sam0345 comments on Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum - Less Wrong

-9 [deleted] 05 November 2012 08:09PM

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Comment author: sam0345 13 November 2012 02:05:25AM *  1 point [-]

And that does happen in practice, I think: most everyone who lived in the USSR would agree that its brainwashing of children was benign in that particular area - teaching cooperation and suppressing zero-sum games.

I don't think so.

Compare East Germans with West Germans. Started off the same race and same culture, yet socialism made them subhuman. Germany has all the problems in assimilating East Germans that a conservative would plausibly attribute to an inferior race with inherently inferior genetics, except that in this case the problems are obviously 100% caused by recent environmental differences.

Socialism did not make them good cooperators, it made them layabouts and criminals.

And, come to think of it, that is a good parallel to the social decay we have seen following state attempts to impose egalitarianism on the family.