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?
- 0 Posts
- 6 Comments
Greed isn’t inescapably “human nature”, but results from it under some basic conditions. The nature of enjoyment and suffering means the pursuit of enjoyment and avoidance of suffering as a biological imperative. Desperation, lack of cultural/learned empathy, cultural normalization of disparity, etc., can quickly allow unchecked greed. The same thing, with different conditions, can be said for… not sure there’s a single word for it, but behavior motivated by empathy promoting equality and sharing and so on. The conditions actually kind of close to being the inverse of those for greed - some combination of not having desperation, having cultural/learned empathy, cultural normalization of economic equality, etc. Both types of thinking are just basically pro-social or anti-social thought with regard to material/economic gain, depending on what influences individual thinking.
Definitions of “capitalism” are variable but I think it’s totally inaccurate to say that it’s only existed for a few hundred years. You look at ancient Roman/Greek society, they have privately owned businesses with shareholder type structures. One of the key influences on Western legal systems today (something hinted at by half our legal terms being in Latin). Something similar about the economic structure can be said about many historical empires, older than a few hundred years. Where does the line get drawn on what’s “capitalism” or “capitalism-like” vs. what’s not. The basic idea of monopolizing control over production etc. in order to privately benefit, is not particularly hard for people to arrive at. Heck, it goes hand in hand with “empire”, because when you have a structure based on elevating a huge number of people against a huge number of other people, it’s not a stretch to have the same structure occurring within the society, because you already have one type of inequality normalized.
Not sure I was following the rules, tbph. Box of laptops and I grabbed some promising looking ones.
I got two laptops from local electronics recycling this past month. One of them is 2020 spec and just needed a charger and some dents smoothed out. Can’t beat rescuing something that’s going in the trash, sustainability wise. If you’re going on the actual used market, Thinkpad like everyone else said.



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”.