You have a set of organs inside that sphere of bone we call a skull and a set of biases (almost all designed to make you ignore the needs of others in favor of your own needs) that are coded at a very deep level. You can tell yourself it isn’t true, but that doesn’t make it not true.
Just because we don’t fully understand human nature yet doesn’t mean there isn’t a human nature. There very clearly is and it’s very clearly physical, we just don’t have the neuroscience to fully comprehend it all yet.
And yes there is enormous neurodiversity among humans… but on average humans are selfish assholes who are incredibly gifted at justifying the evil shit they do because it benefits themselves.
I can’t even imagine following politics as closely as we all do and not seeing this as totally obvious. I mean you guys bitch all day every day about how selfish and shitty everyone is and then I say ‘people are selfish and shitty’ and you act like it’s controversial.
Obviously there’s quite a bit of flexibility, but that doesn’t mean there’s no human nature. There is, just like there’s snake-nature, baboon-nature and honey-badger-nature.
If you give enough love and support to basically any mammal though, they turn into a good dog, and that goes for people too.
If you mean that humans naturally desire sunlight and oxygen and to not die, then sure, there’s a human nature. But to say humans are naturally trash bags constantly looking to fuck each other over is at best incredibly controversial.
Google around a bit. This is a hotly contested topic that hinges on careful definitions and debated empirical research. To stroll in here like bs and lol at anyone who contradicts his anecdotes is insulting and misguided.
There are communities out there (ie not in the US) where individual desperation is shared and thus diluted because capitalism hasn’t taken root, divided communities and forced people to fend for themselves.
Just being a nit I guess. I think there’s more to it than needing to eat and breathe, but nature/nurture is a sliding scale thing and just about impossible to talk about unless I guess you are 100% tabula rasa or 100% it’s all hard wired.
Grunching but LMM seemed this think this was relevant to the conversation here. Basically he was helping me figure out which headset to buy and I had said I preferred Amazon because I had free money on there, but it certainly wasn’t a requirement. Anyhow one of the two we decided on was available for Best Buy at retail of $150 with the lowest price on Amazon being ~$190.
I did also buy another set of headphones in “used-like new” condition to compare the two and now worried Im getting scammed.
Says the guy from the UK. I don’t know where you think these unspoiled paradise’s of cooperation and harmony are but I’m fairly confident your country spoiled them if they ever existed.
I’m really tired of you acting like the US is some outlier in its shittiness. We’re the main global empire at present, which is a role we took over from the British. Before the British it was someone else and so on. At no point and in no place have people been anything better. If medieval Nigeria had developed substantially more effective transportation and military technology they would have done exactly what the Western Europeans did with an African flavor. If the First Nations had ‘discovered’ Europe they would have colonized the fuck out of it.
I’m tired of people acting like there are these magical good people out there somewhere. Every time I dig even an inch deep into the place they’re describing you find people and fairly normal fuckery carried out by people. This isn’t to excuse anyone for anything, it’s just how things are and always have been. Things are improving I guess, but that’s because we’ve discovered how to inflict even more suffering on every other form of life on the planet instead of on other humans… and we’re still treating other humans like shit even though there’s a very real chance that we’ve been in a truly post scarcity world for a couple of decades.
I know you don’t know where they are - that’s my exact point - and I’m mystified why you base your world view on the behaviour and situation in one very extreme country.
It’s not extreme at all. If anything it’s incredibly derivative and the paper we were copying off of was yours. Your legal system, your colonialism (we’re just the North American branch office of the British Empire metastasized), and your ideas.
We’re the global super power. If anything we’re the least malevolent empire in human history. This has more to do with where we are in human history than any innate goodness in us. Like all global empires before us we’re the baddies.
I don’t understand how someone from checks notes the UK can possibly think that he has the moral high ground on checks notes the evils of a global empire. You guys literally raped and pillaged an area so large that the sun never set on a place you were currently looting.
Once again we’re literally the North American branch office of your colonial empire. Our practices are your practices because we were founded by English colonialists. When we genocided the natives we were doing what the English did every place they went basically. When we bought slaves we bought them from your merchants mostly. When we sold our cotton produced with the blood of African American slaves English textile mills were our biggest market.
This isn’t to excuse us, but you can come off your high horse because it’s frankly ridiculous coming from where you come from.
Yep. I think it’s a great insight that with enough love you can turn just about any mammal into a dog and I believe the credit for that insight goes to @Bro.
I can recommend the new @Sabo /@clovis8 thread’s guide to posting better ie fewer straw men like this.
The reason I’m talking about the US is quite obviously because you’re citing it as your one and only data point for educating the rest of the forum of well travelled people all about human nature, because… well that’s all you have.
I’m citing all of human history going back to a fossil with a spear in its head. It’s on you to cite a counterfactual because there aren’t any. Every group of humans in history did awful shit and has plenty of blood on its hands because every group of humans is composed of humans. This includes every civilization since the recording of writing, and given that it seems very unlikely to me that any of the groups of humans prior to that were any better.
Maybe humans were better before we invented farming, but we’ll never know and they can’t have been that much better because yeah that fossil got hit in the head by a spear.
I have no desire to get into this debate but there is tons of research on violence levels during prehistory. Coles notes it was way more violent than today.
It’s on you to prove or at least provide evidence that your ancient human was speared as an act of unnecessary aggression and not as a justified act of self-defence in a fight for scarce food.
“All of human history”? Really? Have you even watched documentaries on how some remote villagers lived until very recently?
Governments have been overthrown by people saying shit like that since the dawn of writing… and pretty much without exception those people immediately began hoarding wealth and tyrannizing other people. We have actual brain science that shows that when you get power your brain changes on a structural level and you lose your ability to have empathy for the people below you. Even if you lead a revolution and personally somehow maintain your humanity, that just means that the monsters you made deals with to get resources for your revolutions will just push you out as soon as the war is won.
I would be 100% on board with any idea you had that hasn’t already been tried hundreds of times. The early labor movement was one of the least racist social groups of their time… and after they had won a few advantages for themselves they immediately began excluding black people, and the gangsters they had gotten help from immediately had their hand out. It took less than 10 years for the labor unions to go from anti establishment to part of the problem once they actually won.
The reason why they were an easy target when the right started their post New Deal comeback is because they were seen (correctly) as extremely corrupt and a big problem by the general population. Power corrupts.
