Zohran Mammdani was recently elected mayor of New York City. He ran a successful campaign advocating Democratic Socialist principles. Trump denounced him as a communist and instead tends to advocate unregulated capitalism as the best way to govern. Brief descriptions of these are: communism (common ownership, abolition of private property, classless society), capitalism (private ownership, pursuit of self interest over common interest, competition over cooperation), socialism (public or government ownership of property, limits on extreme wealth gaps, cooperation over competition). These are all core governing theories that have evolved over time as different ways that large populations of our species could conduct themselves to achieve long term, stable resilience and overall well being on this planet for current and future generations.

Communism and socialism tend to squash individual uniqueness and special talent resulting in lack of creativity and innovation. Unregulated capitalism creates wide income and wealth disparities at the expense of the environmental and social commons. Both create instability, decrease quality of life and are unsustainable long term. And both communism as well as unregulated capitalism drift over time into corruption driven, authoritarian, autocratic forms, with wealth, resources and power concentrated among a few individual “elites” as dictatorships and corporate fascism.

Examples of this are Russia’s current evolution from communism into an autocratic state with a central “strong man” surrounded by a small group of extremely wealthy and powerful oligarchs. The emergence of the “Robber Barons” in the U.S. early last century is what happens with unregulated capitalism. Different paths to the same place.

Democratic socialism is actually an evolved hybrid form of capitalism and socialism. It is defined as a distributed form of economic democracy with social ownership of economic and productivity drivers like utilities. It emphasizes welfare for basic needs like health care and a living wage from capitalism.

Strong centralized regulation to provide clean air, water and food in support of a healthy environment and workforce is mandated. It includes democratic principles like voting, civil liberties, private property ownership and entrepreneurism. This is the form of social governance structure that provides the highest quality of life for all of life as well as the most stable and sustainable way forward. This deep truth is backed by strong scientific and experience based evidence. What is the objective evidence?

Foremost is the science supporting how your physical body is working as you read this. The life force maintains and sustains balance in the sweet spot of health, well being and healing, automatically, almost all of the time, because it is organized as a Socialist Democracy. Billions of years of evolution on our planet have determined the powerful flow of what wants to happen with life on this planet. Your body’s cells and organs are all functioning and existing with high efficiency under the following deep truths about the way life works best. Diversity is a quality found in robust life and enables greater strength and resistance to adversity and environmental stresses.

It enables stronger ability to adapt, self correct and survive. Your gut microbiome is a prime example. Symbiosis in your body proves that cooperation and reciprocity of benefits is more powerful than competition for survival. Your liver is in constant cooperation with your kidneys. The healthy body is also a marvel of inter connectedness meaning that nothing happens in isolation. The body’s well-orchestrated 37 quadrillion chemical reactions per second is support for this socialist principle. Checks and balances or feed back and feed forward loops create self-regulating stability.

The socialist democracies of the Nordic countries produce the happiest citizens.