I just finished my first novel of my vacation: Seven Days to Petrograd by Tom Hyman. It’s about an attempt to assassinate Lenin as he goes from Switzerland to the Finland station to Petrograd, all via Germany and Sweden. The book jacket quotes the Washington Post‘s comment that “What Frederick Forsyth did in The Day of the Jackal . . . Hyman Does Here.” True, but he doesn’t do it as well. Still, it’s good.
I found two passages worth quoting on EconLog because they’re both about taking responsibility for one’s own life.
Bauer, mentioned in the first quote, is the guy trying to assassinate Lenin.
In Bauer’s eyes, Marx’s social theories had victimized his father far more than the railroad ever did. Karl Marx invited his father to hide from himself and from the reality around him. It was Marx who fed him the excuses he needed to explain away his miserable lot in life and to justify his not making any effort to improve it. It was all somebody else’s fault–the fault of the government, the fault of the system, the fault of the ruling classes. His father was a sucker, he decided. He had let others control his life.
Later he’s talking to a woman about his life and his failures. I won’t name the woman because that would be too much of a spoiler.
Bauer braced his hands on the edge of the chest’s marble top and leaned forward. “I could have been [a great star in baseball]. But I only got to play two seasons. I gave the owner of my team a hard time, so he fired me. I was a dumb, hotheaded kid. I pushed too hard to get more money out of him, and when I didn’t get it, I started raising hell–on the field and off. I was my own worst enemy. I couldn’t get a job in professional baseball after that. The owners blackballed me.”
“Sounds to me as if the owner exploited you for his own profit, then callously discarded you when it suited him. You were a victim of capitalist greed.” [DRH note: It shouldn’t be surprising that this member of Lenin’s travel party is a Marxist.]
“I guess it could seem that way. But it was his team. I could have started my own team if I’d had the money.”
Clearly Bauer learned from his father’s mistake: he blamed himself rather than the system or a team owner.
READER COMMENTS
Roger McKinney
Jul 19 2023 at 10:02am
It boils down differing views of human nature. Until the rise of socialism in the early 19th century, most people saw human nature as a combination of good and bad with the individual choosing which he would be. Even the atheist Hume agreed.
Then socialists invented the silliness that people are born good and turn bad only because of oppression and property is the greatest oppressor. The state could perfect humanity through redistribution of wealth and education. Socialists intended socialism to be a salvation message to replace the Christian one.
In spite of almost two centuries of failure to improve human nature, let alone perfect it, the socialist view of human nature has become the most popular.
robc
Jul 19 2023 at 10:33am
From the 2nd quote I wonder if Bauer is very, very loosely based on Moe Berg.
Berg played in MLB for 15 years and wasn’t a troublemaker as far as I know, then he was a spy during WW2.
robc
Jul 19 2023 at 10:35am
Just adding on, Moe’s father was an immigrant from Ukraine and owned a pharmacy in NYC. So that doesn’t align with the first quote.
Just the combo of baseball and WW2 intrigue made me draw a connection.
gwern
Jul 19 2023 at 1:24pm
The timing seems important to note here. After all, right now you can’t make your own professional baseball team: the MLB has professional baseball locked up in a legally-protected monopoly since 1922. (Not Learned Hand’s most harmful ruling, by a long shot, but certainly one of the more bizarre.) And before that, when Lenin was being shipped to Russia in 1917 and this is presumably set, there were still competing leagues (the Federal League).
Mark Z
Jul 19 2023 at 3:59pm
I think Bryan Caplan was on a panel of guests for an NPR show or something and he argued for ways individual poor people could improve their lives, while the other (socialist) commentators argued that this was unrealistic and that poor people should instead channel their frustration, effort, and free time into (socialist) activism instead, as only collectively can the lower class improve its lot politically.
I suspect most intelligent socialists would admit that many poor people could in fact take responsibility for their lives and improve their lot, but that doing so – or encouraging them to do so – is bad because it deprives them of motivation to engage in the political activism ostensibly necessary to save everyone.
If you’re in a waterlogged boat with a bunch of sailors working together to bucket water out of it, and you notice another boat not far away that they could swim to, but some of the sailers can’t swim, do you alert everyone to this fact, so the ones who can swim can choose to save themselves while those who can’t, now too few to keep the boat from sinking, drown? That I think is how the socialist views the question of personal responsibility.
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