Hell!

Fear is the the psychological root of collectivism; fear of insignificance; fear of the disapprobation of others; fear of the success of others; fear that the disasters of the natural world will affect other families less than our own; fear of failure; fear of wasted effort; fear of the world's vicissitudes. Against all these things men and women are inclined to seek insurance, and this terror is a powerful motivation in many of our actions and inactions, indeed it is the only force that can be identified beneath popular support for socialising legislation. Conversely, those unwilling to to support socialising policies are simply stating their own relative lack of fear – or to put in quotes: "I'm all right, Jack". The competent have less to fear and more to gain from even the greatest hazards of the highest of risk. Consequently, hostility to socialising policy arises not only from the fear of sequestration of assets, but from the correct judgment that such policies vastly reduce the potential gains, and not only for the individuals concerned.

Politically, the collectivism arising from fear manifests itself as socialism, which as an institutional movement is driven by the interests of the state's executive personnel, who are generally speaking capable, and can be said to exploit the timidity of the weak as well as, to some degree, addressing their fears. The resulting policies are dangerous since they weaken the aggregate society, by foregoing wealth that would make society stronger in the face of external shock. On this view, socialising policies are, and this will inevitably seem paradoxical, both short-sighted and selfish.

This problem is deeply intractable because the weaker are not wrong; they would indeed be disadvantaged by a distribution of wealth and power that optimised the generation of aggregate societal wealth, and it is impossible to see how to deal with this without force or subterfuge; the weak would either have to be deceived or discarded, neither option being attractive, and the optimal method would be the latter since deceit is likely to be so very expensive, as we know from the costs of the Church when it provided this and certain other services.

If this is correct, then societies that devote what is necessarily a very large proportion of their energies to reducing to nothing the disadvantages of incompetence and misfortune, will themselves ultimately fail. Only unequal societies, which are, correctly, perceived as unfair can prosper.
Is this shocking? Yes? Then history and its product is shocking too.