Three words: lack of imagination.

People want to feel that they have control over their lives. Naturally. Decreasing chaos and increasing our power of prediction is a critical heuristic for survival. Feeling like we are in control, that we understand the world and what is coming, is what we are conditioned for. The political system is a wrapper around our living conditions. If we don’t understand the system, if we don’t see how we will be safe and fed tomorrow under it, we become anxious.

This is where imagination comes in. It is very easy to imagine how the political system works if it is centrally managed. There is one (or a few) people who make the right decisions for our benefit and things happen that way. Clear, simple, and anyone can follow.

Imagine, instead, a system that is decentralized. A system where there is no system. People are not told what to do – they make their choices freely, they interact and create freely. Chaos. And out of that chaos order emerges in which things work just the right way for everyone to have what they need. Can you imagine that? Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Either way, it is really not easy and I can’t do it myself. But my imagination is sufficient for me to believe that it would work. Unfortunately, I, and other such people, are the minority. The majority lacks the required imagination which makes them distrustful of such a system – and understandably so. They instead choose a system that they can imagine and understand, and that is socialism.