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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Unpopular Opinion
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Bullshit. For a couple hundred thousand years humans kept only what they could carry on their backs. And that only counts homo sapiens sapiens. We only started staying in one place and amassing surplus in the last fifteen thousand years and yet there are people saying "greed is part of human nature."
It's the greedy who somehow managed to sell us that propaganda. Greed is a mental illness.
I don't agree with OP. I don't think more punishments are the way to fix things. But neither is gestures broadly the best we can do.
When homo sapians were nomadic, we were quite a tribal social group. The alpha male always had more resources in the group which you can call greed. This was a thing before civilization. And lets be honest, if we had more, would we really share it? Most people want more but when we get more, we do not divide it with others in our community. Very few give up their time and money for charity.
What makes you think that "alpha males" were the norm in the paleolithic?
I could probably be convinced that some individuals had more social capital than others.
What do you even mean by "had"? It seems extremely unlikely that in the paleolithic they had a concept of ownership even roughly like what modern capitalist systems employ. I'm quite certain they didn't think of land ownership the same way we do today. I'd doubt they thought of ownership of tools or food or clothing the same way we do either.
I'd imagine anyone who carried more stuff on their backs than they needed would have significant disadvantages (encumberance) compared to other folks.
How do you know?
Just from looking at Wikipedia, I found a paragraph that starts "some sources claim that most Middle and Upper Paleolithic societies were possibly fundamentally egalitarian." (And that sentence has 4 citations.) It seems like the jury is still out at best on that topic.
And what if that has a lot more to do with our modern world than with human nature?
Indigenous peoples in what is now the pacific northwest of the U.S. and Canada had rituals called "potlatch" in which the most wealthy would give away lots of their resources to those with less. Don't get me wrong, those folks were not paleolithic hunter gatherers, but they're a counterexample to your implication that humans with more never give things away to humans with less. And it was done regularly. (On occasions of births, deaths, adoptions, weddings, and other such events.)
Another example of this is the Moka ritualized exchange by indigenous peoples in in Papua New Guinea.
Looking at how primates behave today, there is an alpha male in the group who has access to more resources. "Human nature" or in this case the nature of primates does not change over a short period of time. This behavior is embedded in us from million of years ago. Sure some tribes may have work togeather, but most indigenous tribes did not document their history, so for all we know there was more of an hierarchy in indigenous groups than we know of.