You know that humans lived in communal societies for a long fuckin time before all the bullshit we know today, right?
Human nature is not greed. That’s capitalism.
Yeah of course, this meme is meant to be making fun of the idea that “human nature” (whatever that may be lol) in any way disproves communist or anticapitalist theory
Greed isn’t inescapably “human nature”, but results from it under some basic conditions. The nature of enjoyment and suffering means the pursuit of enjoyment and avoidance of suffering as a biological imperative. Desperation, lack of cultural/learned empathy, cultural normalization of disparity, etc., can quickly allow unchecked greed. The same thing, with different conditions, can be said for… not sure there’s a single word for it, but behavior motivated by empathy promoting equality and sharing and so on. The conditions actually kind of close to being the inverse of those for greed - some combination of not having desperation, having cultural/learned empathy, cultural normalization of economic equality, etc. Both types of thinking are just basically pro-social or anti-social thought with regard to material/economic gain, depending on what influences individual thinking.
But have humans have never had a non-hierarchical large scaled society?
Sure, but we freely traded with each other.
No matter how many wish communism to work and devote themselves to it, it will fail. They can hold back agorism indefinitely by great effort, but when they let go, the ‘flow’ or ‘Invisible Hand’ or ‘tides of history’ or ‘profit incentive’ or ‘doing what comes naturally’ or ‘spontaneity’ will carry society inexorably closer to the pure agora.
This is a deeply idealist view of production. There is no “invisible hand,” no universal Spirit of Hegel. Trade and industrialized production gives way to centralization and the death of competition, and it makes more and more sense economically to plan production and collectivize it as this competition dies out of itself. Communists aren’t “holding back” trade, trade naturally gives way to the very structures that compel communism and kill off trade.
Observing humans in capitalism and assuming greed is just human nature is like observing humans on the Titanic and assuming drowning is human nature.
It’s just rejecting your responsibility in the way you behave. “It’s not me, it’s the nature”
Anyone ever commenting “human nature” should be forced to explain how: (a) some behavior is an inevitable result of brain physiology, and, (b) why examples of people who don’t exhibit that behavior exist. The absence of those explanations disprove like 95%+ of “human nature” arguments. Like, “oh, religion is human nature, we must believe in a higher power because we crave meaning” - which part of the brain mandates that thought, and why do atheists and agnostics exist then?
Tbf religion scholars believe we do tend towards religious behavior, which isn’t to say humans must be religious or believe in the supernatural, but patriotism is analogous to civil religion, and fandoms can also be very similar to religious communities.
I believe skeptics have always existed, even Cicero included skeptics when writing about Roman religion before the Common Era, but we engage in behaviors that are analogous to religious behavior regardless of our beliefs, so from that point of view our nature includes worship, imo.
Well, notice how you’re using the word “tend”. Religious ideas only come from attempts to derive explanations for what we experience. The latter is the basically intrinsic part of human nature, the former isn’t. I’m talking about what is an absolute, unchangeable part of human nature, versus what’s variable and just “something that humans do sometimes”.
Human nature on its deathbed when it realizes it forgot to account for Karl Marx
Even if you assume human nature is greed, it’s also human nature to have their babies eaten by wolves but I don’t see anyone suggesting we should center our society on baby tossin’ wolf pits.
Killing people who don’t worship the same Gods as you, taking slaves from the neighboring city state, and having a harem of
sex slaves“wives” are all “human nature” that have all been done since before we had the technology to record them all the way up to today. Should those be tolerated in modern society too? Hell no.
Me when I take all napkins and salt shakers from every restaurant because apparently greed is just human nature
