The most dangerous forms of tyranny rarely announce themselves as tyranny.
They arrive dressed as fairness, compassion, equality, sharing, and “social responsibility.”
A reader responded to my article, “My Father’s Escape from Socialism and the True Meaning of Freedom,” with the common argument that socialism is really just about fairness, sharing, and people being socially responsible to each other, and claiming, “Yes, freedom matters, but billionaires must share.”
I’ve heard this argument many times before, so I decided to publish my reply here.
Below is the comment and my full response.
I recommend reading the original article for context if you haven’t yet.
“I value freedom just as much as anyone, yet our country is so out of balance because of selfish capitalism. I see capitalism as different than free enterprise. Capitalism is an attitude of exploitation, which actually destroys free enterprise. The wealthiest people, the billionaires must share.
We don’t need more rules than that except producing anything. That’s destructive to society, which so many corporations do. If I understand it correctly, democratic socialism is about people being socially responsible to each other.
Right now the corporations are controlling us because they are given too much power, like Monsanto poisoning us with pesticides that should’ve been banned years ago. And on and on.
What is freedom if we’re not responsible with it? In the end, it destroys freedom and equality. There is something between capitalism and socialism that will allow us to have a freer and more balanced society. Either extreme throws us out of balance.”
My Reply:
You’re missing the essence of the article. It’s not about capitalism vs. socialism on the level of outer systems. That’s exactly the trap of externalization I wrote about.
“The billionaires must share.” No one owes you anything. Forced redistribution under the guise of “sharing” is the essence of the most evil, anti-Divine system there is. It goes against Natural Law and Divine Law, and my father had to experience where that ideology leads firsthand.
The regime he escaped from called itself the German “Socialist Democratic” Republic, built on the same promise you’re promoting: that the state will make people “share” and be “socially responsible to each other.” It ended in walls, prisons, poverty, deaths, and mass graves.
Every single time, and no, not because it “hasn’t been done right yet.”
Beyond that, this demand is rooted in victim/blame consciousness, and it’s one of the most common shadow projections: projecting one’s own unacknowledged shadow onto the rich and wealthy, making them the carriers of evil and the cause of one’s own condition.
Just like so many “holier than thou” virtue signaling liberals project their shadow onto Elon Musk, demanding higher taxes and bigger government, and essentially less freedom. It’s like a Stockholm syndrome, arguing for more imprisonment in the name of “sharing.”
Underneath that projection is usually unconscious envy and jealousy. Most people who rail against “the billionaires” have never honestly examined their own relationship to money, power, and success. The resentment gets dressed up as moral concern and a call for “fairness,” but it’s the disowned shadow speaking.
In fact, your comment is a good example of what happens when sincere shadow work is lacking: the shadow gets projected outward onto “the wealthy” and “the corporations,” while the inner work that would dissolve the projection, integrate the shadow, and ultimately empower you and others never happens.
I know this pattern intimately because I was caught in it myself for years, which I wrote about in detail in this article:
Yes, there is corruption, exploitation, and corporate capture. I said so in the article. But no system, whether capitalism, socialism, anything “in between,” including anarchism, voluntarism, or any other “-ism,” will ever create a free and balanced society as long as the individuals within it remain unconscious.
You are mistaking symptoms for causes and projecting them externally.
Your distinction between “capitalism” and “free enterprise” is also an inner matter, not a systemic one. Exploitation is not a property of a system but an expression of the consciousness of the people operating within it. A greedy man will exploit under any system; a man of integrity will not.
But the most dangerous “greedy man” is the one who has disowned his shadow and projects it onto others from an inflated position of moral superiority, believing himself to be all good, altruistic, and compassionate.
We see this unconscious greed in many socialist-minded liberals who demand that others support and pay for them, whether through taxes or the state.
This is how they can feel morally justified, entitled, and good about themselves while camouflaging their own unconscious greed: wanting something for nothing, and even worse, expecting someone else’s labor to pay for it.
Musk or any other billionaire owes you nothing, just like you have the ability to create wealth via effort and work in the freest country there is, if you reside in the US.
Your idea that “there is something between capitalism and socialism” that will balance society is also the classic middle-ground fallacy: the assumption that truth must lie somewhere in the middle of two seeming opposites. It doesn’t.
Both poles, and any blend of them, are still on the same horizontal plane of external systems. The real “middle path” is not horizontal but vertical: the raising of individual and collective consciousness, which no economic arrangement can substitute for.
As David Hawkins showed in his Map of Consciousness, the vast majority of humanity calibrates below the level of integrity, caught in victim/blame consciousness. Any system built by and for people at that level of consciousness will reflect it. That’s the meaning of “as within, so without.”
You say, “If I understand it correctly, democratic socialism is about people being socially responsible to each other.”
No, you do not understand it correctly. That is the marketing slogan, not the reality. Democratic socialism is not about people being responsible to each other; it is about the state forcing people to comply with what it defines as “responsibility,” backed by coercion, taxation, and punishment.
Voluntary social responsibility between people is simply called community, or brotherhood, and it needs no ideology or government program. The moment “being responsible to each other” is mandated and enforced from the top down, it is no longer responsibility at all.
Responsibility, by definition, requires free choice. What remains is compliance under threat, dressed up in moral language.
That is precisely how the so-called socialist “democratic” country my father grew up in sold itself to his generation: solidarity, equality, everyone caring for everyone, the workers’ paradise. The word “Democratic” was in its very name.
The lived reality my father experienced was surveillance, informants, compulsory ideology in schools, imprisonment, and a wall with orders to shoot anyone who tried to leave this “social responsibility.”
He and his parents risked their lives jumping off a ship to escape it and spent ten months in prison for it. Every collectivist system in history has marketed itself with the language of care and sharing, and every one of them has ended in the opposite, because you cannot produce virtue through force.
The moral posturing around “social responsibility” is a substitute for the real thing, which can only emerge from individual psychospiritual maturity, facing your own shadow first rather than demanding the state make others share what they have.
This is also why psychospiritual work is essential for those who sincerely seek truth and freedom.
Without it, we remain trapped in projection, blame, ideological identification, and unconscious resentment and envy, mistaking external systems for the root cause of our condition.
Real freedom requires the inner work of seeing through our own shadow, wounds, conditioning, false identifications, and self-deceptions. Otherwise, we remain inner prisoners while living under the illusion of external “freedom.”
Even our ideals of justice, equality, and compassion can then become hijacked by hidden forces and turned into instruments of coercion and manipulation, all while wearing the mask of “saviors.”
This is a big topic in itself, which I explored in more depth in my article:
Freedom without responsibility destroys itself; on that we agree.
But responsibility begins within.
It means facing your own shadow and what you do not want to see within yourself, not pointing at billionaires. Pointing is always easier for the self-righteous ego, hiding in a costume of inflated “social justice.”
Full article for context: “My Father’s Escape from Socialism and the True Meaning of Freedom”
Bernhard Guenther is a psycho-spiritual researcher, teacher, guide, and co-host of The Cosmic Matrix Podcast, whose work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold. His path integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our world.
You can find more of Bernhard’s work at his main website Piercing the Veil of Reality and through his programs Time of Transition: Embodied Soul Awakening, co-facilitated with his wife, Laura Matsue Guenther, and Mastering Spiritual Warfare.
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