tell me your outlook on human nature and i tell you who you are
tell me your outlook on human nature and i tell you who you are
idk the author
61 comments
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Communist countries did some pretty heinous stuff to the environment, too. Industrialization lets us fuck things up efficiently regardless of the economic system.
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Yeah, it is not Capitalism alone, but a Promethean Worldview. Authoritarian communist countries hat that one embedded as well.
This is why we need not only a change of economic system, but a shift in perception of nature as well.
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Doesn't fascism require a strong man leader?
I'm all for calling out destructive ideologies but if we call everything fascism then it's really going to dilute the power of the term.
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Fascists typically believe in strongman leadership, but you don't have to swear allegiance to a specific strongman to be a fascist.
Eco-fascists, in particular, want a Pol Pot-style dictator, someone who will ignore laws, human rights, and common decency, in order to drastically reduce the human population and force the survivors into low-tech subsistence farming. Last I checked, no one like that is anywhere near power anywhere in the world, but that doesn't make eco-fascists any less fascist for it.
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I think eco-fascism in particular is fascinating, because elements of it can take root in otherwise very progressive individuals. And then they go on to spread to crypto-fascism without even knowing it--like the "humans are the virus" thing, which you might chalk up to everyday cynicism.
I mean this is true of all fascisms. I hesitate to call it a natural human disease of the mind or anything like that, but it certainly is a tendency, especially when times are tough.
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I'm far, far more concerned with the regular fascism going on then someone crashing out about why people wont just stop being terrible to each other.
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Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
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You're doing the thing
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It's also incorrect, since many forms of human communities have existed which did live in an equilibrium with the environment... You know, until we expropriated and killed them to accumulate more resources for capitalism
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yes. Just replace Human or Human Being with Capitalism and Smiths observation holds true :)
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Its a great movie quote, but I always found it a bit grating used outside that context, because, well, other animals dont instinctively develop some natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment.
Its not like a wolf will realize that they've been reproducing too much for the local population of prey animals and decide to have fewer cubs, or actively avoid certain prey species that have declining numbers compared to the rest, if theres too many to support the excess ones will simply starve, or wander off in search of prey. The rabbits wont decide to reproduce less if something happens to the local predator population, they simply overeat their food supply until their numbers collapse back down or their abundance causes the number of predators to rise.
The equilibrium is a product of every species acting in a way that would upset that balance if they were not all in competition with eachother, and it is only stable over relatively short periods of time, in the long run it changes under pressure from geological and climactic shifts, evolutionary adaptation, etc. All humans have done, is evolve an adaptation that is too disruptive for this process to look the way it normally does. (namely enough intelligence and aptitude for tool use to effectively adapt to different conditions much faster than the time it would take for anything slower breeding than perhaps a single celled organism to evolve a counter for).
Id be willing to bet that, if you gave any other animal a set of traits that effectively allowed them to adapt to things much faster than the pace of natural evolution, you would get similar disruption.
What's more, such an equilibrium will eventually come back. If humans manage to destroy our natural life support system enough to go extinct? Then it will return as whatever survives our mass-extinction event fills empty niches and carries on as it has. If humans do survive but manage to make large scale civilization impossible and must revert to low tech subsistence hunter-gathering? Then they would be subject to the same growth constraints and competition as other large omnivores. If humans develop technology and infrastructure that allows for high tech industrial civilization to exist with a generally sustainable resource cycle, that doesnt disrupt the surrounding ecosystem anymore? Then that surrounding ecosystem is no longer subject to our disruption. If humans develop technology and infrastructure that just replaces by brute force the natural systems that we rely on, so as to no longer need them to survive, and continue on until the whole natural ecosystem is gone? Then as humans and their pets, crops, livestock, parasites etc would represent the whole of life remaining on earth, that built environment would be the environment, and as it would have to have been made generally self-sufficient and stable to get to that point, it would still represent a stable ecological state, if a very different and less diverse one than what exists now.
That doesnt mean that things wont change anymore once a stable state is reached, even stable environments in nature are not permanent, but humans cant logically continue to diminish a finite natural environment forever. Eventually humans will stop doing that, there wont be any humans to do it, or there wont be a natural environment left to do it to. In that sense, we can be viewed the same as any other disruption caused by any other organism, we've just created a much bigger shock than usual and the process of finding a stable state is still ongoing.
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Great analysis but many animal populations actually do self-regulate before resource depletion. Wolves exhibit territorial behavior that limits pack density, and some rodent species undergo physiological stress responses that reduce fertility when overcrowded. It's not conscious decision-making like humans could theoretically do, but these mechanisms evolved preciesly because they maintain equilibrium.
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I would like to give you kudos for this superb dismantling.
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A stupid quote. Most viruses also reach an "equilibrium". Not with a single person, but with the population as a whole. Each species is doing its best to expand its reach, most reach the limit of their expansion when they meet another species or an environment that they can't conquer. Humans just haven't reached that limit yet. Maybe that limit will be climate change, maybe humans are able to work past climate change and will never reach their limit. Either way, the distinction between viruses and other life is frivolous.
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Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not.
Rodents and house cats are famous for wiping out native species when introduced to new areas.
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Capitalism is largely responsible for climate change. Deforestation and aquifer depletion are more directly linked to population growth. Communism wouldn’t magically make industrial agriculture go away
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True, however there are different ways to do it, I think its Denmark? that gets more than double the yield/acre than the world average utilizing a lot of greenhouses and what amounts to pretty much hydroponics lite. If half of agriculture land suddenly didn't need to be used that way it would be huge.
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Yep absolutely! Animal agriculture is really the main issue when it comes to this and the amount of food we would have to grow would be much less if we didn’t feed most of it to animals to eat. Our economic system could definitely incentivize there being more farmers who practice more labor intensive agriculture to improve yields and reduce soil degradation and water use.
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No it wouldn’t but do you know the biggest contributor to CO2 emissions isn’t agriculture it’s just plain old energy usage.
Communism can most definitely help in curbing the use and extraction of fossil fuels while coordinating their replacement with renewables on a time scale that won’t doom humanity.
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Yes I agree with you! Greed is at the heart of our predicament. I just think that the focus on CO2 emissions as the main problem is missing all of the other planetary boundaries we are crossing. There is an ecological problem in addition to the economic one. Without a doubt the economic problem has multiplied the harm of overpopulation manyfold, wealthy and exploitative countries are disproportionately to blame for the dangers we face, and we should seek new ways of living that are not inherently exploitative to minimize the loss of life as we adjust to drastic change.
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And humans allowed capitalism to happen and have historically throughout history allowed a small handful of powerful people to take control and make everything shitty until things collapse soooooo. Capitalism is just a symptom of the disease
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"Slavery is the slaves' fault because they allowed themselves to be enslaved."
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Now you're getting it
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The duck knows what's up
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Is ecofascism a real ideology? I’ve never run into a single adherent.
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Few fascists call themselves fascists. But ecofascism is mostly used as a descriptor for policies and policy priorities that are genocidal in the name of ecology, even though the proponents may be non-fascist in other areas.
For example, a neoliberal legislator may cut foreign aid because it's going to industries that emit carbon, while simultaneously cutting public transit funding to promote driving. Or a neoconservative may increase the funding for border police by a massive amount because climate change will lead to an increasing number of climate refugees.
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have you ever heard of the tragedy of the commons? because it was coined by an ecofascist and has inserted itself deep into economic theory. ecofascists are few, just like all fascists, but their ability to ply power allows them to influence world decisions by seeming reasonable while they murder, kill, and disrupt
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It's a cool-sounding buzzword to use against people concerned about the environment so you can sound like a leftist while protecting overconsumption.
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Idk I’m leaning towards the idea that it’s mathematically inevitable.
No matter what societal structure you have, if your ultimate goal is to become type 3 civilization, you want to grow efficiently with scale. The only way to do this is by using templates/cookie cutters/removing individuality/ authoritarian. This inevitably leads to ignoring natural habitats and laying out your mass-produced factory lines.
Also because of entropy, this kind of system will inevitably be destroyed. And power vacuum, new faction swarm in, the cycle repeats.
Life is just an entropy machine created by entropy after all…
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Humans are inherently adaptive to their environment. Our bodies obviously change, but so do our minds. Our habits, our emotional responses, our beliefs of what is possible and what is necessary, all change depending on how we grew up and the world we see around us. It takes a lifetime to unlearn all the harmful lessons of a fucked up youth, and almost everyone has had a youth fucked up to be burdened with plenty of traumas to pass on to the next generation. And that's on top of all the pain that the natural world can bring.
Humans are the dumbest possible species capable of doing science well enough to reach escape velocity from the physical limits of the ecological niche they evolved to occupy, but we're also the only species, seemingly in the nearest billion light years. We're the best shot this part of the universe has at bringing peace and joy to the natural world, including ourselves. And we are getting better at it, slowly and with many setbacks. There have been countless plagues and extinction events in the history of our world that have caused tremendous damage to the ecosystem, and we're the first to try to mitigate itself.
If we manage to change fast enough to mitigate most of the crisis we are creating, we will build a better world than could have ever have been without us. A world where mammals live unburdened by parasites and parasites live unburdened by mammal immune systems. A world where people grow strong and healthy and loving and open and connected and sharply intelligent because our environments help us grow into our best selves. Food forests, friendships, peace and prosperity and labors of love.
We already know it is possible. We already know we could belong there. We all dream of such a world no matter how strangely contorted our sense of how to get there has become. We just have to keep building our social structures to get ahead of our technological power.
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Who invented capitalism again?
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Captain Capital.
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Humans are stupid creatures that wage wars on their own species, they are smart enough not to but they don't choose to. They are smart enough to know right or wrong but no. Their smartness is also the cause of this human nature because every human can have their own thoughts or opinion for something which causes conflict between them so my solution is "one body one mind" which is shown in so many media. But in reality it's also not perfect because individuality will be gone. Just FUCKING SUFFER ALREADY STRUGGLER
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I wonder which humans are the virus 🤔
61 comments
Yes but counterpoint, capitalism is a human invention so humans (at our current state) are still the root cause
And it's not like it was all utopian paradise before capitalism was invented.
We can also be the solution.
There are more options than just capitalism (and especially the weird kind of klepto-capitalism that we're falling into globally now).
I believe in humanity being the solution when I see it.
So far I don't.
Humans also invented slavery, torture devices, nuclear weapons, and totalitarian regimes but we don't argue these things are "natural" or inevitable.
Just because humans created capitalism doesn't mean it's an expression of some essential or universal human trait.
Such a western view: a capitalist society. We have the choice to participate in that or in a different system. Most just don’t want to give up the “I have” for “what can be”.
I would love to see a post-capitalistic society... but the (class-)war toward it is long and potentially bloody.
I think they did a study in the Amazon, and found that actually the Amazon is strongest when defended by indigenous populations. In fact basically all around the world, all nature is stronger when protected by humans.
I think you could make the case that before capitalism, this would also have been the case in the west. There are clear links between the growth of capitalism and witch burning.
In most of the world its participate in capitalism or go to jail, not like you can just go live in a tent in the woods without being dragged out. (Unless you live somewhere like the US which still has really big woods.)
Nah, other animals have performed transactions since before humans existed. The fact that we do it in marble halls and fancy suits doesn't make us the originators.
Capitalism no doubt sucks, but our other inventions suck even more unfortunately.
Right but then it's a matter of reference. Anything can be a virus. The specific issue with unlimited capitalism is that it is a virus to ourselves as well as pretty much everything else on Earth except a handful of people that benefit from it. As if they were immune.
Capitalism is genetically baked in, to a certain degree. But so is egalitarianism, war, schadenfreude, empathy, looking at people but if they look back at you then you turn away because you’re really not trying to give them vibes but they’re still looking at you for an uncomfortably long time so you have to turn back to them to understand why they’re doing this but your perception was wrong and they had long since looked away.