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Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

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Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#81

Post by bleepblorp »

arethuza wrote: post #56
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #38

All it takes is one narcissist to ruin things for everybody else.

I do believe that most people are basically decent. However, we are also gullible and prone to conforming to dominance hierarchies.

About 40% of humans are predisposed, either through biology or upbringing, to blindly follow socially dominant people.

This is why authoritarianism happens.

A disproportionate percentage of socially dominant people are sociopaths who are unfit to lead. This does not matter to authoritarian followers, however, and this is why things like Naziism happen.

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#82

Post by samatman »

082349872349872 wrote: post #52
luckylion wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To have a We, you need a They. An alien threat would be the best thing ever for human cooperation. I'm not sure whether the aliens need to be real, as long as they feel real.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 is real, but apparently insufficiently alien? Or maybe too alien to suffice as a subanthropomorphisable They?

Not nearly alien enough.

Plague has co-evolved with human civilization, for reasons adequately explained in Guns, Germs and Steel, among other places.

The ability to understand it, and take rational steps to mitigate it, is rather more new. SARS2 is arguably the first major pestilence to strike a human civilization which was coddled into the illusion that no such thing can happen to it.

Our spectrum of responses to that are fairly predictable to a student of history, but mixed with the peculiar impotence of a people who thought they had the power to stop this sort of thing, and have discovered they do not.

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#83

Post by clairity »

The_Double wrote: post #21
jadbox wrote: post #2

While reading this, I can't help but to hear Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator final speech in the background of my mind: "... We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed h…

Bregman's point in his book is that the belief that everyone is greedy is more harmful than the greed itself.

that doesn't jive with my initial take, although admittedly, i've only read the first few chapters so far and have yet to get back to it. i got the initial sense that the greed is harmful, and the beliefs around greed make it worse, so a little greed leads to a lot of bad feelings. it's not minimizing/forgiving of the actual greed in existence though.

i'm in general agreement of the book's overarching thesis that people are mostly good. we wouldn't have a functioning society if that weren't true. it's just that our spidey senses are horribly tuned to the modern world of very few actual dangers, which are mostly hidden away in institutions (centers of power) rather than our neighbors to whom we tend to cast the suspicious eye.

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#84

Post by btilly »

soledades wrote: post #66
fancyfredbot wrote: post #8

I think this article is rather unfairly quoting poor Hobbes out of context. Hobbes didn't say humankind was nasty and brutish, he said the life of man would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" in the absence of a community... Which is not contradicted by the examples in the article!

You are misrepresenting Hobbes here to say that he was referring to the absence of a community... Sapiens have always lived in communities. He was referring specifically to humans in the condition in the absence of state power: Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against ev…

Your summary of what the book says is directly at odds with data that I've seen in books like Enlightenment Now.

https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-violence-declined-... does a good job of summarizing the data. Every archeological site on record and every primitive society we have been able to study records a rate of death by human violence that exceeds by orders of magnitude what is seen in modern civilized societies. In fact they all exceed what happened in the USA+Europe from 1900-1960, and usually by a large multiple. Even with 2 world wars, Western civilization killed fewer per capita in violence than any previous period in history that we have data for.

In short, Hobbes was right. Every attempt that I have seen at taking a quantitative approach has backed that up.

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#86

Post by dsubburam »

kiba wrote: post #48
bambax wrote: post #44

We help our own, and destroy and torture with great pleasure and no remorse everything else, including animals, whole ecosystems, and other human beings we decide, for some reason or another, are "aliens". The moment we give another human community a special name is the first step towards abomination. Being territorial and aggressive towards others is a trait we share with other species, but we are also superpredator…

I like to eat chicken, beefs, and porks for no other reason than it's tasty food. Does that make me a bad person?

Another way to reframe this is to ask if this is a free action, rather than a good or bad one. Free as in free from animal passions that compel one to act in a pseudo-deterministic way ("I am hungry so I eat", "I am scared so I run"), and instead according to higher-order reason and principle only humans (so far) have access to.

So, if we choose meat for a meal in an automatic way because our tongue asks for it, it might be an unfree choice. But if we do so after some consideration, including factors beyond our bodily impulses, it could be seen as a choice made by a free person.

This my take/interpretation of Immanuel Kant's transcendental freedom[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative#Freedom...

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#87

Post by dundarious »

btilly wrote: post #84
soledades wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are misrepresenting Hobbes here to say that he was referring to the absence of a community... Sapiens have always lived in communities. He was referring specifically to humans in the condition in the absence of state power: Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against ev…

Your summary of what the book says is directly at odds with data that I've seen in books like Enlightenment Now . https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-violence-declined-... does a good job of summarizing the data. Every archeological site on record and every primitive society we have been able to study records a rate of death by human violence that exceeds by orders of magnitude what is seen in modern civilized…

I’d encourage you to read R. Brian Ferguson’s work, especially Pinker’s List. It goes into Pinker’s methodological errors (basically, he double counts much of his data, and even without that, is over confident of the explanatory power of that data).

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273371719_Pinker's_...

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#88

Post by AnimalMuppet »

growlist wrote: post #70
arethuza wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly because the attempts at creating "utopia" aren't anything of the sort - they are simple power grabs by whoever happens to be the most ruthless bunch of thugs.

[flagged]

I don't think so. I think the argument is that it's all the wrong type of communism, and the wrong type of socialism, and of anarchy, and the wrong type of every other "this will bring us to paradise" idea. And it's wrong, not because the ideas are necessarily wrong, but because they're run by people. Specifically, they're run by people (call them type 1) who think that having other people (type 2) believe in a utopian ideal is a great way for type 1 people to get put in positions of power. The type 2 people put them in such positions so that they can create the utopia, but the type 1 people don't do that once they get in power. Instead, they just do whatever lets them hold on to the power.

It's not just the wrong type of communism. It's the wrong type of human beings.

Personally, I think that this take is somewhat too cynical... but only somewhat. There are people who are genuinely trying to make things better. Not nearly as many as are saying that they're trying to do so, but more than zero.

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#89

Post by moksly »

sriku wrote: post #29
jadbox wrote: post #2

While reading this, I can't help but to hear Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator final speech in the background of my mind: "... We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed h…

"And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. ….." .. so mixed on hearing that. On one hand, this gives so much hope under the direst of circumstances. On the other, it says a lot about human nature too .. which can steadfastly hold on to destructive beliefs and act on them till the last breath.

It could also simply mean that every reign has a natural end. Power inheritance tends not to go well in non-free societies, even if it does sometime manage to last a few lifetimes.

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#90

Post by AnimalMuppet »

mjfl wrote: post #18

Seems to focus way too much on the bystander effect as a straw man example of "human evil". A much better picture of human evil would come from studying war rape, especially that of a victorious army. Any victorious army. Think Soviets in Berlin, Japanese in China, during WWII. The English civil wars were full of it as observed by Hobbes. Furthermore, it is ubiquitous throughout history. Any human convinced of their…

Look at the US conquest and occupation of Germany vs. the Russian. There was a massive difference.
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