Why I used to think I was a socialist but was wrong

[by "popular" demand]

I used to think I was a socialist. I didn't know much about socialist economic, social or political theory. I hadn't read Marx. I couldn't articulate the differences between socialism and communism. I had never heard of the Second International or Frederick Engels. So... why?

To be completely honest, a lot had to do with my aesthetics. For me--and this is still true--there was literally nothing in the world more offensive to the senses than a large crowd. Times Square, Pier 39, sporting events, zoos, concerts, Yellowstone, and the Rose Festival all left me with acute sensory rage. The merciless ugliness of these places arose from individuality taken too far, I thought. Each person was so focused on making themselves stand out in a crowd that the effect of the crowd was complete and intense visual confusion. Add to that intense blasts of noxious deodorants, bodily insecticides, hair spray, perfume, and other industrial synthesized personal care products, and I experienced my own personal hell.

So I decided that I was not a huge fan of freewheeling individuality and that a certain amount of uniformity across society is a good thing. While jealously defending my need to be different from everybody else, I wanted the rest of humanity to stop being so frazzin' different from each other. Somehow I thought that socialism would deliver this. The key here is that a large portion of my motivation was aesthetic. Not moral, not philosophical, not logical, but aesthetic.

I thought of other ways to defend what I considered socialism, which I thought of as simply the mandated practice of equality and unity. Scripture, the fantastic gulf between the well-offs and the have-nots, an ideallistic streak and a taste for being different [ironically enough] all seemed to solidify my position on socialism.

Then, I learned what socialism is all about. Nothing doing!

At this point in my life I see the aesthetic purgatory that is Disneyland as an unavoidable consequence of the inalienable rights of human expression. I still feel strongly that every tax-paying citizen has the right to health care, that unfettered consumerism is immoral and destructive, that capitalism is in essence sinful, and that masses of people are profoundly nauseating.

But I am not a socialist!

What to write about?

I have a backlog of blogs I've been wanting to write. My 2 or 3 readers can vote on which one comes next [in order of how likely I am to do it before we leave for Montana on the 24th]:

1. The chimp video game study fraud
2. Review of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman [5 stars]
3. The demise of the clovis megafaunal extinction theory and discussion of the carolina bays
4. Review of 1491 by Charles C. Mann [2.5 stars]
5. Review of Resistance by Barry Lopez [4.5 stars]
6. The first Global Warming data
7. Explaination of why I used to think I was a socialist but was wrong
8. A review of the Pinker/Bloom language evolution paper

Anybody out there have an itching to hear any one of these? I've been dying to jump into any one of these, so just let me know...