Reddit reviews The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

I heard a very depressing theory on the "Talking Politics" podcast a few months ago. The idea is that equality within a society can arise only during and after a destructive force such as that presented by the Second World War. Without such such destruction, the "natural" forces of politics and human nature will inevitably result in those with more resources exploiting the system for their own ends to become richer.

EDIT: It was Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveller.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy posits that any political/economic system allowed to run long enough turns into an oligarchy, with resets only happening because of civil conflicts, invasions, collapses and other periods of unrest.

A good book to explore this with historical data is The Great Leveler by Walter Schiedel.

Pitchfork Economics

• Walter Scheidel: Historian at Stanford. The most frequently cited active-duty Roman historian adjusted for age in the Western Hemisphere, Scheidel is the author or (co-)editor of 20 books, including The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality.
  
  Scheidel cites what he calls the Four Horsemen of economic leveling: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse and plagues as the only forces that have consistently led to major economic leveling.
  
  That's the historical reality. We should expect no different. The question is, will we rise up and create something better, or fall in to a dark ages of sorts, like with the decline of the Roman empire.

I'm going to answer by reformulating the question into: "What type of society maximizes the opportunity for individuation, for the largest number of people?"

First, the answer cannot be a far-left or far-right society. What matters most in these societies, respectively, is the "good of the people" and the "good of the state." Both are authoritarian and so require the centralized coercion of individuals. Since individuation is about "following your own star," a fundamentally coercive social structure is necessarily incompatible. And empirically, these societies end up killing large numbers of their own people.

A capitalist society "delegates" the coercion of individuals...to the individual level. No one is telling you what to do, but you still have to eat. So you get to make a parameterized choice...within the rules of the overall system. Some people call it "wage slavery."

While capitalism has not (yet) led to the large-scale killing of its own people, it comes with a separate set of problems. The biggest one being that it raises material things and money to the highest level, and money becomes god. (Our current situation.) All the old myths and symbolic ways of life lose their vitality. Eventually this nihilism, if left to fester, will produce a violent correction. The unconscious, in its attempt to compensate our imbalanced conscious attitudes, will snap back and tear the external world apart. Then maybe capitalism ends up killing huge numbers of its own people anyway.

Well, now there's a problem. If authoritarian societies don't work, and laissez-faire societies don't work, it seems we are out of options.

Not actually true, though. It's actually a hint we are looking for answers in the wrong place. This doesn't prove that widespread individuation is impossible
under any system, rather it proves that social systems themselves are inherently useless tools for helping individuation—regardless of their type.

Expecting a system to actively further the goal of individuation is fruitless. At best we can ask which system is least detrimental to it.

And the answer has to be nearer to a laissez-faire system, aka capitalism. Despite all its flaws it AT LEAST provides individuals a fighting chance to break through the mass illusion of materialism. It is AT LEAST not fundamentally based on coercion.

Yes...everyone is a wage slave in some sense but...what "wage slavery" really is, at the bottom of things, is an epithet against Mother Nature. Because nature is the ultimate unyielding and unbeatable force. The idea that socialism or communism will liberate us from wage slavery is simply a delusion on the part of the dreamer, that she will be the benefactor of the coercion rather than the target of it. A dubious idea. Not to mention her dreams come at the expense of the self-actualization of said targets. It is zero-sum thinking.

So basically, all social systems including capitalism are completely horrible for individuation purposes. But capitalism slightly less so, because it aims toward removing all coercion except for what is unremovable—nature. It provides us the most freedom for choice, subject to limitations. Corruption will always find its way in, and it will be a constant battle to reduce it. There will always be winners and losers. Worse, inequality is an inescapable part of the human experience. Attempting to engineer it otherwise will have no effect. That is the hard pill which people get stuck swallowing. (Further reading: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Leveler-Inequality-Twenty-First-Princeton/dp/0691165025)

Capitalism falls horribly short of perfection—it merely beats the alternatives.

To summarize, capitalism offers the greatest number of people the greatest chance for individuation, because it provides the greatest chance for bottom-up social change starting within individuals, which is the only real type of social change. It lets us hold onto the faint glimmer of a "tipping point" which ultimately ushers in a Candida Rosa society—the only "TRUE" utopia which rises from the bottom up, rather than from top-down enforcement.

Is it possible to achieve that archetypal utopian society? Even if it were reached, could it last? Is a human society free of conflict possible?

I don't know, but I doubt it. Man is a fallen creature. Maybe at best, we can get closer.

So to finally answer your question. Yes. Emerging policy is anti-Jungian. Self-actualization is impeded by ALL societies. Capitalism gives us the best shot though, however dim it may be.

The idea that greater self-actualization will be somehow achieved by coercive top-down social engineering is contradictory to the maximum extreme. Rather than a holding of opposites it is the wild embrace of opposites by people who have given up on resolving cognitive dissonance within themselves. That comes with a heavy price.

https://www.amazon.com/Great-Leveler-Inequality-Twenty-First-Princeton/dp/0691165025

>but how would you answer someone's concerns that their quality of life will suffer when so many initiatives and programs are disassembled and dismantled in the pursuit of limited government?

Easily.

Wealth in nations has always been defined by the freedom of goods being moved, and the ability of the citizens to generate new wealth. Redistribution doesn't work, that's a fact, it's not an opinion, it's a historically proven fact. It does not work. I know that there's a section of the population who for most of their lives have been told it does, but it's bullshit. The money and resources you would give to people always just go back to the top, that's because the issue isn't resources but strategies, ways of solving problems, and some people do not have good strategies.

In this country, as with any country, we have to measure poverty different than every other country because it's based on the average income. We do not have people in actual poverty, just relative poverty to the insane income of the average American.

>like why should the disabled and working poor have to potentially lose out due to your ideology?

Not much, jobs are always available, and outside of those who are entirely dependent, not much would change for them. Things might actually improve because reducing taxes will mean things will cost less, more jobs will be available, and more people will be willing to give.

>will libertarianism really improve/optimize life quality (sorry for sounding condescending/emotional/moralistic)?

You're not any of those things, you just sound insane. Imagine someone coming up to you and saying that we have to keep giving food and gold to the volcano or else it will erupt, and you know that it won't erupt because that's not what causes it. We've already know for a long time what helps people, welfare is not one of them. It's just an easy platform to run on, it sounds good, and it's easy to shame those who would fight agaisnt it.

> violent crime is jointly determined by the pattern of income distribution and by the rate of change of national income

Multivariate statistics describing human behavior won't be as clear-cut as graphs you see in physical sciences. But I'd lean towards their takeaway.

>If you're arguing for redistribution you're basically saying "if we don't take your money by force, they'll take your money by force"

That's a bingo! Perhaps you should consider this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Leveler-Inequality-Twenty-First-Princeton/dp/0691165025

We can always argue that people should behave more like angels, but the data suggest otherwise.