Hatred often makes you want to hurt people, but people hurt peope in the name of greed more often, and not only with less potential for guilt, but is often the cause of delusional accolades and reassurance both from within oneself and from others.
Hypothetical:
A CEO lays off 10,000 employees that helped that company succeed, solely to increase earnings and not because the company is hurting, not only seriously hurting 9,997 people, but causing 3 to commit suicide.
A bumpkin gets in a fight with someone he hates the melanin of because he’s a moron and kills them.
Who did more damage to humanity that day? They’re both, I want to say evil but evil is subjective, they’re both highly antisocial, knowingly harmful behaviors, yet one correctly sends you to prison for a long time if not forever, while the other, far more premeditated and quite literally calculated act, is literally rewarded and partied about. Jim Kramer gives you a shout out on tv, good fucking times amirite!
Edit: and this felt relevant to post after someone tried to lecture me about equating layoffs to murder.
“Coca-Cola killed trade unionists in Latin America. General Motors built vehicles known to catch fire. Tobacco companies suppressed cancer research. And Boeing knew that its planes were dangerous. Corporations don’t care if they kill people — as long as it’s profitable.”
https://jacobin.com/2020/01/corporations-profit-values-murder-culture-boeing
That’s actually a fantastic way to word what I’ve been thinking about for years. Greed crimes.
I don’t know where you’re from, but as an American, I’d rally for that to be an amendment.
Interesting thought. However greed is part of human nature, since we humans like to get as much resources as possible.
greed is part of human nature
Bullshit. For a couple hundred thousand years humans kept only what they could carry on their backs. And that only counts homo sapiens sapiens. We only started staying in one place and amassing surplus in the last fifteen thousand years and yet there are people saying “greed is part of human nature.”
It’s the greedy who somehow managed to sell us that propaganda. Greed is a mental illness.
I don’t agree with OP. I don’t think more punishments are the way to fix things. But neither is gestures broadly the best we can do.
When homo sapians were nomadic, we were quite a tribal social group. The alpha male always had more resources in the group which you can call greed. This was a thing before civilization. And lets be honest, if we had more, would we really share it? Most people want more but when we get more, we do not divide it with others in our community. Very few give up their time and money for charity.
The alpha male always
What makes you think that “alpha males” were the norm in the paleolithic?
always had more resources
I could probably be convinced that some individuals had more social capital than others.
What do you even mean by “had”? It seems extremely unlikely that in the paleolithic they had a concept of ownership even roughly like what modern capitalist systems employ. I’m quite certain they didn’t think of land ownership the same way we do today. I’d doubt they thought of ownership of tools or food or clothing the same way we do either.
I’d imagine anyone who carried more stuff on their backs than they needed would have significant disadvantages (encumberance) compared to other folks.
This was a thing before civilization.
How do you know?
Just from looking at Wikipedia, I found a paragraph that starts “some sources claim that most Middle and Upper Paleolithic societies were possibly fundamentally egalitarian.” (And that sentence has 4 citations.) It seems like the jury is still out at best on that topic.
And lets be honest, if we had more, would we really share it? Most people want more but when we get more, we do not divide it with others in our community. Very few give up their time and money for charity.
And what if that has a lot more to do with our modern world than with human nature?
Indigenous peoples in what is now the pacific northwest of the U.S. and Canada had rituals called “potlatch” in which the most wealthy would give away lots of their resources to those with less. Don’t get me wrong, those folks were not paleolithic hunter gatherers, but they’re a counterexample to your implication that humans with more never give things away to humans with less. And it was done regularly. (On occasions of births, deaths, adoptions, weddings, and other such events.)
Another example of this is the Moka ritualized exchange by indigenous peoples in in Papua New Guinea.
Looking at how primates behave today, there is an alpha male in the group who has access to more resources. “Human nature” or in this case the nature of primates does not change over a short period of time. This behavior is embedded in us from million of years ago. Sure some tribes may have work togeather, but most indigenous tribes did not document their history, so for all we know there was more of an hierarchy in indigenous groups than we know of.
Hatred is too, yet we recognize that flaw/failing/deficit/defect in ourselves and attempt to minimize it’s effects by educating children that it is bad and not socially acceptable and with punishment if practiced to a harmful degree.
I argue practiced greed should be treated similarly. Greed is a vice and a personal failing. Modern society seems to have complety abandoned this fact. It’s part of our darker nature right next to hatred. It’s one of the most prominent devils on our shoulders, not angels. We should be teaching kids that harming someone else, even if allowed, if it gives them the opportunity to get more or “succeed” is deeply wrong, and even wanting a lot more than others no less deserving than you is wrong, not “rational self-interest.”
True, hatred and greed is embed in human nature. However making laws against greed will likely not solve much but discentivise productivity. Or as libertarians will say “cause atlas to shrug”.
💀
You make a fair point, however when you work for someone, that is your choice. To shop at a business is your choice. If you do not like a business, do not work for it and do not shop there.
Stealing from someone is stealing from a person who took time to produce that item. In the case of s store, the store had to buy the product from a distributor.
So theft is still inmoral. Is theft greed? Yeah it could be and in most cases its greed and selfishness. However the thief in most cases can buy the item but chooses not to.
“discentivise productivity.”
This right here. The jargon they use to rationalize cruelty. “growth or die” capitalism says, yet that same growth/metastasis capitalism demands is ironically choking the human race right now.
Growth is destroying our habitat. What we need is equilibrium.
Im not on the “I hate capitalism train”. However yeah I understand workplace relations between employee and employer overall is in the toilet.
As of now, the best solution I can come up with is refusing to work for morons. The more that do this, the harder it will be for morons to find staff and run their operations.
💀
Yes I have heard of the dunning-kreuger effect. If your employer is a moron, go find another employer to work with that is a capitable at being an employer.
Copy pasting my own comment:
FYI this argument (often referred to as the human nature argument) only holds water when you look at European history. Most other societies had an element of communal property. Also in more developed life (including but not limited to humans), especially in situations of crisis, alturism is more expressed than self interest.
In other words: socialism is not against human nature. Capitalism is.
Tribes may work togeather in a crisis, but there is always a hierarchy. Looking at primates, we alway see a alpha male leader role who is fighting for more resource control in the group.
