Happiness instead of capital and spirituality. Model of an Optimal State. Evgeniy Belilovsky

Party’s voters turned away from it, and America’s going generally blue, that had been expected, never happened. On the other hand, instead of explaining to the voters that the ideology of socialism itself, as opposed to its practical embodiment, has much to offer, George Biden responded to Trump’s shouting about Democrats’ socialism by denying any connection to socialism of his justified calls for providing the citizens with guaranteed social benefits and even managed in the second debate with Trump to deny his own vice-presidential candidate’s remarks. Such a blurring of their proper positions led indeed to the fact that the support of Democrats was not at all what they had hoped for.

      For their part, Republicans, whose ideology is based on individualism, should also neither dismiss the possibility of individualism dominating also within the socialist socio-economic model, nor use the word “socialism” as a swear word, but look closely at its possibilities. And above all, in the name of the firm implementation of the principle of individualism, we must refuse to impose on people who do not wish to follow religious guidelines to obey these guidelines, in the matter of abortions and on other issues. Bearing in mind that the desire to get rid of the religious hegemony that prevailed in the Old World was one of the main reasons for establishing the New World.

      Such a correction of party positions would lead to the restoration of the unity of American society on the basis of a new consensus on a number of crucial ideological issues, and the differences between the parties would be defined already within the framework of this new consensus. If this is accomplished, the United States will strengthen its shaken position as the flagship of the entire civilized world and provide the world with a new impetus. This book may clarify what such impetus will be.

Ashkelon, Israel, January 2021

      What’s to blame and what to do about it?

      Sad music wails,

      I am not deluded,

      When mediocrity prevails,

      Fascist rule is not excluded.

(I. Guberman)

      In establishing what is wrong with the world, the country, the city, the business, the family, it is customary to begin with identifying who is to blame for the trouble and shortcomings, and based on this seek what should be done to correct the situation. This postulate also underlies the famous thesis of the “Communist Manifesto” stating that the entire history of mankind has been a history of class struggle. Others spoke of a struggle for the triumph of God or race, but as a rule the first step was proclaiming the annihilation of the enemy. In reality, it is not primarily the individuals and their associations, which only represent the existing systems, that need to be targeted. We must first of all look for the wrongs of these very systems and suggest the ways to fix them. This is what we will talk about.

      French President Emmanuel Macron said that democracy is out of fashion and capitalism has gone mad, so we have to look for new solutions. This has been clear for a long time. Such as the incompetence of the electorate and the electoral processes being prone to manipulation, as well as the capitalism’s inability to solve in principle the basic social problems of modern society. The fact that it had been publicly said by one of the world leaders was the only new thing about it. Thereafter, the truth of this statement was confirmed by events in the world in the context of the coronavirus epidemic.

      This evidently leads to the need for a fundamentally new solution to the world’s problems. I have already proposed such a solution in the form of a specific system. Now, in light of the new reality, this system should be made even more consistent and explicit.

      The system I propose did not emerge out of nowhere. Marx has already predicted the collapse of bourgeois democracy and suggested an alternative – the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the practical attempt to implement such an alternative has fallen short from the very beginning, as free-market apologist Ayn Rand convincingly demonstrated in her first novel, We the Living. After Trotsky, as described in G. Grigorov memoirs Turns of Fate and Despotism, refused to lead the coup suggested to him by the military leader Muralov and others, the transformation of the USSR into a near-Hitlerian, and after Stalin into a “moderate-fascist” version of the Russian Empire has begun. And further on, the rule of Stalin and his successors clearly demonstrated the ineffectiveness, degenerating into inhumanity, of real socialism. But the resulting, in the words of former U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. G. Kennan, “hysterical manifestation of anti-communism” was “due to the failure to distinguish between the undoubtedly progressive social doctrine, on the one hand, and the alien to us political machine that abused and appropriated the slogans of socialism, on the other”. The senselessness of the indiscriminate denial of socialism was confirmed by practice: the kind of capitalism that Ayn Rand campaigned for in her book Atlas Shrugged has also failed and threatens the very existence of the civilization. This is what the Rothschild clan’s ex-French president had to admit, and which was shown by the destruction of the world economy in the context of the coronavirus epidemic – in such a way that this destruction made people’s lives worse considerably more than the epidemic itself. But it would also be wrong to explain the failure of “real socialism”, in legal terms, by the excessive act of an accomplice only. There were great many such accomplices, none of whom had a satisfactory result. Therefore, it is necessary to acknowledge the existence of deep-seated defects not only in the capitalist system, but also in the socialist system. So it became necessary to develop a new system that would combine the advantages of capitalism and socialism and discard their defects. Such a system could be called SOCIAL INDIVIDUALISM (for more details, see my book in Russian Social Individualism – Moscow, LitRes, 2018).

      The need to develop specifically such a system was understood even on the eve of World War II by the great Robert A. Heinlein. In his visionary novel “For Us the Living”, he formulated the basic premise of the American Constitution of 2028 that he conceived: “No law shall forbid the performance of any act, which does not damage the physical or economic welfare of any other person. No act shall constitute a violation of a law valid under this provision unless there is such damage, or immediate present danger of such damage resulting from that act.”

      First of all, this means that the state will not impose any morality on its citizens. Neither religious postulates, nor the “moral code of the builders of communism”. Such a state would not engage in the education of its citizens at all. It would leave people free to be whatever bastards they want, as long as their bastard nature does not induce them to cause harm to the “physical or economic welfare of any other person”. If that very bastard character is mitigated by the fear of retribution for breaking the law, that would suffice in Heinlein’s state. Another thing is that a vile character can make life difficult for the individual himself in the society. The awareness of such complications can facilitate a change of character, but certainly not the “education of the new man” by the state. For, according to R. Heinlein, there is “grisly unconscious symbiosis between the underworld and the organized churches – for the greatest bulwark of the underworld were always the moral creeds of the churches”.

      He confirms this by the practice prevalent in U.S. in the 1930’s, when criminals” were anxious to have blue laws on the books as long as they were not enforced. Illicitness was the thing that made most of their stock in trade valuable, and they knew it.” This was also the reason why “…in every large American city, the gangsters and the preachers, each for his own purpose, supported and elected the same candidates… Sometimes the concatenation is very involved, but in every case you will find at the end the churches attempting to use the state to coerce the citizen into complying with a creed which the churches have been unsuccessful in persuading the citizen to accept without coercion. Wherever that occurs you have a condition which inevitably results in the breeding of a powerful underworld which will seize the local government, and frequently, through control of local political machines, seize state and national governments as well.” And the fact that