic outcome for those who by virtue of inborn talents, enthusiasm, energy, and skills outshine others in an “equity world.” In Vonnegut’s tale, a Handicapper General’s agents enforce equity by requiring those who excel to wear some limiting device (the stronger, for example, must wear weights; the brighter wear headache-imposing earphones). Gotta be equal in an equitable world, right? And if one can’t elevate the energy, talent, and intelligence of the terminally lazy, untalented, and stupid, then the only recourse is to handicap the superior humans. The goal, not stated but implied, is universal mediocrity.
Of course, one might argue that there is proof of industrialism in people who favor socialism and communism or who are subject to such regimes and that the proof lies in technological accomplishments within China, Russia, and even nuclear North Korea. But one needs to remember that secrets of the atomic bomb were surreptitiously taken by the Soviets and who knows who else, and that much of China’s advances in technology have been piggybacked on the stolen intellectual property of Americans. But skip the military tech and concentrate for a moment on successful small businesses and private ventures that required the risks of entrepreneurship. Those many failed collective farms of the Soviet era stand as a permanent testimony to the degradation of entrepreneurship under communism. Technological advances made on the basis of already existing tech are one thing; a population of self-aggrandizing self-motivated capitalists is another. Which system, socialism/communism or capitalism, made the modern world modern?
Of interest to me is Michaelis’s reference to his hometown as a den of communism. Chicago. Hmmnnn. Isn’t that where Bernie Sanders graduated in 1964. Here’s Michaelis in 1890:
“Chicago has for the last fourteen years been the centre of the communistic and anarchistic agitation in the United States, and in defending the fundamental principles of American institutions against these theories, that were imported from the overcrowded industrial centres of Europe, I became quite familiar with them as well as with the notions and peculiarities of social reformers, who imagine themselves in possession of an infallible receipt to perfect not only all human institutions but also human nature.”
Is there an endless echo of this in all the words of socialist reformers? Things will be different this time. Things will be equitable. Life will be wonderful because everyone will have everything that he needs, leading to peace, harmony, and love among us all.
I’m writing this in 2023 twenty years after Michaelis’s fictional wakeup. He died in 1909, spared the knowledge of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent murders of millions under Stalin and subsequent communist regimes. But he would not have been surprised had he lived to see the subjugation of individuals to the state and the democides committed in the name of the state. He saw long ago the travesties engendered by communism and socialism. Too bad his book was never taught in American schools. Instead, we have arrived at an age when ignorance of socialism’s and communism’s failed promises and inhumane treatment of people—both occurring under the guise of equitable reforms—has enabled the unscrupulous to deceive the naive.
*Project Gutenberg. Richard Michaelis. 1890. Looking Further Forward: An Answer to Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. Chicago. Rand, McNally & Company, Publishers. You can find the down-loadable book online at the Project Gutenberg website.
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