More stuff does not make us happier. Doing stuff, especially for others, does | Suzanne Moore | Comment is free | The Guardian.


Suzanne Moore thinks, apparently, that being left-wing involves trusting people. You don't have to have lived (as I have) in socialist countries with a massive apparatus of control (or in post-socialist ones happily dismantling it) to find that comically delusional. Anyone who lived through the New Labour era must marvel too at her claim that;

...surely anyone vaguely left-wing is more optimistic than those on the right, because we tend to believe that people given power and freedom will do good things for each other...

If she tried, could she be more wrong? We libertarians are constantly mocked by Leftists for believing that (while bad people will always do bad things) if left to our own devices, most of us will look after ourselves and our families and a good number of us will act selflessly on occasion. The Left, on the other hand, never stops demanding (for our own good, of course) more control. That's precisely because what they truly believe is what Moore has the nerve to attribute to her political opponents (based on observing her own children);

...without socialisation we would simply bite each other, grab whatever we goddamned want and shove it in our mouths...

No we wouldn't. For centuries of human progress before Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Neil & Glenys Kinnock, John Prescott, Tony Blair and other con-artists learned the power of political hypocrisy as the perfect cover for doing precisely that, we trended in the opposite direction, building cooperative ventures and steadily improving the human condition.

I am still optimistic about the potential of the human race. But I am pessimistic about the prospects for people capable of such astonishing self-deception. I can only wonder what such a fantasist sees when she looks in the mirror. Katy Perry, presumably.