Progressives and False Progress

Is collectivism true progress?

In the 1920s academics and other elites finally heard the good news -- humanity was progressing!  Working conditions were improving at an unparalleled rate, more goods and services were being produced than ever before, and more people had the leisure time to engage in humans’ favorite age old past time: complaining.

There was even so much progress that progressives believed they could finally put an end to this noisy dissatisfaction by perfecting the imperfectable.  They believed they could perfect government.

What they ended up doing was subjecting the nation to collective impoverishment not progress.

Thus the progressive movement was actually the collective impoverishment movement.

The collectives, for short, thought they were supporting human progress because of an understandable oversight.  According to the German philosopher Hegel progress was located in the historical development of the bureaucratic state.  And the collectives, who were philosophical devotees of Hegel and desperate to be on the right side of anything including history, unthinkingly adopted their master’s vantage.

This meant “progress” involved advancing bureaucracies’ interests over the true source of progress: capitalism.

Capitalism is progressive because it advances humans’ fundamental interests -- which includes getting more stuff, different stuff, and new stuff in increasingly abundant amounts to perform an ever expanding number of different activities.  In short capitalism is progressive because it gives humans more and more of what they want: abundance and difference.

Yet the collectives overlooked this fact by following Hegel and his misread of history.  They were too busy moralizing the masses with their sermons on the perfectibility of civilization.   And they never noticed the economy’s crucial role in advancing human progress and accordingly human happiness.  

For this reason they choose to bulldoze actual progress and replace it with sterile office spaces for heartless bureaucracies.

But maybe this was all the progress the collectives ever wanted -- to see the resentful mob triumph over the enterprising few.  If that’s the case we’re more progressive than ever before.

Zigmund Reichenbach holds a M.A. in Philosophy from West Chester University.  You can find him commenting on news stories of national and state interest at his Facebook page Zigmund Reichenbach -- Commentator or you can follow him on Twitter @zreichenbach1.  Additionally you can find re-airs of the weekly Sunday podcast episodes here. 

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