Growing Up in a Progressive Utopia - life in a socialist country.

Growing Up in a Progressive Utopia

written by Konstantin Kisin

I grew up in one of the most progressive societies in the history of humanity. The gap between the rich and poor was tiny compared to the current gulf between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ we find across much of the West. Access to education was universal and students were paid to study and offered free accommodation. Healthcare was available to all and free at the point of use. Racial tensions were non-existent, with hundreds of different ethnic groups living side by side in harmony under the mantra of ‘Friendship of the Peoples.’ Women’s equality was at the very heart of Government policy. According to the prevailing ideology “all forms of inequality were to be erased through the abolition of class structures and the shaping of an egalitarian society based on the fair distribution of resources among the people.”

You are probably wondering whether the idyllic nation from which I hail is Sweden or Iceland. It was the Soviet Union. In modern Britain the top 10 percent earn 24 times as much as the bottom 10 percent but in the Soviet Union the wealthy and powerful barely made 4 times as much as those at the bottom. The illiteracy rate in late Soviet times was just 0.3 percent compared to 14 percent of the US adult population who cannot read today. University students were paid an allowance to study and those from working class backgrounds were often given preferential treatment to facilitate better access to higher education. Free accommodation was available for students studying outside their home town.

The Soviet Union was a huge country populated by hundreds of ethnic and religious groups that had been slaughtering each other for centuries. In this shining example of a successful multicultural state, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians, Russians, Tatars, Moldovans, Belarussians, Uzbeks, Chechens, Georgians, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Turkmens, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, and dozens of others all lived side-by-side as friends and neighbours.

The USSR actively promoted women’s equality in order to get more women into the workforce, with some of Vladimir Lenin’s first steps after the 1917 Revolution including simplifying divorce and legalising abortion with the stated goal of “freeing women from the bondage of children and family.” Maternity leave was generous and the state provided ample childcare centres, one of which I myself attended.

Unfortunately, despite these facts and the lofty ideals from which they were derived, the reality of life in the Soviet Union was rather different.

Low levels of wealth and income inequality were achieved by making everyone poor and restricting access to basic goods such as food, domestic appliances, and basic clothing. The ’emancipated’ women of the USSR were denied the evil fruits of misogynistic Western civilisation such as tampons, washing machines, and the ability to feed their children. And while healthcare provision was universal, it was also universally poor and entirely corrupt. Only people with influence, connections, and the ability to pay bribes could actually obtain good treatment.

University places which paid students to study were subject to the same corruption with examiners able to solicit bribes and favours. In exchange for an education, you forfeited the right to a future career of your own choosing—instead, you would be allocated a job by the state system, often in a completely different part of the country.

The temporary lull in ethnic and religious strife was achieved through systematic murder, forced starvation, mass deportation, imprisonment, and ruthless ethnic cleansing by an oppressive police state to keep everyone in check. At least 50 million people were killed or sent to concentration camps to create this ‘peaceful’ society, to say nothing of millions who had their property seized ‘for the benefit of society.’ These enemies of the state included my great-grandparents who met in a Soviet concentration camp for political prisoners. Every morning at their camp, three people would be picked out at random from the general population of the camp and thrown into the icy waters of the lake to freeze and drown in full view of the other prisoners to ‘keep things under control.’ And the moment the regime was no longer able to keep a lid on this volatile melting pot, it exploded into horrific ethnic conflicts, which erupted all over the former Soviet empire and resulted in the deaths of millions of people.

With this background, I am—perhaps understandably—hypersensitive to the emerging far Left in Western politics. I can’t help noticing similarities in the rhetoric about “eradicating inequality,” “smashing the class system,” and a new age of “radical egalitarianism.” And when I do, I shudder.
I shudder because such people no longer appreciate what they have in the West: one of the most prosperous, free, fair, equal, tolerant, peaceful, and open societies not just in the world today but in the entire history of our species. This isn’t an abstract point about the ungrateful youth of today, it’s a reminder of the unforgiving reality that those who don’t realise how good they have it, or take their lives of plenty for granted, are vulnerable to demagogic ideologies that promise to tear it all down to build a ‘better tomorrow’ just as the founders of the Soviet Union did before them.

I shudder because I know that an environment in which anyone who does not hold the correct political views is ostracised can eat away at the heart of what makes Western society a beacon of hope to the rest of the world: the fact that we value free speech and individual autonomy above anything else, including material or practical considerations.

I shudder because the murderous track record of the far Left is no better, and arguably far worse in terms of raw statistics, than that of the far Right. I say “Nazi,” you say “Holocaust,” but “Communist” does not bring to mind the 50 million who perished in my country or the 80 million murder in Maoist China.

In an ideal world, everyone would be equal in every way and we would all ride our unicorns to the end of the rainbow. Unfortunately, we do not live in that world we live in this one. We must deal with reality as we find it not as we wish it to be. And we must bear the cruel lessons of history in mind as we do so.

World has far more reason for cheer than fear - Bjorn Lomborg

World has far more reason for cheer than fear

By Bjorn Lomborg

It is very easy to form the view that the modern world is coming apart. We are constantly confronted with an onslaught of negativity: Frightening headlines, alarming research findings, and miserable statistics. 

There are indeed many things on the planet that we should be greatly concerned about, but fixating on horror stories means that we miss the bigger picture. The UN focuses on three categories of development: Social, economic, and environmental. In each category, looking back over the last quarter-century, we have far more reason for cheer than fear. Indeed, this period has been one of extraordinary progress. Socially, the most important indicator is how long each of us lives. In 1990, average life expectancy was 65 years. By 2016, it had climbed to 72.5. In just 26 years, we gained 7.5 years of life. A pessimist might suggest this means we have 7.5 more years to be sick and miserable, but this is not the case. In 1990, we spent almost 13 percent of our life unwell, and that percentage has not increased. And, while there is much talk of inequality being worse than ever, on this most vital measure inequality is decreasing: The gap between life expectancy in poor and rich countries has narrowed dramatically. In terms of economic development, one of the most important indicators is the share of people in poverty. Far fewer people now live in abject need. In 1990, 37 percent of all people were living in extreme poverty; today it is less than one in 10. In just 28 years, more than 1.25 billion people have been lifted out of poverty - a miracle that receives far too little attention. 

Looking at the environment, one of the biggest killers is indoor air pollution caused by poor people using dung and wood to cook and keep warm. In 1990, this caused more than 8 percent of deaths; now it is 4.7 percent. That equates to more than 1.2 million fewer people dying from indoor air pollution each year, despite an increase in population. We are constantly confronted with an onslaught of negativity, but we should all challenge ourselves to pay more attention to the positive facts about the world.

There is a similar trend in many other environmental development statistics. Between 1990 and 2015, the percentage of the world practicing open defecation halved to 15 percent. Access to improved water sources increased by 2.6 billion people in the same period, to 91 percent, meaning more than one-third of the world's entire population gained access to improved water. The improvements do not stop there: The world is more literate; child labor has been dropping; we are living in one of the most peaceful times in history; and the majority of the world's governments are democratic regimes. 

Max Roser, of Oxford University, has built a comprehensive website to explore data sets like these. He strikingly suggests that we could think about these quarter-century changes in terms of what happened over the past 24 hours. Seen this way, just in the last day, average life expectancy increased by 9.5 hours; 137,000 people escaped extreme poverty; and 305,000 got access to safer drinking water. 

The media could have told each of these stories every single day since 1990. But good news is not as newsworthy as bad news. That is not just the media's fault. It is more challenging to tell a positive story. In many cases, the "news" isn't that something has happened, but that a bad thing is no longer happening. It doesn't capture our imagination in the same way. 

An intriguing 2014 study found that, even when participants stated that they wanted to read positive stories, their behavior revealed a preference for negative content (a preference they didn't even realize). 

We should all challenge ourselves to pay more attention to the positive facts. When people are asked if living conditions around the world will be better in 15 years, 35 percent believe they will be and 29 percent think they will get worse - essentially a toss-up. But, among people who understand that many things on the planet already are better than they were, 62 percent believe in progress. That share drops to just 17 percent among those who don't know the facts. 

The belief that everything is getting worse paints a distorted picture of what we can do, and makes us more fearful. Consider the fairly common scenario in which politicians and the media whip up fear of crime, even when statistics show national crime rates are low or falling. Attention and scarce resources can end up being devoted to solving the wrong challenge, and we get more police on the streets or reduced civil liberties, rather than more welfare-enhancing - but less newsy - policies like improving pre-schools or healthcare.

While getting the facts wrong can easily result in misguided, fear-based policies, a more balanced, fact-based recognition of what humanity has achieved enables us to focus our efforts on the areas where we can achieve the most good (often where we are already doing well). This will ensure that the future can be even brighter.