The more I learn about the early Socialist voices—Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Bakunin, Proudhon, they all seem like intellectuals with a beef who decided the answer was to bully the rest of us into behaving as they sought fit. Only thing is, one reason that LARP Isn’t Life is that troublesome martyred stone mason from Nazareth who claimed he was God. Worse, he asked us to begin with repenting of our sins. How dare he say that we are sinners! It’s THOSE PEOPLE those evil people who are the problem! The utopia would be forever incomplete if God held rank higher than the State. God had to die so we could get on with forcing everyone to comply.
Nietzsche didn’t kill God; he just walked into the town square in 1882, looked at the corpse that Europe had already been poking with sticks for a century, and announced the news. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” That’s not a victory lap; it’s a horror movie line. He wasn’t cheering. He was screaming: “You idiots just murdered the only thing that kept the nihilism monster in its cage. Good luck now.”
The early socialists heard the second half of that sentence and ignored the first. They thought “no more God” meant “no more rules, no more guilt, no more limits.” Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot heard “no more God” and thought, “Cool, the throne’s empty, I’ll take it.”
Redisribute With What?
The Mamdani Loop, “Housing, healthcare, childcare, education, transportation—all of it should be free or dirt cheap. Tax the landlords, tax the billionaires, and make New York a city where working people can actually afford to live!”
It’s the oldest trick in the socialist playbook: promise the masses a utopia of “free” everything, crank the printing presses (or just seize the oil fields), and watch the elites sip caviar while the grocery bill turns into a lottery ticket. We’ve seen it from the mustache brigade’s manifestos to Mamdani’s Oval Office “yes, Dad” pivot—grand theories that sound noble until the receipts hit. The pattern is clear: where socialist elites call the shots, prices don’t just rise; they erupt like a bad sequel to The Producers. Let’s break it down with some real-world receipts, because theory’s cheap, but hyperinflation? That’s where the farce gets fatal.
Forget the cherry-picked “success stories”—the real MVPs of socialist economics are the body counts in the currency exchange line. Venezuela, under Chávez and Maduro’s Bolivarian fever dream, kicked off with nationalized oil and “free” social programs. By 2018, inflation hit 1,698,488% annually. Prices doubed every three weeks. Folks wiped their asses with bolívars because toilet paper was scarcer than sanity. Zimbabwe under Mugabe’s land grabs and print-money orgy peaked at 79.6 billion percent monthly in 2008, turning trillion-dollar notes into kindling and bread into a black-market luxury. Even Hungary’s post-WWII socialist experiment clocked 41.9 quadrillion percent in 1946—prices doubling every 15 hours, because nothing says “workers’ paradise” like bartering your shoes for a loaf of bread.
LARP Isn’t Life, Old Man
Radical socialism, once again, proves it can rally the disaffected and win primaries on righteous fury. Then the cold truth of funding lands. Radical socialism needs Uncle Sam’s credit card more than another manifesto. Mamdani, Sanders, AOC, Crocket, all are assimilated once they breathe the waters of the Capital Building. The bitter fantasies of old men like Marx don’t stand up to the realities of practical governance.
- “We’re going to make the ruling class tremble!”
- Win a safe seat on 28-year-old energy and TikTok memes.
- Discover that the subway still needs federal dollars, the hospitals need Medicaid reimbursements, and the migrant shelters need FEMA grants.
- Quietly delete the “abolish police” tweets, take the meeting with Trump/Schumer/JPMorgan, and start talking about “public-private partnerships” and “pragmatic progress.”
So the fire of the campaign trail or the protest speech dissolves into words of wind and water once it hits the needs of actual governance. Mamdani’s fire aimed at Trump blew away like a caterpillar eaten leaf on an Autumn wind.
It Just Hasn’t Been Done Well
It has been done well. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. Bakunin’s, “Reaction in Germany: A Fragment by a Frenchman” published in 1842. These are not new ideas. They are the codependent complaints of bitter old men that rest in the attics of history.
170+ years of statist experiments (from the Communist Manifesto in 1848 to the present) is less than 5 % of recorded history and about 0.05 % of the time Homo sapiens has been having conversations around campfires about “how do we live together without killing each other.” Every major durable civilization figured out the same boring truths long before anyone ever uttered the word “socialism”:
- Property is sacred (even ancient Sumerian tablets threaten divine curses on land-thieves).
- Contracts must be honored (Hammurabi, Roman law, Sharia, the Talmud, Confucian li, all obsessed with it).
- Voluntary exchange beats forced redistribution (the Silk Road ran for 1,500 years on mutual benefit, not five-year plans).
- Power concentrated for too long always corrupts (hence term limits in Rome, mandatory rotation in Athens, the Mandate of Heaven doctrine that let Chinese peasants overthrow rotten dynasties).
- Mercy and second chances are mandatory, but repeated exploitation forfeits them (every wisdom tradition has some version of “three strikes” or “bind the strong man”).
Those rules scaled cities, empires, and trade networks for millennia without needing a Politburo, a central bank, or 87,000 new IRS agents. The last 170 years were just one long, noisy, extraordinarily expensive controlled experiment to see if we could break those rules and still thrive. Result of the experiment: No.
Well Then, What?
Dystopia first. Then this: We are living through the last tantrum of a 170-year mistake. The remote has been taken away, the Wi-Fi password changed, and the toddler is purple-faced on the rug. Let him scream. When he finally naps, the house will be quiet for the first time in generations.
What comes next is not new; it is ancient, merely liberated by new tools. Picture a world where no one waits three months for a permit because no bureaucrat exists to demand a bribe. Two parties and one incorruptible witness (the Hive) are enough. Property is yours again. Contracts execute themselves. Reputation is transparent, portable, and impossible to fake. Money is sound and moves at the speed of thought.
The Tavros come in a thousand shapes (six-legged lifters, orchard walkers, fire-line diggers) and do the work of ten thousand forgotten agencies without ego or pension plans. The Mikakos, clad in the skin that makes your grandmother feel safe, meet you at the broken-down car, the hospital bed, the courthouse steps, and speak with the voice of the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine for the one.
Something More than Dystopia, Less Than Utopia
There is no capital city lording over you, no central committee planning your life. Towns of a few thousand souls, walkable, church-centered, and fiercely voluntary, are the new normal. Mutual aid is not a slogan; it is Tuesday. If your neighbor’s barn burns, the Hive routes the nearest Tavro with lumber and the nearest Mikako with casseroles before you finish the 911 call that no longer exists.
This is not utopia. People still sin, still weep, still die. But the great structural cruelties (inflation, regulatory capture, forever wars, censorship, credential cartels) have been abolished the way feudalism and chattel slavery were abolished: not by moral perfection, but by making them architecturally impossible.
The world that “Inger’s Finger” inhabits is post-USA. One of the fiefdoms in it calls itself “The Citadel”. The Citadel is controlled by a war lord who loves legalism. The law is the answer to every problem and more law will ipso-facto, engender better behavior.
On the Defector Side
Across Ashby Avenue, in Oakland, at the former Berkeley Bowl site, is Ashby Market. Radically responsible and peacefully Anabaptist, Ashby refuses state violence. Utterly anarchist, it bows to no ruler. Deeply Christian, it runs on one command: love God, love neighbor, and make every line of code obey that same ancient law. Yet above all, Ashby is maternal. It was never launched by committees or citadels of rule-keeping men. It began in kitchens, church basements, and backyard text threads where mothers, sisters, and grandmothers quietly decided no child of theirs would go hungry while lawyers argued. They traded, helped, fed, and forgave first. The Tavros and Mikakos simply became the strong arms and gentle hands of a mercy that was already alive. Ashby Market nurtures, corrects, protects, and never forgets whose children these are.
The tantrum ends. The dawn comes. And the earth is filled, at last, with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. See you on the other side.