Yeah… people forget that ancient humans survived through cooperation long before states existed and the fights they did have were mostly just over territory and resources. Not some deep evil ‘‘human nature’’
To be fair, getting people to coordinate gets exponentially harder the more people you have. We evolved to work in relatively small groups, not millions or billions.
Yeah true but humans have evolved to cooperate on a large scale, unlike most primates
The violence we see today has nothing to do with culture clashes or a lack of evolution… it’s driven by inequality. And the state wasn’t created to solve coordination problems, it emerged from inequality to protect those who had too much
And yet society has evolved historically towards greater and greater interconnection, rather than fragmentation. Shouldn’t that say something about how human nature depends more on our ever-changing material conditions, than as something fixed and static?
I would make the argument that our species resorting to violent conflict over shareable resources is a pretty damning indictment of human nature.
Tribalism exists, it’s a scientific fact. You can overcome the biases it imposes through cognitive effort, but at a baseline we are predisposed to hate anyone who we believe “doesn’t belong.” That’s not inherently evil, but it is asshole behavior.
Yeah… people forget that ancient humans survived through cooperation long before states existed and the fights they did have were mostly just over territory and resources. Not some deep evil ‘‘human nature’’
To be fair, getting people to coordinate gets exponentially harder the more people you have. We evolved to work in relatively small groups, not millions or billions.
Yeah true but humans have evolved to cooperate on a large scale, unlike most primates
The violence we see today has nothing to do with culture clashes or a lack of evolution… it’s driven by inequality. And the state wasn’t created to solve coordination problems, it emerged from inequality to protect those who had too much
And yet society has evolved historically towards greater and greater interconnection, rather than fragmentation. Shouldn’t that say something about how human nature depends more on our ever-changing material conditions, than as something fixed and static?
There was cooperation, sure. There was also a lot of killing.
It’s not just human nature, even chimps kill chimps from other groups who stray into the wrong territory.
Cooperation against other humans (and Neanderthals and such)
I would make the argument that our species resorting to violent conflict over shareable resources is a pretty damning indictment of human nature.
Tribalism exists, it’s a scientific fact. You can overcome the biases it imposes through cognitive effort, but at a baseline we are predisposed to hate anyone who we believe “doesn’t belong.” That’s not inherently evil, but it is asshole behavior.