Bitch modern humans have been on this earth for six hundred thousand years creating an enormous number of distinct and unique cultures which shape the people living under them. The absolute arrogance to think you can generalize a hundred billion people’s worth of experience based on what you’ve experienced in your one tiny lifetime. Humans are so fucking diverse there is VERY little you can say is “human nature.” But no please tell me more about how people are just selfish by default despite all the fucking evidence to the contrary.
Like when they start talking about “the illegals being treated better than actual citizens”?
Whenever someone says, “It’s human nature to be [selfish/greedy/violent],” I hear, “I won’t blame myself in the slightest for being [selfish/greedy/violent]”
It’s so unfortunate that this view is drilled into us continuously throughout school, at least in the United States. I remember reading Lord of the Flies in high school and the class’s main takeaway was that most humans, especially children, are just terrible in some fundamental way.
Cooperation for mutual benefit is human nature 😈
See I’m not even 100% sure on this, cause there a plenty of people who (in our current society) are selfish and uncooperative. I’m sure under a better system those same people could be better but the fact that they aren’t now indicates to me that even cooperation for mutual benefit has to be encouraged by the environment to manifest.
Consider that their environment, I’m assuming you’re from :amerikkka: or at least the west, has drilled into them since childhood that rugged individualism is what’s morally correct. The concept of the superstructure and the base, that the superstructure is the combination of education/media/culture that drives into people repeatedly the message that competition is good and on a subtler level might makes right. The culture which valorizes success as material wealth and demonizes poverty is what leads people to be selfish and uncooperative. It is the sense of compassion and cooperation which has been killed by society and the elite have worked very hard to make it this way.
I mean, for sure I think people are only shitty because of our broken capitalist society, but if you need a culture that encourages compassion and cooperation it seems like those are just as much cultivated by the environment as more toxic traits. I think this is mostly just a semantic difference though, it seems like our opinions are pretty dang close otherwise.
99.99% of the human nature argument is shitty people trying to absolve themselves for shitty behavior by imagining anyone else would have done the same in their circumstances.
Everything about our existence from the cohabitation of gut flora, or the fossilized remains of ancestors with mended bone fractures, to the way our brain processes “Truth” points to a cooperative & collaberative “nature”; but sure go off about how being a selfish dickhead is “natural” behavior to you I guess.
E: This is aside from the fact that it betrays a certain cowardice. Like, even if the Human nature-ist is correct they are not enslaved to this behavior. To the contrary, working to transcend this “natural instinct” would be seen as honorable; rising above the rabble or whatever. But they’re too cowardly, stupid, or lazy to even see things on these terms; content instead to shrug and say “Anyone would have sold out their family for some paper.”
Its human nature to seek out nourishment such as food and water
