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

64 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
sive that might be to those whose sense of worth depends on financial
advantage. Thus he declared that socialism is “a state of society in which
the entire income of the country is divided between all the people in exactly
equal shares, without regard to their industry, their character, or any
other consideration except the consideration that they are living human
beings” (“The Simple Truth” 155). For Shaw human equality was a realist
rather than an idealist proposition. He did not pretend that human beings
were all equally talented, attractive, or even admirable. They are not
equally suited to the task of telling other people what they must do, although
someone must govern. Such talents are, in common parlance,
“gifts,” and there is no logic in rewarding anyone for being especially
lucky. Sidney Trefusis, in An Unsocial Socialist, dismisses the idea that
genius should be rewarded, declaring that it “cost its possessor nothing;
that it was the inheritance of the whole race incidentally vested in a single
individual” (106). Trefusis goes to some lengths “to illustrate the natural
inequality of man, and the failure of our artificial inequality to correspond
with it” (160). Although “you cannot equalize anything about human beings
except their incomes” (“The Case for Equality” 122), failure to do so is
not only dishonest but socially pernicious. Shaw put the case for eliminating
artificial distinctions most succinctly in The Intelligent Woman’s
Guide:
Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except
the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and
capacity are everything. Instead of all the workers being levelled
down to low wage standards and all the rich levelled up to fashionable
income standards, everybody under a system of equal incomes would
find her and his own natural level. There would be great people and
ordinary people and little people; but the great would always be those
who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had
spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a
year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters,
and not poor creatures who had never had a chance. That is
why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only
chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality. (102)
The final sentence reveals at least one source of the resistance to socialism
among those who should most favor it: the poor. Nowhere is that resistance
more glaring than in the United States, the land built on the myth
that anyone can strike it rich. Socialism was once thought inevitable be-