But how would this create communism, you ask? Well, first of all, the small number of highly productive people would want to pay for a comfortable and dignified subsistence for everybody else! Why would they do that? For starters, because nobody is forcing them to — so they get the genuine pleasure and ethical satisfaction of choosing to help others. Second, they will choose to provide a dignified basic income to all the peons. (We’re being honest, remember? So yes, many of them will be peons, but that’s OK, because True Communism will ensure they receive the dignified life they deserve, which is much more than you can say about liberalism, which protects peons from being called peons but ensures that they rot in their “diversity”). Why? Because all the peons will truly love them for their beneficence! Receiving the authentic and earned love of a large group of people is an unsurpassably desirable human experience. When Mr. Moneybags goes out to walk his dog in the morning, literally every person he passes on the street smiles at him glowingly in warm, grateful admiration. Today, he hides in a private mansion, unrecognized on the street at best, hated or belittled at worst. Tomorrow, under Aristocratic Communism, he now enjoys the subjective experience of Lorenzo de Medici: deservedly proud, appreciated, and respected, although his opprobrium is feared and avoided. All Mr. Moneybags has to do is give a small chunk of money to a genuinely magnificent cause. Additionally, he also now gets to think of himself as an avant-garde cultural visionary, something the rich have loved to fancy themselves since time immemorial, because he’s also participating in a world-historical socio-political innovation. Of course, the really significant art is going to come almost exclusively from the rare creative geniuses on his dole, but they’re all happy to let Daddy fancy himself artistically relevant).
I submit that the psychological and behavioral micro-foundations of True Communism are, for the Aristocrat class, not only well-founded but game-theoretically stable. I think actually existing human beings who match this description would choose this alternative to the status quo — if it was available — and they could not do any better by defecting (so long as a true distribution of respect is maintained).
As for the below-average-productivity people, they get what they’ve always wanted: a communist society where they don’t have to work for money to survive. They can do whatever they want, like start a blog (and some would be interesting, instead of all the dumb lifestyle marketing blogs people launch to escape shitty jobs), or they can just sit around doing nothing all day, enjoying life. But the genius of this model keeps giving, because it would be very unlikely that many of these people would do nothing at all. Why? They would not get a lot of respect. A small number of them might not care, holing themselves up in their paid-for house, doing nothing and perhaps being the object of some negative gossip here and there; the real negative opprobrium is naturally reserved for willful evil, which is measured by repeating behaviors that everyone else dislikes.3 If these people are not hurting anyone and not running around spouting stupid shit to disrupt everyone else’s flows in the name of “social change” that they’re only seeking because they’re genuinely alienated, then the rich people will now really love them. After seeing, today, what really happens ultimately when the capitalist underclasses are left to be poor and alienated, rich people would feel such incredible relief. They would feel wondrous admiration for these simple souls even if all they did was cease running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
What would the masses in our True Commune choose to do? What is unique about Aristocratic Communism is that, because it is uniquely indexed to the real objective differences that exist between people, honest effort will tend to be respected even if the person is relatively useless (with respect to productivity). For people with below-average productive abilities, in all modern Western societies there has always been an incentive to under-contribute the effort you are capable of, and over-report your limitations, insofar as what you could win from guilting rich people has typically been greater than what you could win from just trying your best. This is because, for those with below-average productive abilities, your best does not do much in terms of objective value on the open market, but — and here’s the rub — in the context of modern alienated anomie, nobody cares whatsoever that you might really be trying your best to contribute to society. You don’t get any love or respect or appreciation for that. If you did, you’d much rather try your reasonable best, be respected by your peers, maintain a clean conscience, and not have to do all kinds of deceptive rhetorical gymnastics, to the public and to yourself, just to make your way through life.
Under contemporary anomie, many ethically dubious practices that would feel excruciatingly shameful to an upright person even 50 years ago (such as publicly inflating your handicaps to get a few extra bucks or respect points as charity)4 do not currently result in very much ego depletion. They should. Descending to such lows should feel like a terrible descent, but it doesn’t, in part because such a low baseline has been normalized. Today, nobody really cares that much about each other, so the threat of opprobrium from your peers is a weak and avoidable penalty — just move onto the next group of people who will vaguely but not really care about you. (A dirty little secret in leftist circles is that this kind of cycling is common; people move from one communal house to the next, or from one activist cell to the next, or they even move cities, not because they’ve done anything especially bad to anyone but because all the little interpersonal hangups accumulate — trivial things, for example, all the missed appointments from everyday flakiness… The conversations where neither of you are really there… It all just becomes intolerably soggy and weighty, so you displace the problem geographically.5
This is one reason why modernity is such a rapid downward spiral of ethical degeneration, something the left and right both agree on (citing, respectively, the unbounded greediness of modern business people and the unbounded wretchedness of the underclass). Because Aristocratic Communism rewards honest-best-efforts and punishes ethically dubious practices, I find it extremely likely that under Aristocratic Communism the below-average-producers would choose to contribute the best they can, within the limits of their ability and temperament.