It’s in Human Nature to be violent, which I why I’ve made sure to arm my kindergarten class with knives. Because otherwise I would not be accounting for Human Nature.
(note: this is sarcastic, I did not arm a kindergarten class with knives)
you armed them with knives in a gun fight?!
They’re doing the best they can with a teacher’s salary
You know that humans lived in communal societies for a long fuckin time before all the bullshit we know today, right?
Human nature is not greed. That’s capitalism.
Pretty sure humans have been bashing in each others heads over resources since the dawn of humanity.
Capitalism made it worse and more efficient tho.
Half the problem with capitalism is that we aren’t allowed to bash in the heads of the people who took all the resources.
Observing humans in capitalism and assuming greed is just human nature is like observing humans on the Titanic and assuming drowning is human nature.
It’s just rejecting your responsibility in the way you behave. “It’s not me, it’s the nature”
Anyone ever commenting “human nature” should be forced to explain how: (a) some behavior is an inevitable result of brain physiology, and, (b) why examples of people who don’t exhibit that behavior exist. The absence of those explanations disprove like 95%+ of “human nature” arguments. Like, “oh, religion is human nature, we must believe in a higher power because we crave meaning” - which part of the brain mandates that thought, and why do atheists and agnostics exist then?
One has to wonder how capitalism arose, if the traits which gave rise to it aren’t part of human nature.
Capitalism arose from European feudalism. Which in turn arose from Christianity. Which in turn became mandated by the Roman Empire right before it totally coincidentally collapsed. The decisions behind this progression were limited to a tiny subset of the local human population, the ruling class which back then was basically seen as a completely different (superior) race compared to the commoners and peasants, to the point they chose to breed with their own relatives instead of polluting their blood with that of the people below them. Therefore, they absolutely did not represent the wishes of most humans at the time and certainly did not represent the “nature” of most humans, just the ones most corrupted by power and exceptionalism in a system they created specifically to keep themselves in power and separate from the masses. They’re not human nature, they’re the societal cancer that actively rejected and suppressed real human nature.
So the ruling class, with all the wealth and power and ability to do whatever they wanted acted against their own natures to create a system which would create in humans the desire to hoard wealth and power?
Yes. When your rule is based on seizing wealth and power you’ll keep doing that perpetually so you don’t lose your place in the ruling class. The fact that they did that is more consistent with the Marxist notion that human “nature” is shaped by the material conditions they’re born into.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of peasants of that time fully accepted and even embraced their position due to all the religious brainwashing. Most had no real aspirations of power (supposedly despite their nature to desire power) because they’ve been taught their whole life that it’s better for that to be taken care of by someone else that “God” supposedly chose. If anything, our uncritical acceptance of our place within capitalism is closer to what the serfs thought.
So then it’s not capitalism which causes in humans the desire to hoard wealth and power?
Any system predicated on obtaining as much wealth or power as possible will see people fixating on that and eventually divorcing the wealth/power itself from the material conditions that they arose from. Why do you think so many corporations turn into death spirals where they try to increase profits at all costs, abandoning their actual products and customers, and then act all shocked when they inevetably go bankrupt due to no longer having a customer base because they alienated everyone with their shitty profit oriented practices? The only way to solve this is to change the system people live under.
If it’s not in human nature to hoard wealth and power, then how do systems arise which are predicated on obtaining as much wealth or power as possible?
