this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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Don’t worry, so did Adam Smith!
It's always goofy when reactionaries and conservatives pull the human nature card, as though Capitalism is inherently natural despite only being a few hundred years old.
People can share tools, shocker!
Homo Sapiens would not have exceeded the other Hominids if not for cooperation.
The Sapiens secret of success is large-scale flexible cooperation. This has made us masters of the world. But at the same time it has made us dependent for our very survival on vast networks of cooperation.
No man is an island, but for the right price you can purchase one ☝️
While I agree that cooperation is rad AF, I think it's willfully ignorant to ignore the historical context of cooperation in the face of competition against the other.
Trying to make a naturalistic argument without acknowledging that is only telling half of the story, and the other half is pretty wart-y.
It’s not about ignoring crazy people and prisons, aberrant behavior will always exist. It’s about instilling a culture of collectivism versus individualism, which incentivizes competition and exclusion.
Not only do the objective conditions change in the act of reproduction, e.g. the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field etc., but the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language. Source.
It’s historical materialism.
As proof of your hypothesis, I am offering the PvP experience in Elder Scrolls Online. So-called “ball groups” dominate. Ball group members all agree to wear armor sets that boost the other members of the group and are complimentary with other armor sets worn by fellow members.
These group-focused armor sets mean that individual members are weaker alone than players wearing armor sets which enhance individual performance. But a ball group can take down groups several times their size if the other groups are composed of players with only individual enhancing armor sets.
Game Theory > Historical Materialism. Who knew?
That's not at all what I'm referring to.
Collective organization has almost exclusively been in the context of there being "barbarians" on the doorstep.
We need to cooperate because if we don't the (Sumarians, Babylonians,Persians, Macedonians, Mongols, Visigoths, Blackfoot, English, Soviets, Terrorists) will destroy our way of life.
I'm not saying it's necessarily and universally TRUE (although in many cases it was) but human cooperation has historically been bound to human competition.
"Let's all work together in harmony" is the first, rosy half of the fuller "so that those other people don't fuck us. Even better, so we can destroy them first"
A peaceful society (in your estimation) has never existed, so it’s not worth it to try.
Again, that's not at all what I'm saying.
I'm saying that claiming human cooperation as a natural state without acknowledging the other side of the coin as being human competition is intentionally cherry picking.
If an intelligent person were to be listening to history, they might instead conclude that cooperation w/ competition could exist without necessarily a violent competition. Humans vs space, humans vs COVID. I think it's possible to frame non-human agents as "the competition", it's happened before.
It’s not an either/or. It’s how we organize society. If you prescribe to historical materialism, which I do, you understand that it’s a choice of how we prioritize resources in society.
This is is the age old battle of idealism versus materialism.
I guess the difference is that you're viewing history through a philosophical lens, whereas I'm viewing it through an anthropological/archaeological lens.
I admit, I am biased to the belief that for the purposes of understanding history, these are more appropriate academic tools.
I can't stress this enough: you are continually attributing to me positions that I probably don't hold (at least in the way that you're keen to attribute).
My only position is that it is disengenuous to represent human nature as being a certain way by refusing to acknowledge historical context. All (and I mean that, all) I am asking you to do is augment your position by including the reality of history, rather than rejecting the parts of it that you don't want to deal with. I don't even believe they're incompatible, it just demands of you an expansion of your ideas.
My only position is that it is disengenuous to represent human nature as being a certain way by refusing to acknowledge historical context.
That’s what Marx’s historical materialism does.
All (and I mean that, all) I am asking you to do is augment your position by including the reality of history, rather than rejecting the parts of it that you don't want to deal with.
I have acknowledged the violent past of humanity, but I understand they were shaped by socio-economic conditions.
I don't even believe they're incompatible, it just demands of you an expansion of your ideas.
My ideas are expanded by reading and understanding, not by demands. I’ll leave you with an article on Human Nature and the Alternative to Capitalism. It states:
Our genetic speciality is that we are not specialised, not constrained by a range of instinctive behaviour. One result is that human beings can display very different forms of behaviour – ranging from great care for one another to selfishness and violence. The behaviour that predominates is not genetically determined.
I envy your courage.
I am a coward. But I am aware of my limitations.
I profoundly disagree.
There is no such thing as human nature and anyone claiming such a thing to support their arguments is full of shit.
The only thing all humans have to do is breathe, eat, drink, piss and shit. Literally everything else is optional and how you go about solving those requirements is entirely up to you.
Replace the word human with any other animal and you’ll drool when you read that back.
One of the wildest things about being human is that we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that we’re special and different from all the other animals. We can talk and plan so we’re different.
If we don’t have a nature to contend with, why have religions cropped up independently from one another all around the world over and over again? The nature we deal with might be a bit more complex than the nature of a meerkat, specifically because we can plan, but we definitely have a nature.
We kill for resources just like any other predator. If another group of humans is sitting on something we need, we kill to get it, just like lions that attack other prides and rip off the testicles of competing groups.
We’re just smart (and cruel) enough to bring back the defeated and give them a name and a job to do back at our den.
We can pass information down long after we’re dead and knowingly build on things that shaped our species long before we got here, but we still contend with our nature.
There are needs and material conditions that humans will react to, but using human nature as a reason to not change to a better organizational structure is a naturalistic fallacy, just like saying its human nature to eat meat would be in the face of a vegan. Just because something is traditional does not itself justify.
Oh no, I agree with you. I just think that acting like we don’t have a nature to contend with won’t help.
Part of the fact that we live beyond our own lives with knowledge we pass down means that we have a responsibility to grow as a species. I eat meat, but I don’t think that will be the norm forever because our nature is subject to growth and change. I respect vegans for jumping ship early. We will always have to contend with factions of people who want to walk us back though because of our nature. Or small handfuls of people who want to be kings.
Collectively, our nature could save us in the form of information hoarding. Of course it could also end us because we have a readily available supply of misinformation/disinformation. I believe that people pushing disinformation is part of our nature. Misleading other people for personal gain that is. I don’t have any desire to do it on a large scale, but I’d sell something that was broken if I was hungry. Some people do that when they aren’t hungry because planning is part of our nature.
Sorry if I’m in circles here or making no sense. I’m being chased around by two very needy toddlers. :p If I’ve failed to make a point here, I’m sorry. I have to give up now and hold this brat.
I don’t disagree with you though. I just feel like knowing what our nature is can be valuable for growth.
Just advice. Spend less time on here and enjoy your time with your toddlers. Take extended videos of their daily lives. You really only get about 7 to 8 innocent years with them until they spend less time with you. And it goes by so fast. I know it’s cliche, but it really is true.
Oh trust me, I know. My son just turned 26 on the 30th. The next one turned 21, the next one turned 19, the next one turned 15.
I ended up with a woman a lot younger than me and she wanted children so I started over.
It’s absurd, I’ll have 7 children when the next one is born. Two of my older kids are adopted (well one of them is, the other I just raised).
I fully intended to stop with my 15 year old, but I felt it would be unfair to enter into a relationship with a younger woman who wanted children of her own and say, “Sorry babe, I’m done.” Besides, I love raising them.
My son was a neighbor’s kid. He kept coming over and asking if he could play my video games. I told him no like 30 times (all the local kids knew I had an insane video game collection and talked about it with him). I let him in one day and he never left. He was 7 when he first came, he was 18-19 when he moved out. I always worried that he’d disappear on me when he grew up, but we talk almost every day.
After about 3-4 months with me, I finally told him I needed to meet his mother. She told me that when he came asking to play games, his father had thrown the kids out and they were sleeping on a little backroad that had recently closed to traffic. She asked me if I wanted to adopt him, I said yes. We never made it legal, but he was my kid from then on. We played WoW together every day. He was my whole world.
I wish I had the ability to record videos so easily then. I have some, but not many of my older kids. I got an iPad pretty early with my 15 year old and I have several videos, but not like I do with the little ones. Her mother passed from breast cancer and she’s been through hell. She’s a great kid. She really is. By the time cameras were in our pockets, my son was camera shy. I was too so I didn’t press the issue. I wish I had.
Thank you so much for caring enough about a stranger to make that comment.
I hope rest of your life is wonderful.
John locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu boisterously rise from their graves...
This, but unironically.
It's tricky, isn't it? Human nature is often defined by greed but when you grow up in a capitalist system where greed is actively encouraged, what do you expect?
Personally, I like to look towards how we treat fellow humans who we don't have a financial relationship with. Almost everyone I hang around with treats their family well, offers to help friends out, is kind to strangers etc. Human nature is wonderful on a small level, but when you get to big financial decisions, greed is necessitated else you get left behind - and if you don't have enough money then you don't have a home, good food, entertainment, travel, healthcare (for Americans)...
Karl Marx’s biggest philosophical mistake is his trust in the proletariat, forgetting that the average Joe is a complete dumbass.
This is why education is such a pillar of society and why authoritarian ideologies oppose it so much. If the working class gets too smart then the owning class is in trouble.
You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.
I prefer the term, complex dumbass.
Wut?