Leaders and political groups from around the world seem hell bent on choices that don’t make any sense. Even if you take into account stupidity, greed, narcissism, religion, rascim, hate, ect. there are constantly things happening that don’t fit.
If inst, you reframe the shit being done with the thought that while none of them may agree on a final destination, they all agree that a fast drop in population is the “fast and easy” solution, then suddenly it all starts to make a lot more sense. Then everything going on is a rush to secure power and position in the post apocalypse world. And things like antivax become their own filtering mechanism to self-select stupid people out of the gene pool.
Unfortunately, once you begin thinking about things with that mind set, then it also becomes really difficult not to see COVID as a test of the system, or at least the tipping point that pushed everything into high gear.
Yep. Obama once said in an interview how once he met super rich people he realized they’re just normal people and unfortunately that’s very true. They’re not special. They’re not a cult of baby blood drinkers, perverts and sycophants because they know something. It’s because they’re normal fuckers.
You know these fuckers. They panic to get one car ahead of you in traffic because mentally they don’t think they’ll get to the same place in basically the same amount of time, usually faster if they just respect traffic flow, they don’t even consider other people at all in their decisions. They buy all the Pokemon cards, concert tickets and game systems to scalp to get themselves ahead even if it isn’t a hobby they’re interested in at all. They take what isn’t nailed down cause they can not because they need it. They lie and cheat for their own personal feelings to avoid guilt and ever considering themselves negatively.
They’re just bad people, some are born bad I believe most are raised.
Next time you go into work look around at the bozos you work with. They’re in the CIA, they run the government, they handle your healthcare. Yes they are that incompetent and yes they are that rude. That’s just how some people are, it’s just how humans are.
Human nature arguments are dubious when the range of human behaviors is largely determined by the opportunities, obstacles, and incentives that arise from particular socioeconomic systems.
Capitalist societies value and incentivize the accumulation of wealth, which requires greedy and self-centered behavior, so we are surrounded by greedy and self-centered people.
Socialist societies value the collective good, so they promote altruistic and communally-minded people. Just look at interviews of people from former Soviet states. Almost universally they say that people got along better and had a real sense of solidarity and care for your neighbors.
I really don’t think so. You’ll find people who will say the same thing about capitalism but doesn’t make it true. I’ve worked with people who are from Vietnam, China, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela. That is not their sentiment. I dislike this idea that socialist societies will suddenly make everyone nice and kind and caring, it just isn’t true. Socialist policies are definitely beneficial but it is not a solution to the greater issue of human development which is that being a heartless, selfish psychopath probably resulted in a higher likelihood of survival for millions of years across all forms of systems and cultures.
I absolutely disagree. The reason our brains are so large is because we are an incredibly social species. Cooperating and altruism were the defining traits that enabled our species to develop civilization. We only stopped being altruistic when our socioeconomic system shifted to agriculture and suddenly there was property to hand down to descendants.
As for you working with people from socialist countries, if you want to find out how it really is, ask the people who stayed, not the small minority who didn’t like it and left.
That just isn’t true we have Neaderthal bodies with signs of violence on them, some societies were less hostile than others but that more depends on geography and resources. In Africa there was families who were clearly bound and beaten to death over 20,000 years ago. The idea of the peaceful hunter-gatherers just isn’t true, there was definitely places and cultures that were more peaceful but a lot of that was again just dependent on resources. Person to person today, regardless of what economic system you live in, people are actually less violent than they used to be.
I also would say we did not stop being altruistic, we built a system that makes it difficult to be. But people are exceptionally kind today in a lot of places.
I think you decided how you feel on this topic so there’s no point in going on. But you should look into it, you’re falling into a classic trap that doesn’t allow you to view the world complexly and you’re convinced all violence stems from capitalism or something. Overall, violence was a daily way of life for many people and cultures don’t suddenly just flop to violence, they develop it slowly over time. We have also over time developed better ways to interact and our population size shows that. While poverty is a problem and widespread, the base level of existing is far more comfortable than it used to be just look at the infant mortality rates and the average life span.
I’m not saying that violence didn’t exist and hunter-gatherers were always peaceful, I’m saying that the socioeconomic structure of tribes incentivizes cooperation in a way that capitalism disincentivizes. Most of human history is that of cooperation punctuated by brief periods of violence perpetrated by a small minority of humans. The last 10,000 years of agriculture and private property are an insignificant fraction of human evolution, so I don’t think you can even say that people are less violent today than during our pre-agricultural evolution.
I don’t think I’m the one being dogmatic when you are saying that humans are innately violent and selfish. I think my view is actually more hopeful that we can build a society that disincentivizes those negative traits into rarity.
Look I think we both believe the same thing overall but for whatever reason we’re not meeting up in the same space.
But you are suggesting violence wasn’t common and hunter-gatherers didn’t engage in it when history tells a completely opposite story that violence was pretty steady. As much as people would cooperate, the also fought. It really depended on resources, and resources were thin. The periods of violence weren’t brief, they were common, everyday and existed alongside peace basically in a duality. We have proof our ancestors likely integrated with neanderthals, we also have proof the two probably beat the shit out of each other. Things aren’t black and white they’re always grey.
I do think humans are innately violent and selfish, but I think you’re viewing that phrasing in our society’s lens. Violent and selfish to us typically means violence and selfish towards our fellow countrymen, neighbors, allies. But we’re not talking about towns and cities of millions, we’re talking about clans and cultures of maybe a few hundred tops. They likely viewed their own much closer, but when it came to outsiders they were in competition for resources with, they had to be selfish and likely were willing to be violent for their own people. It isn’t the same individual selfishness, it is more of a “me and my people” selfishness that you can still see today with racism, nationalism, weird cultural identity issues. We find skeletons with signs of trauma all the time suggesting violence was constant for these people, raids and clashes were common. You had to fight for what you needed quite literally.
Today we see how much education is a decider in how selfish people are, those who can understand society and view people with empathy and understand how that fits in tend to engage in it more. For most of human history there were less people on the entire planet than in my area alone, I live amongst maybe 9million people. That’s massively more than the entire planet housed for thousands upon thousands of years. And the fact we don’t fight, aren’t violent and work everyday together shows we have deincentivized violence massively and for the better. Society today is more altruistic, we are the kinder people. But in our hearts and minds still exist the ancient selfish and violent human.
Capitalism doesn’t discourage cooperation at all, as much as we might have issues with our society, capitalism and beyond has actually brought about massive cooperation so that we exist in far greater numbers and experience less violence than our ancestors did. That shows we are better at cooperating. The last 10,000 years might be a fraction but it is not insignificant. Before the last 10,000 years the population was barely scratching 1 million, today we add roughly 100 million each year. Most people who have ever lived have actually lived in the era of recorded history. That is the significant fraction of human history.
First of all, everything collectively known about humanity shows our ancestors were largely not violent primitives, but instead they experimented with a wide array of different socials structures for millenia. Not all of them perfect, but violence wasn’t a “daily way of life”.
But sure socialism won’t magically make violence, psychopathy, or bad actors disappear. It won’t necessarily bring people closer together. The point is largely about who owns the means of production. But there are also absolutely forms that encourage and reward cooperation in stark contrast to what we have under capitalism.
In fact capitalism loves cooperation. They love monopolies and consolidation because they thrive under internal cooperation. Any attempts to the contrary have failed hilariously.
Cooperation is absolutely, and without doubt, one of humanity’s greatest strengths. It baffles me you’re trying to argue otherwise. In our current capitalist society, with how isolated we are, it may seem beneficial not to cooperate at another’s expense for the immediate advantages it brings you. But its short sighted, in the long term cooperation benefits more people, and it always has.
In the right social structure this would be rewarded and encouraged, and most everyone would be better for it. History shows it, game theory shows it, life on earth shows it, cooperative enterprises show it, and even internally capitalist enterprises show it (but who benefits?)
First of all. Calm down, chill out. Relax.
I didn’t once say anything negative about cooperation, I didn’t even use that word once. What are you talking about? Why are you building this strawman of cooperation and then dismantling it for me when it has little to do with what I said?
It is a false belief people have that ancient man was overall more altruistic, they weren’t. They did not experiment, they engaged with what worked. Cooperation is definitely key to our survival but bigger than that is our ability to weigh risk vs reward and more often than not the more important part of that is risk. Sometimes abandoning an injured ally, allowing the weaker individuals to perish, to abandon the place you call home and other selfish, sociopathic choices were the decision that would lend to one’s further survival. Which is probably why we have so much selfishness in our society, not in capitalistic society, but in all societies. It is part of the human condition, people are selfish and rude and protect their feelings more than anything else. Literally most of therapy is people learning to not engage with those knee jerk emotional/mental responses that reinforce these behaviors.
While you can say cooperation was a big part of humanity’s success it actually wasn’t the big one. The big one was risk vs reward being able to plan and just overall decision making. Which unfortunately psychopaths tend to have the edge over the regular person for, which is why they probably have been routinely successful at survival way back in ancient times and today. Game theory shows us that cheating actually can benefit you especially in the short term and most of human history, for a specific person, is short term. Game theory also shows us it is kind of full of shit, according to game theory the prisoner’s dilemma should end in disaster. In practice, it really doesn’t work that cleanly. Game theory relies on humans basically being heartless reptiles, which people aren’t because they like to cooperate and be liked and engage in kindness and respect.
So I don’t really understand the point you’re trying to make or why you have an issue with what I said. History is messy, but what is clear is ancient man was not overall altruistic, it wasn’t paradise and people/society today is overall completely better.
Nah, the rich and the powerful are the rich and the powerful in every society because of a psychopathic ability to step on others.
In the Soviet Union, the average person wasn’t really much more prosocial than the average person in the US. The people with any sort of power ranged from skeevy fuckers to open psychos. Just like in the US.
This is ahistorical, and is exactly what the capitalist ruling class want you to think.
Capitalist ruling class or not, I’ve lived in the USSR and I’ve lived in the US. Same people in both places. Neighbors are generally decent folks, cops are insecure assholes, and rich/powerful people got there by screwing people over.