Humans are less self-serving and can successfully be integrated into a communist system.

Perhaps the most important question for communism, given its emphasis on communal functioning, is whether people’s ability to get along with and cooperate with one another can be changed. At least one present-day writer, Steven Pinker, argues that it can be changed and that in fact it has been. In The better angels of our nature: A history of violence and humanity, he presents a mass of evidence indicating that, contrary to what most people believe, people are becoming less violent in a variety of different ways. Over time they have become less likely to kill one another in wars, less likely to murder, and more likely to concede rights to women, minorities, homosexuals, and even animals. 38 38 Pinker, Better angels . 44 Was Communism Doomed? How might this have come about? Pinker’s basic argument is that people have become nicer. He is uncomfortable with the possibility that people have become better at empathising with each other, that is, feeling the emotions of others as if they were one’s own. 39 More likely, he considers, is that people have become better at self-control, and he points to evidence, ranging from gradual falls in the interest rate charged on money—greater self-control should result in a greater tendency to forgo present pleasures for future ones and so lead to lower interest rates—to improved nutrition, that indicates that people in the developed world at least have developed better self-control. 40 Another possibility is that the adoption of rational–legal morality by much of the Western world has improved people’s ability to foresee that acting in a particular way is likely to produce a painful and unpleasant reaction from others. Put slightly diff erently, we remain self-interested, but our self-interest has become better informed. 41 Finally, drawing on Flynn’s work, he suggests that there has been an increase in people’s ability to reason and that this in turn has produced both an increase in liberal attitudes on many issues and a greater ability to take different perspectives. 42