I rejoined university this week and as a consequence am now walking around with that horrible student label attached to me. So far I have managed to get up in the mornings and I haven’t watched ANY daytime TV, especially not Diagnosis Murder so I’m not quite a student again yet am I? My lectures for anyone not interested in Librarianship would have been extremely boring but for me and my fellow librarians they have been rather good. We’ve had discussions about management, technological advances, Nancy Pearl (the stereotypical librarian) and the changing roles of information and the need for information management within an increasingly techno-society.

Here’s a little clue as to why information management is just as important, if not more so today than it has ever been: between 1750-1950 information doubled, between 1950-1970 information doubled again, in 1995 information doubled every 30 months, in 1998 information doubled every 21 months and then in 2005 information was said to double every 30 days!! WOW. That’s a lot of information I’m training to manage isn’t it! Librarians don’t just sit and say sshhh ya’kno! We preserve information, we organise information, we educate, we make information accessible, we do a bloody lot if you ask me.

Anyway – the main point of my ‘Hello, I’m still alive’ post wasn’t to talk about my course but to give a nod to the Socialist Students meeting I went to on Monday. The main topic of discussion, ‘What is Socialism?’ got me thinking a lot about human behaviour and whether there can be any truth in one comment that was put forward; ‘Everyone wants to be a Lenin, no-one wants to be the masses’.

So what is socialism? In my opinion a socialist state is a typically egalitarian-like state, a state that provides for everyone and maintains fundamental human rights such as healthcare, education, social security, food, shelter etc etc. Socialism is a rejection of the inequalities brought about by wealth and power. Socialism rejects poverty, war, human suffering. What I don’t think socialism is however is a struggle for equality by stripping away individualism. The term equality suggest that everyone is equal in the sense that everybody is the same and has the same needs. I don’t think this is right. Our inequalities are due to many factors including age, sex, physical strength, environment, culture, tradition etc etc. In my opinion a truly workable social state would therefore need to be one that recognised these differences and set out to provide for a states individuals rather than its masses.

I think one of the main failings of socialism has been its need to group people together on mass because it doesn’t recognise patterns of human behaviour. Take Mao for example. The failure of communism in Mao’s China followed Mao’s totalitarianism, his desire for absolute power. It led to the great famine and the disaterous Cultural Revolution. He denounced aids that were essentially fighting for the same cause, he allowed torture, threatened to crush any ‘anti-Mao’ activity which included caring for your own children slightly better than your neighbours. Mao’s China was nothing more than a fascist dictatorship. He called for criticism yet should anyone dare, they would be crushed, their whole family would be crushed and disposed of. You would be a ‘class enemy’, a ‘Capitalist roader’, a ‘Kuomintang sympathiser’ and forced to attend regular denunciation meetings, beatings and interrogations. The point I’m trying to make here is the fact that socialism could never work should it fail to recognise human behaviour and human emotion.

I read about an experiment earlier today by Philip Zimbardo at the Department of Psychology at the Stanford University in California. He took 21 healthy young men and decided to monitor their behaviour in a fictional prison environment. He appointed 10 prisoners and 11 guards and left them with a basic instruction: the guards are to maintain law and order. After six days he was to abandon the project entirely as the prisoners suffered appalling mistreatment leading to psychological defects. While he concludes that individual behaviour is largely under control of social and environmental forces, rather than being the result of personality traits, character or will-power I can’t help but question whether it might be possible that the result of this experiment was mainly caused by an innane human behaviour to abuse power. Is it human nature to abuse power? Is abusing power a natural outcome of human nature that seeks to dominant? Is life simply a survival of the fittess? At any cost?

Maybe to answer such questions socialism should learn from role relationships and the consequences of organisational structures that ignore personalities, understandings of others, attitudes to behavioural constraints, abilities to inhibit and control behaviour and degrees of socialisation with respect of constraints. Well that’s what I think anyway.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Personal and tagged as lenin, mao, socialism, uni. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.