Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

The Will and Its Responsibilities 63
Christian ideal, it is not only unobserved in practice; it is not even honestly
believed.
Some may protest here that this argument confuses true human worth
with market value, but that charge recoils onto the accusers. In simple economic
terms, when market value is the criterion, no one is ever overpaid or
underpaid except through carelessness. The market values any commodity—human,
animal, or inanimate—at whatever price someone is willing
to pay. Market value is only a useful fiction; there is never any one market
price for anything, even at the same moment in the same community.
When someone says that he is underpaid, he does not mean that he could
get more if he tried; he means that he is intrinsically worth more. Such a
person subscribes to the notion that there is such a thing as a “fair” market
price. The illusion that the market is nature’s divine plan for sorting the
wheat from the chaff (when it is not being sabotaged by meddling dogooders)
is one of the central pillars of capitalist ideology. The Social Darwinists
who endorse this theory ignore the fact that the market is both
unavoidably capricious and perpetually manipulated, but they are at least
honest; the socialists have no such excuse. Anyone who maintains that
some people should be paid more than others is assuming that there is such
a thing as a fair or correct wage for different forms of labor. Such a one who
also rejects the caprice of the marketplace as the court of last appeal must
believe that people should be paid what they “deserve.” Thus personal
worth becomes equated with the “fair” price of one’s labor. And not insignificantly,
money becomes the final yardstick of human worth.
The realist knows that none of us deserves anything, that the notion of
personal desert is only an idealist illusion, however satisfying to the economically
fortunate. All systems of social hierarchy that claim a basis in
intrinsic worth, whether hereditary aristocracy, socialist bureaucracy, or
Darwinian plutocracy, are arbitrary and illusory. When Shaw proclaimed
the natural truth of human equality, he was justified by the patent falsity
of all claims to the contrary. The social idealists were pleased with that
declaration, conforming as it did to their ideals, but Shaw went on to insist
that they take it literally and act upon it. Unfortunately, although people
are shocked when a favorite ideal is attacked, they may be panicked and
bewildered when told to behave in strict accordance with it. Capitalists
smiled and socialists stared when Shaw stated what he saw as the essential
truth of socialism. He observed that once you have taken the decision away
from the caprice of the marketplace there is no sensible reason why any
one individual should get any more than any other, no matter how offen-