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Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

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Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#91

Post by AnimalMuppet »

throwanem wrote: post #6
falcolas wrote: post #3

Tell that to those disappeared by their political competition. To those in Chinese concentration camps for the crime of being Muslim. To those being black bagged in Hong Kong. To those stuck in poverty because they have nothing of value to trade in a capitalistic society.

I think the point may be that systems which produce such behavior are perversions, rather than expressions, of whatever essential nature humanity may be said to have.

Then why does human nature seem to produce such behaviors so often?

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#92

Post by wahern »

bleepblorp wrote: post #81
arethuza wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a citation for such a figure, or is it something that appeared self-evident, like sticky electoral support for historical, authoritarian leaders?

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#93

Post by cousin_it »

vorpalhex wrote: post #79
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would they? It's my understanding that premodern conquerors were quite open about the fact that their primary goal was acquiring wealth and glory rather than optimizing the world.

I mention the destruction of Babylon by the Assyrians because it's an exception, and because the king goes on in great detail about how much he wanted to remove even the idea of Babylon. Most conquerers obviously felt they were the best person to do the job, but they were not in it for like, direct personal gain. At some point you conquer enough to drown in wine and gold long before you conquer as much as they did -…

"When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no lands left to conquer."

Skyler: "If I have to hear one more time that you did this for the family..." Walter: "I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. I was really alive."

The way I see it, conquerors aren't driven by greed or morality. They conquer because they enjoy it, are good at it, and want to be the best and greatest.

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#94

Post by throwanem »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #91
throwanem wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point may be that systems which produce such behavior are perversions, rather than expressions, of whatever essential nature humanity may be said to have.

Then why does human nature seem to produce such behaviors so often ?

My guess? Because we've only been at this whole "civilization" thing for a few thousand years, and although that sounds like a hell of a long time when compared with the few dozen years any one of us gets, it has so far not been enough for us to work out how we can reliably generalize at large scale the same altruistic instinct that so often and so regularly leads so many of us to risk harm to ourselves in defense of people we don't even know.

It's probably not a very good guess. But what the hell, at least it's a guess that leaves room for the hope of a better future, and I like that a lot more than any of the alternatives that seem to be at hand.

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#95

Post by soledades »

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…

Two paragraphs above the part I quoted:

What about ancient skeletons, then? Steven Pinker cites twenty-one excavations having an average murder rate of 15 percent. But, as before, Pinker's list here is a bit of a mess. Twenty of the twenty-one digs date from a time after the invention of farming, the domestication of horses, or the rise of settlements, making them altogether too recent.

Further info:

The anthropologist Douglas Fry was skeptical, however. Reviewing the original sources [of Pinker's list], he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorized as [most violent tribe] Ache 'war mortality' actually concerned a tribe member listed as 'shot by Paraguayan.'

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#96

Post by vermilingua »

munificent wrote: post #72
baryphonic wrote: post #23

Whenever I read something like this, I wonder if the author ever had children, or even knows anyone with children. I have two. Children ages 2 and 3 are a strong counter-example to this "inmate human goodness" hypothesis and Rousseau's thinking in general. My kids at that age would often be about to trip over the last nerve with some sort of interruption only to say, "Mommy and daddy, I love you." In some ways, I thi…

> Children ages 2 and 3 are a strong counter-example to this "inmate human goodness" hypothesis and Rousseau's thinking in general. Children younger than that are strong counter-examples to claims that humans are bipedal and have sophisticated verbal skills. I think there is a more, useful understanding of "innate" that doesn't literally mean "from the moment of birth" but more means "absent other sufficiently strong…

The trick isn’t in the meaning of the word “innate”, but in your definition of child and human. Children are not fully human at birth, their brains are entirely undeveloped; so it’s perfectly valid to say humans have innate goodness, and children do not, because they are not yet entirely human.

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#97

Post by arethuza »

wahern wrote: post #92
bleepblorp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a citation for such a figure, or is it something that appeared self-evident, like sticky electoral support for historical, authoritarian leaders?

The Milgram experiment or its variations might come up with such a figure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

NB I don't know enough about the area to discuss the validity of the experiment, just that it might be a source of such a figure

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#98

Post by heavyset_go »

wahern wrote: post #92
bleepblorp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a citation for such a figure, or is it something that appeared self-evident, like sticky electoral support for historical, authoritarian leaders?

I'm not the original poster, but there have been studies on the authoritarian personality type[1] in psychology going back nearly seven decades years or so. A certain subset of the population is inclined towards displaying authoritarian traits, and those traits are about 50 percent heritable[2].

Regarding contemporary Americans, about 40 percent of Americans are in favor of non-democratic forms of government and about 52 percent support a strong leader without checks and balances from Congress or elections[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_personality

[2] https://psmag.com/news/authoritarianism-the-terrifying-trait...

[3] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/03/13/is-public-s...

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#99

Post by stakkur »

I just finished reading this book a few weeks ago. I can't recommend it enough. There is so much to learn here, and it's not just a shot of positivity--it's that we're fundamentally wrong about human nature, and much of the research we've long relied on to justify our beliefs is flawed (or often faked or just plain wrong).

Re: Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

#100

Post by arethuza »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #88
growlist wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 utopi…

Well, I was describing tyrannical power. Certainly I would agree that there are many people who genuinely want to help rather than to achieve power for its own sake.

e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan

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