Axiom About Humanism

Humans are driven by feelings. A theory about humans should start from studying human soul. However, scholars feel uncomfortable speaking about human feelings plainly. They tend to embellish them, caught surprised afterwards with “sudden” mass violence and deceit.

In previous post I listed eight observations—eight axioms about human feelings—, which anyone talking on social topics should take into account, especially the ones holding themselves as scientists. And if someone disagrees with one axiom or another, he should propose an alternative, so that anyone could see a basis for his conclusions. I assume that intelligent people won’t disagree with these axioms, because they correspond to the honest expression of feelings that anyone experience. Here are my axioms:

About Humanism: Only humans feel; collectives do not feel.
About Isolation: Feelings of other people can be judged only by their acts.
About Insatiability: It is impossible to overcome all needs.
About Tastes: People value powers differently.
About Egoism: Strangers' needs are not important.
About Love: Loved ones are only few.
About Justice: The worse the offense, the more offender is hated.
About Envy: The richer the person, the more he is hated.

Each of these axioms cuts away a huge mass of statements as antiscientific ones. And only the statements not contradictory to these axioms can be considered as scientific.

We will talk about each of these axioms one after another.

Today it’s turn of the first axiom—about humanism. This axiom divides people talking on social subjects in two groups:

1. Humanists—those who endue only humans with ability to feel, but not collectives—and,
2. Collectivists—those who endue collectives as well as humans with ability to feel.

Axiom about humanism means that such phrases as people’s wishes, social needs, national interests, public reception and suchlike can only be treated allegorically, not literally. These phrases are only tropes, because collectives have no wishes, no soul, no sensor that could feel need or joy. Only humans that form collectives can wish and enjoy. Collective or society is nothing but communicating people.

Society for collectivists isn’t just humans, but Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes, Le Grand Être of Auguste Comte, Humant Hill of Aleksandr Zinovyev, Oranus of Victor Pelevin, or Society, Nation, People in some other inhuman sense. It’s not fairly correct to call social philosophers affected with collectivism humanitarians, because their views are inhumane, manless, unpeopled. They study collectives, not humans. Their humans are either dissolved in collectives, or so much pressed together that it’s impossible to find a gap between them: “A Party means millions of arms, brains, eyes linked and acting together”, wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky—Soviet revolutionary poet.

Only while speaking of society collectivists don’t spare words like system, whole system, integrated system. For them, human is just an element of this system, a member of society, who doesn’t worth interest as itself. Mikhail Zhvanetsky once said: “…I mean society that we form, not the one we belong to”. Indeed, while forming a society, humans preserve their integrity, their soul; human souls do not mix down into some big soul of society.

Collectivists state that only the People—not individuals—is the true subjects of history. An individual human is not even a unit—it’s zero, nothing. Only collective is something. This is what Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote in his poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin:

Individual —
	what can he mean
		in life?

His voice sounds fainter
	than a needle dropping

Who hears him?
	Only, perhaps,
		his wife,

and then if she’s near
	and not out shopping

Here’s what another poet of collectivism in its fascist form—Benito Mussolini—wrote: “Not a race, nor a geographically defined region, but a people, historically perpetuating itself; a multitude unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live, the will to power, self-consciousness, personality. In so far as it is embodied in a State, this higher personality becomes a nation”.

Humanists—on the contrary to collectivists—believe that human is much more consistent, integral and whole than society. There was a good reason that ancient Romans applied the word individuum (indivisible, impartible) to human, not to society.

When a humanist is prompted to contribute in the interests of society, he—understanding that only humans can have interests—would always inquire, in the interests of which people specifically he should contribute. A sophisticated humanist understands that social interests may turn to be the interests of those who prompt to contribute in the interests of society. Sophisticated fraudsters know that naïve people would rather contribute for common needs than for needs of specific fraudsters, and sophisticated humanists know about this knowledge of fraudsters.

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Translator's note:
There’s a remarkable nuance in English language. The word people in English is normally treated as plural from person: “people are dancing” or “people were angry”. However sometimes people can become singular, and then you hear “Peoples” or “the People is”. Reading the works of great collectivists you would notice that they mostly use the word people as a noun in singular form, like they were talking about an individual: “The state is an abstraction; the people alone is the concrete” (K. Marx). Karl Marx used Das Volk (the people), which is singular in German. Vladimir Lenin said narod, which is also singular in Russian. French un peuple, Italian il populo and even original Latin populus are also singular. I wouldn’t go too far saying that this nuance of English language, which always reminds the speaker that people is nothing but many individuals and not some superbeing The People, leads to higher level of individualism in Britain and US than it is in many other countries, but I believe there’s at least something to it.