Karl Marx’s biggest philosophical mistake is his trust in the proletariat, forgetting that the average Joe is a complete dumbass.
72You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.
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This is why education is such a pillar of society and why authoritarian ideologies oppose it so much. If the working class gets too smart then the owning class is in trouble.
16I prefer the term, complex dumbass.
12Wut?
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It's always goofy when reactionaries and conservatives pull the human nature card, as though Capitalism is inherently natural despite only being a few hundred years old.
People can share tools, shocker!
42Homo Sapiens would not have exceeded the other Hominids if not for cooperation.
The Sapiens secret of success is large-scale flexible cooperation. This has made us masters of the world. But at the same time it has made us dependent for our very survival on vast networks of cooperation.
No man is an island, but for the right price you can purchase one ☝️
15While I agree that cooperation is rad AF, I think it's willfully ignorant to ignore the historical context of cooperation in the face of competition against the other.
Trying to make a naturalistic argument without acknowledging that is only telling half of the story, and the other half is pretty wart-y.
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It's tricky, isn't it? Human nature is often defined by greed but when you grow up in a capitalist system where greed is actively encouraged, what do you expect?
Personally, I like to look towards how we treat fellow humans who we don't have a financial relationship with. Almost everyone I hang around with treats their family well, offers to help friends out, is kind to strangers etc. Human nature is wonderful on a small level, but when you get to big financial decisions, greed is necessitated else you get left behind - and if you don't have enough money then you don't have a home, good food, entertainment, travel, healthcare (for Americans)...
35Don’t worry, so did Adam Smith!
11John locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu boisterously rise from their graves...
7There is no such thing as human nature and anyone claiming such a thing to support their arguments is full of shit.
The only thing all humans have to do is breathe, eat, drink, piss and shit. Literally everything else is optional and how you go about solving those requirements is entirely up to you.
4Replace the word human with any other animal and you’ll drool when you read that back.
One of the wildest things about being human is that we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that we’re special and different from all the other animals. We can talk and plan so we’re different.
If we don’t have a nature to contend with, why have religions cropped up independently from one another all around the world over and over again? The nature we deal with might be a bit more complex than the nature of a meerkat, specifically because we can plan, but we definitely have a nature.
We kill for resources just like any other predator. If another group of humans is sitting on something we need, we kill to get it, just like lions that attack other prides and rip off the testicles of competing groups.
We’re just smart (and cruel) enough to bring back the defeated and give them a name and a job to do back at our den.
We can pass information down long after we’re dead and knowingly build on things that shaped our species long before we got here, but we still contend with our nature.
10There are needs and material conditions that humans will react to, but using human nature as a reason to not change to a better organizational structure is a naturalistic fallacy, just like saying its human nature to eat meat would be in the face of a vegan. Just because something is traditional does not itself justify.
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Yes, and the same for capitalism. People are too greedy for either one. Mixing them works somewhat.
1This, but unironically.
-5One more person who knows nothing about the subject.
-36A homophobe with the username 'europe_will_live'. How original. Fuck off loser.
12I would suggest starting here
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