“Muh Human Nature” is a classic debunked liberal argument against socialism/communism. If you think you are ‘left’ then you really should maybe read some theory or watch some youtube videos or something. Second Thought has a lot of good intro to political economy explainer videos.
The larger point is that the workers that lack solidarity (as you claim), are specifically incentivized to think in this way by their boss under capitalism. “Crabs in a bucket” mentality is a good shorthand description of what I am talking about. The capitalists and bosses want workers to be in competition with each other, not in solidarity (think union organizing). This is why I called out your ‘class traitor’ thinking espoused by your comment. Brain worms refers to this. You have bad ideology in your brain due to living in the world of neoliberal capitalism, it has instructed you on how to understand the world. And you seem just fine with following those instructions to the letter.
I’m not arguing against socialism/communism, I’m arguing against the first paragraph in the meme you posted.
If you think you are ‘left’
I don’t.
The capitalists and bosses want workers to be in competition with each other, not in solidarity (think union organizing).
You have bad ideology in your brain due to living in the world of neoliberal capitalism, it has instructed you on how to understand the world.
This is faulty logic. The fact that an understanding of the world includes benefits to capitalists and bosses doesn’t imply that the understanding of the world either (1) is incorrect or (2) came through their instruction. You’ve shown neither of those to be true.
I appreciate it is painful to acknowledge that bosses exploit workers and that one can find comfort imagining that the exploitation is due to factors which can be altered but wishing it to be so doesn’t make it so.
the workers that lack solidarity (as you claim), are specifically incentivized to think in this way by their boss under capitalism
Their boss may well give them an incentive not to cooperate but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other, much more primal forces pushing towards the same end. Looking at the behaviour of workers and all humans for that matter, they don’t seem to need any encouragement in order to step on each other.
“These days, at least in the West, there seems to be a consensus that capitalism is just “the way things are.” Everyone from capitalist economists to your dentist to your weird uncle is firmly convinced that humans are just hard-wired for capitalism. Let’s explore that idea. Hope you enjoy!”
If you’re not able to express succinctly in prose whatever idea you think I need to waste my time watching be revealed in a YouTube video then I suspect it’s not an idea worth paying attention to.
Since you seem to be a conservative misanthrope, maybe you should learn about prosocial behavior in humans. It’s kind of the main evolutionary advantage humans have. It is what provides our ability to coordinate large groups. I don’t think the status quo is inherently “the way things are” because history shows there have been various forms of society with differing levels of exploitation and prosocial and antisocial tendencies. Your ideology claims that the status quo is due to ‘human nature’. Mine does not.
From early in life, children help, comfort, and share with others. Recent research has deepened scientific understanding of the development of prosociality – efforts to promote the welfare of others. This article discusses two key insights about the emergence and early development of prosocial behavior, focusing on the development of helping. First, children’s motivations and capabilities for helping change in quality as well as quantity over the opening years of life. Specifically, helping begins in participatory activities without prosocial intent in the first year of life, becoming increasingly autonomous and motivated by prosocial intent over the second year. Second, helping emerges through bidirectional social interactions, starting at birth, in which caregivers and others support the development of helping in a variety of ways and young children play active roles, often influencing caregiver behavior. The question now is not whether, but how social interactions contribute to the development of prosocial behavior. Recent methodological and theoretical advances provide exciting avenues for future research on the social and emotional origins of human prosociality.
Human prosociality from an evolutionary perspective:
variation and correlations at a city-wide scale
**Prosociality is a fundamental theme in all branches of the human behavioral sciences. Evolutionary theory sets an even broader stage by
examining prosociality in all species, including the distinctive human capacity to cooperate in large groups of unrelated individuals. **We use
evolutionary theory to investigate human prosociality at the scale of a small city (Binghamton, NY), based on survey data and a direct
measure of prosocial behavior. In a survey of public school students (Grades 6–12), individual prosociality correlates strongly with social
support, which is a basic requirement for prosociality to succeed as a behavioral strategy in Darwinian terms. The most prosocial individuals
receive social support from multiple sources (e.g., family, school, neighborhood, religion and extracurricular activities). Neighborhood social
support is significant as a group-level variable in addition to an individual-level variable. The median income of a neighborhood does not
directly influence individual prosociality, but only indirectly through forms of social support. Variation in neighborhood quality, as measured
by the survey, corresponds to the likelihood that a stamped addressed letter dropped on the sidewalk of a given neighborhood will be mailed.
We discuss the results in relation to evolutionary theory, the experimental economics literature and the social capital literature in an effort to
integrate the study of human prosociality across disciplines.
Evolution of prosocial behaviours in multilayer populations
Human societies include diverse social relationships. Friends, family, business colleagues and online contacts can all contribute to one’s social life. Individuals may behave differently in different domains, but success in one domain may engender success in another. Here, we study this problem using multilayer networks to model multiple domains of social interactions, in which individuals experience different environments and may express different behaviours. We provide a mathematical analysis and find that coupling between layers tends to promote prosocial behaviour. Even if prosociality is disfavoured in each layer alone, multilayer coupling can promote its proliferation in all layers simultaneously. We apply this analysis to six real-world multilayer networks, ranging from the socio-emotional and professional relationships in a Zambian community, to the online and offline relationships within an academic university. We discuss the implications of our results, which suggest that small modifications to interactions in one domain may catalyse prosociality in a different domain.
“Human beings must necessarily cooperate and aid each other in order to survive. It’s how our species evolved. However, that doesn’t mean humans only ever aid each other, or even that they care about others except as a means to survive. Humans will cooperate when it’s beneficial and also stab their fellow humans in the back, step on them and exploit them when it’s beneficial. That’s why all we have are systems of elites and peasants, filled with squalor and death.”
differing levels of exploitation
And yet never an absence of exploitation.
So not sure what your point is.
That humans in general, including fellow labourers, are what are reckless of the health and life of the labourer, not just “capital”. You’re deluding yourself by limiting your criticism to capital alone. Or even worse, deluding yourself by assigning blame to capital alone.
“Muh Human Nature” is a classic debunked liberal argument against socialism/communism. If you think you are ‘left’ then you really should maybe read some theory or watch some youtube videos or something. Second Thought has a lot of good intro to political economy explainer videos.
The larger point is that the workers that lack solidarity (as you claim), are specifically incentivized to think in this way by their boss under capitalism. “Crabs in a bucket” mentality is a good shorthand description of what I am talking about. The capitalists and bosses want workers to be in competition with each other, not in solidarity (think union organizing). This is why I called out your ‘class traitor’ thinking espoused by your comment. Brain worms refers to this. You have bad ideology in your brain due to living in the world of neoliberal capitalism, it has instructed you on how to understand the world. And you seem just fine with following those instructions to the letter.
I’m not arguing against socialism/communism, I’m arguing against the first paragraph in the meme you posted.
I don’t.
This is faulty logic. The fact that an understanding of the world includes benefits to capitalists and bosses doesn’t imply that the understanding of the world either (1) is incorrect or (2) came through their instruction. You’ve shown neither of those to be true.
I appreciate it is painful to acknowledge that bosses exploit workers and that one can find comfort imagining that the exploitation is due to factors which can be altered but wishing it to be so doesn’t make it so.
Their boss may well give them an incentive not to cooperate but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other, much more primal forces pushing towards the same end. Looking at the behaviour of workers and all humans for that matter, they don’t seem to need any encouragement in order to step on each other.
“These days, at least in the West, there seems to be a consensus that capitalism is just “the way things are.” Everyone from capitalist economists to your dentist to your weird uncle is firmly convinced that humans are just hard-wired for capitalism. Let’s explore that idea. Hope you enjoy!”
Is Capitalism Really Human Nature? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbkMDb1jJCw
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=nbkMDb1jJCw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Pass.
If you’re not able to express succinctly in prose whatever idea you think I need to waste my time watching be revealed in a YouTube video then I suspect it’s not an idea worth paying attention to.
Since you seem to be a conservative misanthrope, maybe you should learn about prosocial behavior in humans. It’s kind of the main evolutionary advantage humans have. It is what provides our ability to coordinate large groups. I don’t think the status quo is inherently “the way things are” because history shows there have been various forms of society with differing levels of exploitation and prosocial and antisocial tendencies. Your ideology claims that the status quo is due to ‘human nature’. Mine does not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology
Here’s just a few of many examples of prosocial behaviors being inherent to humans, as we are highly social beings.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6786781/
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/Wilson-EvolutionProsociality.pdf
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01241-2
So not sure what your point is.
I’ll just cut-and-paste from another comment:
“Human beings must necessarily cooperate and aid each other in order to survive. It’s how our species evolved. However, that doesn’t mean humans only ever aid each other, or even that they care about others except as a means to survive. Humans will cooperate when it’s beneficial and also stab their fellow humans in the back, step on them and exploit them when it’s beneficial. That’s why all we have are systems of elites and peasants, filled with squalor and death.”
And yet never an absence of exploitation.
That humans in general, including fellow labourers, are what are reckless of the health and life of the labourer, not just “capital”. You’re deluding yourself by limiting your criticism to capital alone. Or even worse, deluding yourself by assigning blame to capital alone.
Ya, I already said you seem to be a misanthrope.
misanthrope mĭs′ən-thrōp″, mĭz′- noun
One who hates or mistrusts humankind.
A hater of mankind; one who harbors dislike or distrust of human character or motives in general.
A hater of mankind; a misanthropist.
And no exploitation is a ‘differing level of exploitation’ even if you don’t want to understand that. Just like zero is a number.
You’re claiming there have been human societies with an absence of exploitation? And you have sources to back up your claim?
Nothing will convince you because you are filled with hate for fellow humans, and you like being that way.