Prodigal Knight Revan wrote:I, however, believe in nurture over nature. Human nature can ultimately be put aside with the right kind of nurture. So I also deviate from the argument that communism has to fail for this reason. It doesn’t have to; it just happens to because no society has been nurtured in the way which would require Communism to succeed.
Studying it further, it's human nurture that makes it fail; not nature.
I disagree. If you were to remove society entirely, our actions would still be self-interested. Our own survival and benefit would take precedence; we are, after all, animals. What you seem to be saying is communism would succeed if everyone within the society was indoctrinated with communist ideals from birth.
This has a couple of flaws, as I see it:
1) You
cannot indoctrinate everyone from birth. It's just not achievable. Unless you set up a society comprised entirely of newborn infants without any parents or other adults, your fledgling communist society will necessarily be comprised of people who have
not been indoctrinated in the ways of communism. If it is, as you say, the nurture of these adults that prevents them being entirely in favour of a communist society, then there will be some who refuse to indoctrinate their children into the communist mindset. Thus you end up with a second generation of people with their own dissenters and rebels. From a practical point of view, if no other, you simply cannot ensure everyone is a communist.
Now to point 2:
2) When you say "Human nature can ultimately be put aside with the right kind of nurture" you are, essentially, demonstrating the point about individuality that has already been made. You are advocating taking choice away and ensuring everyone is, for want of a better word, brainwashed from birth with the ideals of your society, regardless of whether this goes against their own nature. You are leaving them no free choice. This takes our hypothetical communist society a long way along the path to an Orwellian form of totalitarianism in which the state shapes the citizens as it sees fit, and individuals cease to exist. Surely there can be few greater violations of our essential humanity than to remove our personalities by indoctrination.