Lol I’m not gonna read all of the last few dozen posts but are people trying to argue that humans are inherently good/bad?
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Same, I think you guys arguing against BS are on crazy pills but I have no desire to get into a 200 post conversation about it. This thread has been a great read though so thanks to all the participants.
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This is much closer to the genesis of your beliefs about all humans being self-serving and violent than the constructed arguments about recorded history and speared fossils.
The problem with describing humans as inherently anything is that we all have differing definitions of what constitutes “bad” and “good.” Maybe nail those down before you all start going at each other over nothing.
Hint: morality is subjective
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My dad’s life gave me a huge sample of people talking about how great they were while being huge pieces of shit. That’s the only way my childhood was relevant besides maybe making me more willing to acknowledge the reality that humanity isn’t inherently good.
One probably informs the other, but his point on the nature of power, and the people who actively seek out and obtain power seems pretty accurate to me. There’s a pretty decent sized contingent of people here who think you have to be a sociopath to become a billionaire. I don’t know that that is always true, but if you take the pool of billionaires in the world I think you will find sociopaths much more often than random chance would suggest.
That same logic applies to political power. To such an extent that basically every country will have a sociopath as their leader at one point or another. Play that out over millennia and enough of the clan chiefs, kings, emperors, dictators, and even elected leaders turn out to be absolute shit human beings that it makes it pretty easy to broad brush human nature as being shitty.
I think the reality of human civilization makes it such that shitty people are going to end up in charge regardless of what kind of government you make up.
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That has nothing to do with the problem here - I doubt there’s much difference between people’s ideas here of what morally good and bad are. It’s not like we’re conversing with Trumpers.
I actually agree with the last point to such a degree that I think one of the primary goals of any attempt to design a system of government that worked would be to figure out how to weed out the high functioning personality disorders that tend to rise to the top.
We need to find a role that these people absolutely cannot use and make succeeding at it mandatory for moving up the ladder past a certain point. Some kind of filter that makes progression for these types slow down drastically.
No more than usual. I’m just stuck at my desk waiting for something to happen more than a little annoyed.
Yes every history book ever written is one anecdote lol. I have hundreds of anecdotes about people hard signalling goodness to lure in the unwary. Absolutely not in any way restricted just to my parents. It’s a constant and it is has never not been true from what I’ve seen. It’s one of the most useful tools in my kit for avoiding predators.
Dude literally every scam artist does this. The con in con man stands for ‘confidence’. As in they convince you to have confidence in them and their character and then use that to steal from you.
Looks like Amazon has gotten exactly what it wanted from this thread. I imagine we’ll see an AmazonPolitics forum pop up before next week.
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I agree with this really. I think it’s easy for people in our relatively lowly positions to look at billionaires and assume they’re all sociopaths or psychopaths. Some certainly are because their aim all along was to grind many companies into the dirt and throw their employees out of work eg Bezos.
Others may have started off small and by chance as much as skill, often hit on something that enabled them to gain an eventual monopoly of some area of some market, and I don’t think these are always socio/psycho-paths.
The problem is with the broad brushing of whole communities under the assumption that malignant rulers/leaders using their citizens to exert their authority in bad ways means that those citizens performing pretty much compulsory bad acts are bad people.
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I literally don’t consider myself or one person I have ever met in my life to be “good.” I don’t necessarily consider them to be “bad” either but if I had to choose one or the other, everyone would go in the bad bucket. Guess I just realized I kind of believe in the concept behind original sin, lol.
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If you believe this, is it even possible for you to be happy?
ETA, because presumably you include yourself?
“Slavery was bad.”
“That’s subjective.”
?
As far as I can tell, I’m one of the happiest people I know. The truth will set you free, lol.
The way I see it, almost no one is willing to lead a truly selfless and “good” lifestyle and they are just negotiating with themselves over why their level of badness is okay.
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You keep changing the topic.
There are two topics. Is humanity innately a bunch of shitty fire monkeys mostly mindlessly persuing their own extremely short term interests and are people who make a big show of being good more or less likely to be good people. I have strong opinions about both (which in my case is basically always accompanied by a large amount of personal experience or data) and your lack of ability to follow my train of thought isn’t my problem.
To add a positive spin to this, when you consider most people to be “bad,” it’s easier to avoid feeling the need to fall in line with all the stupid selfish shit they do (at least in America) that just makes them unhappy.
Eh, I think this is just Christian nonsense. Goodness isn’t about purity. Only the best song ever is a good song? Seems off.
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