"The problem is that people are selfish"
its almost like an economic system centered around profit motive does that.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
"The problem is that people are selfish"
its almost like an economic system centered around profit motive does that.
That is something that is inbred. No life form can survive without being selfish. The behaviour of course transits into an economic system because earning money = survival there
I agree with you 100%
"No life form can survive without being selfish. "
working together is the next step of evolution in species.
look at ants, bees, pack animals, even the majority of humanity outside of capitalism.
Human nature is shaped by the system, not the other way around.
Please read the linked article about selfishness, because I would only be repeating its arguments, and then tell me if you still think that what you have just said is true.
I’m not saying that working together is not desired. Human beings are pack animals, we will never want to be on our own. Being selfish does not mean to be on your own. All of the animals you have described are also selfish. Selfishness is the core of every living genome.
Now please read the linked article.
"Selfishness is the core of every living genome."
you need to read up on "human nature"
"To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism, is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough." - Andrew Collier, Marx: A Beginner’s Guide
what linked article
https://steemit.com/life/@marekdavid/are-we-bound-to-be-selfish
I stopped as soon as I got to him talking about the "moral code"
morals are useless and subjective. Humans help each other because it pleases them. A system which forces people to fight to survive forces them to ignore that feeling. Over time they just naturally do so, its that simple.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works
"To add to what others are saying, it's also kind of a circular statement. In capitalism, your level of success is a function of your will to power. If you are more willing to put down others in competition, then you will be able to amass more wealth. It should not come as a surprise that in a system that rewards the amassing of power, people try to amass power, and they are required to do so to certain extents to survive. Parents and teacher teach children to be competitive in preparation for the capitalist world. Yet, when people exhibit competitive behavior where the system requires it and after having been taught that from an early age, reactionaries point to it as evidence that humans are naturally competitive.
Capitalism derives its "efficiency" from the competitive capacities that people have. However, these capacities vary as capacity for empathy varies. Those who are less empathetic tend to be more competitive and thus rise to positions of power. This is why you see CEOs exhibiting psychopathic characteristics. We have a system that naturally allows people on the verge of psychopathy to make decisions that affect hundreds of thousands of people. It makes use of the worst apects of the human condition for productivity and progress, which inevitably encounters the contradictions upon which it is predicated.
Conversely, communism harnesses the creative will that people have to contribute to the community, in which decisions are made by the members of the community. This kind of communal collaboration is a more apparently natural than competitive ambition. The mark of humans as a more advanced species than our primate relatives is our collaborative, social character. There's a book called "Hierarchy in the Forest" by Christopher Boehm that explains how chimpanzees form themselves into hierarchies with an "alpha male" at the top. It also explains how the human resistance to domination and hierarchy are key factors that drove the evolutionary emergence of language, kinship, social organization, and conciousness, which is widely argued by paleoanthropologists.
It is argued that capitalism should continue because it has been responsible for much progress since the dawn of modern civilization, but many of those innovations have been for the benefit of a few and the disenfranchisment of many. Yes, the Cold War drove many advancements in aeronautics and education, but its purpose was to out-science and out-educate, and the multitude of terrors that came as a result of the Cold War are lingering haunting the world still. Should capitalism still be an engine for scientific progress (social progress is out of the question by the very nature of capitalism's being individualistic) if it produces similar terrors? There has been scientific progress (e.g. International Space Station and CERN) by a global and communal effort done purely for the pursuit of knowledge, which does not yield an individual tangible benefit, but drives our society forward as a whole.
Progress can be achieved for the sake of progress, and thus for the benefit of many, especially when the many are the authors of that progress. To claim that capitalism should continue because it works in accordance with human nature shows a willingness to allow selfish hunger for power to prevail, and an ignorance to our collaborative creative capabilities as humans. This is why it is laughable.
"
I have read a lot about human nature. It has actually been the main area of my philosophical studies and still is. Just because some communist say that people were made not to care about themselves quite a while ago doesn’t beat biological discoveries.
Arguments by communists are disregard by all the nations that have had communism in their country (mine as well) and saw it horrifically failing. Communism wants to have everybody equal and everybody with more or less same "wealth" whatever it would be without capital. That is not possible since not every person is worth as much as the other. That is utopia. Communism never worked in any given country for more than few years. And you know why? Because people are selfish. Main argument being “communism works“is a self-killing act. Every system that was yet annexed had selfish people in which fought against each other to have a better position, whatever it was in the system.
You’re arguing that morals are subjective and at the same time your argument is that YOU love people, because love makes YOU happy. That loving is natural to YOU. And I could continue. Just because YOU feel this way doesn’t mean that the all HUMAN BEINGS feel this way, for they are not YOU, but THEM. And THEY can have totally different feelings about that.
Funny thing is that one of the problems tackled in the post is self-voting and you have already up voted yourself for 2 bucks. You wouldn’t be able to live in a world described by you either. You have proved that you’re selfish even more than most users on this platform.
I must react first I will tell you why bees and all superorganisms as they are called are selfish there is only one queen that can reproduce and it shares genes with every one in the hive or nest the queen is extremely selfish everyone is working for her but the others work for their own genes which they share with the queen to help their own genes reproduce that is selfish they only achieve the same as us in different way. Working together is not neccesary better in evolution only fot certain organisms bacteria are really not cooparating and they survive and survived through the evolution quite well. The fact the communities are working together doesn’t mean they are not selfish they can only achieve their goals better when in community in case of humans mostly because of safety. The system is only part of our human nature but we have things written in our genes which will effect us no matter in which system we are.