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it's so over
(lemmy.ml)
Edit: /j
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this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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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".
One has to wonder how capitalism arose, if the traits which gave rise to it aren’t part of human nature.
Capitalism arose from European feudalism. Which in turn arose from Christianity. Which in turn became mandated by the Roman Empire right before it totally coincidentally collapsed. The decisions behind this progression was limited to a tiny subset of the local human population, the ruling class which back then was basically seen as a completely different (superior) race to the commoners and peasants, and therefore absolutely did not represent the wishes of most humans at the time and certainly did not represent the "nature" of most humans, just the ones most corrupted by power and exceptionalism in a system they created specifically to keep themselves in power. They're not human nature, they're the societal cancer that actively rejected and suppressed real human nature.
So the ruling class, with all the wealth and power and ability to do whatever they wanted acted against their own natures to create a system which would create in humans the desire to hoard wealth and power?
Yes. When your rule is based on seizing wealth and power you'll keep doing that perpetually so you don't lose your place in the ruling class. The fact that they did that is more consistent with the Marxist notion that human "nature" is shaped by the material conditions they're born into.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of peasants of that time fully accepted and even embraced their position due to all the religious brainwashing. Most had no real aspirations of power (supposedly despite their nature to desire power) because they've been taught their whole life that it's better for that to be taken care of by someone else that "God" supposedly chose. If anything, our uncritical acceptance of our place within capitalism is closer to what the serfs thought.
So then it’s not capitalism which causes in humans the desire to hoard wealth and power?
Any system predicated on obtaining as much wealth or power as possible will see people fixating on that and eventually divorcing the wealth/power itself from the material conditions that they arose from. Why do you think so many corporations turn into death spirals where they try to increase profits at all costs, abandoning their actual products and customers, and then act all shocked when they inevetably go bankrupt due to no longer having a customer base because they alienated everyone with their shitty profit oriented practices? The only way to solve this is to change the system people live under.
If it’s not in human nature to hoard wealth and power, then how do systems arise which are predicated on obtaining as much wealth or power as possible?
You can argue that human cognition allows for the world we see around us, but that doesn't mean this was necessarily unavoidable, or that we're naturally selfish, or whatever else. It's also very self-defeating as an argument because we can point to countless examples of cooperation, both past and present, including people saving someone from drowning for no monetary gain. And I don't know you personally, but I try my best to be a good person out of love for humanity, rather than expecting a reward.
But let's say that it is human nature to be selfish. It's still a silly argument against socialism though, since we could still build systems that don't reward our worst Impulses, but rather function with checks and balances to prevent them.
Because humans experiment with societal rules as societies were developing and get into self reinforcing loops that go on long after everyone's forgotten why it happened in the first place.
Human nature is to form societies. What happens in those societies and how they are structured are the result of chaotic interactions and competing thought that, again, are the result of material conditions those humans find themselves in.
There are plenty of societies that don't strictly follow the Roman/European system of power. Japan for example had their emperor reduced to a symbolic position long before European contact, but even though the emperor had most of his real power taken away, everyone still called him emperor and worshipped him because he was so important to their culture, power or not. Meanwhile, in what would be modern day India, multiple different religions arose based on selfless sacrifice for others and rejection of indulgence and pleasure in favor of self reflection and simple living, with many people throughout history in the region (princes, heirs of family fortunes, etc) fully rejecting their very privileged lifestyles embrace aestheticism. Same with ancient Greek stoic and cynic philosophers many of which came from rich and powerful families yet deliberately choose to reject all of it. That all seems pretty against "human nature" no? Then you had the Indigenous tribes of the world who practiced small egalitarian societal groups and did perfectly fine until Europeans intervened.
So the first person who acquired wealth and/or power got no pleasure from it, because that’s not in their nature, but nonetheless kept it and passed it down to their children, who also derived no pleasure from it but also kept it and passed it down, until it had become ingrained tradition, and then people started to acquire the desire for the wealth and power they had had for generations?
Yes. Because it benefited them over others. Humans are capable of choosing to do things that benefit them and it has nothing to do with their "nature". Marxism does not reject the notion that power doesn't benefit the people who have then, in fact that's a core fact that Marxism is based on, and calls out the fact that feudal/monarchist/capitalist power benefits the ruling class by subjugating and exploiting the working class. I don't think you have to agree with Marxism's proposed solution to this to recognize the problem it points out. It asserts that because we have lived in such systems our whole lives, we think it's human nature when in reality a person born and living in some other system (Marxist or otherwise) will think their system is human nature, when reality no system is and they're all abstract inventions with nothing to do with our neurobiology or evolution.
For a non political example, I write code all day because it benefits me, and I doubt programming was something humans evolved to do, we figured it out ourselves and it had nothing to do with our nature. You literally have to learn and practice abstract computational thinking while learning to program because it's very unintuitive at times compared to how humans think by default, yet people learn it just fine.
It’s human nature to survive, but doing things which enable you to survive is not part of human nature?
Define "doing things which enable you to survive." In my definition, that doesn't involve being king or exploiting others to hoard more wealth than you could ever hope to spend. You need some minimum amount of resources to survive but hoarding many times more than you need doesn't help you survive and only harms others.
"If a monkey hoards more bananas than it can eat, causing its peers to starve while most of the bananas rot in its pile, scientists will study its brain to find out what the hell is wrong with it. But when a human does it, they get celebrated under capitalism."
Also, it was once human nature to flee from fire, but once we learned to control it, it became an integral part of our lives. Human "nature" changes over time because your brain is pretty much a blank slate when you're born and doesn't fully finish structuring itself until your 20s. Your entire childhood is spent developing your "nature" that you'll have for your adult life (and even then you can change it at will even in adulthood if you change your living conditions), which is why we're more influenced by the conditions we grow up in than any sort of innate biology. What "nature" was best for hunter gatherer or even medieval times are totally obsolete in our modern day, so they stop being our default "nature" due to children no longer growing up in those conditions.
The idea that your nature is influenced by your conditions isn't even unique to humans. Most animals are the same, a house cat or dog will learn from a very young age how to beg for food from their owners while a feral cat/dog won't because that's not beneficial for their survival when they're not a pet. Hell, house cats keep making kitten sounds because their owners keep treating them like kittens, while feral cats stop meowing once they leave their parents. Animals born and raised in captivity in general often show completely different behaviors and personality compared to wild animals of the same species, because their brains are literally structured differently due to growing up in different conditions.
If you have to keep in mind that the ruling class is always fighting against itself. So when you say they could do whatever they wanted, actually that's not exactly true. Throughout history they've often been killing each other and locking each other up.
My take is that societies became too big. In small communities like families, people don't act capitalist. Humans typically moved in groups of a few dozens for most of their existence. Go above 150 or so and it starts to be less personal and less communist.l