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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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Yeah thats why this requires revolution to accomplish
As a first step. Really, it’s the easiest step along that path.
The hard part is building the new order among the ashes of the revolution. The leaders of the revolution will in all likelihood want to claim the spoils of victory for themselves. Who could blame them? It’s human nature.
Selfishness is not "human nature". Is it in the coal miners nature to have black lung? Humans are a product of their environment and our current environment rewards the most selfish behavior it can so you are gonna have a highly selfish population. Capitalism has made us sick but there are those of us who can do better. The selfish human nature you have been taught is a lie meant to justify current systems and dismiss any alternative. Something incredibly important I have learned as a history student is that humans have a great capacity to come together under adversity. It is our greatest strength. Civilizations do not form under abundant conditions, they form when we are forced to work together for a collective good. We can cooperate, we can work together on massive scales for the benefit of all.
Are there any evidence that human selfishness is not innate? I think almost all organisms are selfish, except in the case of parent-child relations sometimes and collective animals, like ants.
Let me put it another way. Selfishness is no more human nature than cooperation is. If we can build a civilization based on rewarding selfishness we can build one off rewarding cooperation.
Yes, both selfishness and cooperation are traits of human behavior but it seems natural that humans only cooperative if it benefits them i.e. Bob helps his village now because Bob is fairly confident the village will help him in the future if he needs help. In situations where there are not enough resources for all, don't people usually fall back to every-person-for-themselves?
I've been watching past seasons of the US reality show "Survivor" and it's a common strategy to stay in alliances throughout the competition but it's not uncommon for these alliances to breakdown towards the end in the form of backstabbing, because there can only be a single winner. I've only seen a handful of seasons so far and it seems split at best that the winner of a season won with little/or no use of deceit and backstabbing.
My point is, when there's lots to go around, sure, people will help each other. But when resources are scarce, it's every person for themselves. And scarcity is a feature of life itself, therefore, human selfishness is natural and I'd guess is prioritized over cooperation when things get really tough.
Thats not selfishness though. It isn't selfish to contribute to a group that benefits you. Its selfish if you contribute to a system that harms others because it benefits you. These are very different things.
In the various crucibles of civilization people came together precisely because resources were scarce. Yes they would eventually collapse when resources became too scarce to sustain whatever system they had built and infighting wasn't uncommon but resources are not scarce now. We produce enough food, we have enough homes, we have enough water (for humans not for our current technological setup). The issue we are currently struggling with is not scarcity its distribution. The technology produced by the capitalist era is more that sufficient to provide for us all.
Even collective animals have to fight against selfishness. Worker bees detect and kill upstart queens. Human cells are being destroyed all the time (apoptosis). Cancer is the result when that mechanism fails.
Not sure what this has to do with selfishness. Is the worker bee killing an upstart-queen from its own hive? If so, what's its motivation to kill the upstart-queen? How does this benefit the worker bee, causing the behavior to be selfish?
In the case of body cells and apoptosis, I'd view the actual human being as equivalent to the entirety of the hive/the queen bee, in which case, the process of apoptosis is selfless from the point of view of the cells killing themselves or other cells - in theory it's for the good of the human being as a whole.
Yes, the upstart-queen is from within the bee’s own hive. The hive permits only 1 queen and others are destroyed. The selfishness is not on the part of the worker who kills it, it’s on the upstart-queen who is trying to replace the main queen.
Yes, apoptosis is selfless. Cancer is the selfishness it fights against: a group of cells in selfish rebellion against the body.