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.
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.