Bitch modern humans have been on this earth for six hundred thousand years creating an enormous number of distinct and unique cultures which shape the people living under them. The absolute arrogance to think you can generalize a hundred billion people's worth of experience based on what you've experienced in your one tiny lifetime. Humans are so fucking diverse there is VERY little you can say is "human nature." But no please tell me more about how people are just selfish by default despite all the fucking evidence to the contrary.
Like when they start talking about "the illegals being treated better than actual citizens"?
At that point it's time to bring out the big rhetorical guns, like "I don't talk to people John Brown would've shot"
Blegh anything even remotely negative about homeless people sets me off. We know how to fix it. The solution is both simple and easy. People in power just won't fucking do it because they've internalized all kinds of miserable evil shit.
God the list is getting so long
There are so many reactionaries :deeper-sadness:
"We need a compromise between socialism and capitalism"
"Capitalism is the ideology of choice"
Whenever someone says, "It's human nature to be [selfish/greedy/violent]," I hear, "I won't blame myself in the slightest for being [selfish/greedy/violent]"
Whenever someone says, “It’s human nature to be [selfish/greedy/violent],” I hear the whirring of a projector
It's so unfortunate that this view is drilled into us continuously throughout school, at least in the United States. I remember reading Lord of the Flies in high school and the class's main takeaway was that most humans, especially children, are just terrible in some fundamental way.
Meanwhile the actual Lord of the Flies kids did just fine until they were rescued.
Whenever someone says "it's human nature to be [selfish/greedy/violent]", I immediately concede the point and promptly mug them out of good sportsmanship
I hear the same thing when there's complaint about something being unfair and the retort is "The world isn't fair". Just an excuse to be an awful person.
I always put it this way: If we weren't innately social creatures then why the fuck does everyone admit Solitary Confinement is a kind of "extra prison."
Literally how we got out of the caves and started planting things together as a community. If the "hUmAn naATure" as described by liberals was real, humanity would never have gotten to fucking agriculture, let alone where we are now.
See I'm not even 100% sure on this, cause there a plenty of people who (in our current society) are selfish and uncooperative. I'm sure under a better system those same people could be better but the fact that they aren't now indicates to me that even cooperation for mutual benefit has to be encouraged by the environment to manifest.
Consider that their environment, I'm assuming you're from :amerikkka: or at least the west, has drilled into them since childhood that rugged individualism is what's morally correct. The concept of the superstructure and the base, that the superstructure is the combination of education/media/culture that drives into people repeatedly the message that competition is good and on a subtler level might makes right. The culture which valorizes success as material wealth and demonizes poverty is what leads people to be selfish and uncooperative. It is the sense of compassion and cooperation which has been killed by society and the elite have worked very hard to make it this way.
I mean, for sure I think people are only shitty because of our broken capitalist society, but if you need a culture that encourages compassion and cooperation it seems like those are just as much cultivated by the environment as more toxic traits. I think this is mostly just a semantic difference though, it seems like our opinions are pretty dang close otherwise.
I guess what I'm saying is that early humans were definitely inherently cooperative. That on the plains of Africa, we advanced as a species because of our ability to cooperate rather than a drive to compete.
99.99% of the human nature argument is shitty people trying to absolve themselves for shitty behavior by imagining anyone else would have done the same in their circumstances.
Everything about our existence from the cohabitation of gut flora, or the fossilized remains of ancestors with mended bone fractures, to the way our brain processes "Truth" points to a cooperative & collaberative "nature"; but sure go off about how being a selfish dickhead is "natural" behavior to you I guess.
E: This is aside from the fact that it betrays a certain cowardice. Like, even if the Human nature-ist is correct they are not enslaved to this behavior. To the contrary, working to transcend this "natural instinct" would be seen as honorable; rising above the rabble or whatever. But they're too cowardly, stupid, or lazy to even see things on these terms; content instead to shrug and say "Anyone would have sold out their family for some paper."
Its human nature to seek out nourishment such as food and water
to see the real counterpoint to that argument i would highly recommend david graebers more anthropologically-oriented works (debt the first 5000 years and towards an anthropological theory of value in particular) to get an idea of just how differently human societies can see the world and just how many of our fundamental practices and assumptions that we think are 'universal' are absolutely anything but
#SwedenGate is a great example of culture at work, where the Swedes apparently have a set of practices that differ from almost every other culture on earth but have no self awareness about it.
yeah one of the things graeber talks about in towards an anthropological theory of value is how, even in the west, the relics of our prior more gift/mutual-obligation-based economies/social relations (and their conceptions of value) still exist to a substantial extent in our private spaces, and how purely market self-interest that dominates in public life coexists uneasily and appears very vulgar in many private domains of our lives. we talk about our 'values' for things that are important to us in our social relations that are an explicit rejection of self-interested market logic and the market sense of 'value' (sharing, helping those close to us, gifts, our obligations to guests and the people around us). there is of course still plenty of self-interested logic in a lot of this - the social capital from being a generous host etc etc, but it's a very different kind of logic with entirely different conceptions of what is valuable/important behind it.
and yeah swedengate is the perfect example, when this is excised within a particular culture (for whatever reason) and such an obligation doesnt exist or is denied, people act with visceral shock and revulsion even in societies awash with market ideology because we do still have a separate conception of what is important and valuable and even 'normal' that is not dictated by the 'human nature' of market relations.
"but it's only natural that..." proceeds to describe a hierarchy that was socially/historically developed. This is the whole Jordan Peterson game
Great example of the base informing the superstructure, IMO. "Original sin" was always a concept in Christianity, but with the Protestant Reformation developing alongside capitalism - and the development of a "bourgeois religion" - you get ideologies like "total depravity" and the idea that humans are by nature corrupted by sin and can only do bad thing other than by the grace of God.
And guess what?! Seeing humanity as completely fallen and "sinful" means that any hope of a better future on earth will ultimately be futile. So don't even try... because "muh human nature".
I have no love of the Catholic church but I'm forever grateful my parents took me to a Catholic church as a kid and not some evangelical fuckpit.
Do you know why the Southern Baptists exist? Because the Baptist Convention decided that ministers shouldn't own slaves. Not the laity. Just the ministers. As representatives of Christ on Earth, they decided it wasn't a good look to be holding people in bondage. That's the reason for the schism. Fuck those people.
Yeah southern fundies/evangelicals are just a religion of evil from a bad fantasy book. They think their god is an abusive, violent father. They worship wealth in a very dark, quid pro quo way. Their entire religious focus is on how evil and bad everyone is and how they're all going to be tortured forever. They hate sex but make sexual purity a core and stabbing part of their religion. Viciously hateful of the Other.
Evangelicalism wasn't even always like this. For a few decades in the 1800s they were doing all kinds of lib social welfare projects. They only really mutated in to a religion of high percentage content evil in the last 70ish years.
Meanwhile Jebus is all like "be nice and help people you can do it I love you"
It's human nature to make jerk-off motions when someone claims something is human nature.
:parenti: has a lot to say about human nature.
The clip is cut short but after his first question he stops to go back and add that humans also have the capacity for tremendous kindness and greatness, but that we need to think coherently about both and what we can do to encourage some aspects of our nature and discourage others.
His main point is that it's not constructive to engage in the leftist response to the right-wing human nature arguments by arguing that humans have no inherent nature.
:kropotkin-shining: Human nature is cooperative and collaborative. One could even say it's a factor of evolution
Those are definitely aspects of human nature, but it's not useful to idealize it. Human nature has many aspects, some constructive and some destructive.
There may well be a fundamental human nature, but no way to test it. But even past that, the amount of times I can find a counter example to what capitalists call human nature is like I'm an anthropologist dunking on Freud.
also the lefts view of mutual aid as being human nature comes from to this day highly influential scientific studies by Kropotkin amoung other things a respected scientist.
the rights view comes from economists running thought experiments. It's like being a modern scientist and trying to explain to an ancient greek that you need to test your hypothesis
"Aha but you see, if we assume everyone is a perfectly rational and 100% self interested..."
Philosophers over the course of thousands of years: "Welp, we best throw in the towel. Some guy named Kyle says he's figured out human nature. How are we going to compete with that?"
it's also not even an accurate depiction of human nature. Humans have a hierarchy of needs and they don't just boil down to pointless accumulation of wealth we aren't dragons
