The problem is not that ether system is bad, human nature is inherently flawed. So both forcing people to help or let them run wild with no restrictions is a bad idea.
I know I would be attacked by entire fediverse, but I want to say that charity also has egoism as backing cause. People help other people because it makes them feel good. And people expect themselves to be noticed or praised or rewarded, even if they tell themselves and everyone else that they don’t.
Also don’t presume that I am a capitalist, before you decide to attack me.
I mean, you’re not wrong, but your point is also kinda meaningless. Of course, you only ever do things because there’s something in it for you, even if that something is just feeling good about yourself. If there was truly nothing in it for you, then why would you do it?
But that misses the point of the “people are inherently selfish” vs “people are inherently generous” discussion, because it’s not actually about whether people do things only for themselves at the most literal level, instead it’s about whether people inherently get something out of doing things for others without external motivation. So your point works the same on both sides of the argument.
We hear that argument a lot, and though some people’s charity may be motivated purely by egoism I don’t think it applies to the majority at all. The argument assumes that if doing something makes you feel good, then that feeling must be the sole motivation for that action, which is dubious. And if we follow this logic to its natural conclusion, every action that does not make you feel bad is egoistic, and the concept becomes completely meaningless. Saving a child from falling down a cliff? Egoistic! Intervening when someone is treated unfairly? Egoistic! Giving up your chair for an elderly person on a crowded bus? Egoistic!
Let’s take this last (admittedly small, everyday, non-dramatic) example. Sure, you could give up your seat purely because you want to look like a good person to others (although it’s doubtful anyone would even notice). It’s also possible to experience this feeling called empathy, to see an elderly person struggling to keep their balance while standing up and to want to alleviate that particular suffering. Everyone else is sitting down looking at their phones, so there’s no community pressure to speak of. No one would call you out if you just pretended not to notice. And the discomfort from standing up on a really crowded bus on a bumpy road could easily outweigh that little buzz you get from doing good.
I’ll go even further; it’s even possible, in a scenario like this, to not even think about how it’s going to make you feel or your self-image or whatever. You just want to help someone else because it’s in your power to do so. If this isn’t an example of not being egoistic, what would be? What would be the opposite of egoism? To act completely dispassionately?
And what about someone sacrificing their own life to save another? Striving to do good in the world does feel better, yes, but empathy is also a burden. Still, there are genuinely good people out there, that do good deeds and do not take any credit for it, even do it anonymously. And I can tell you from experience, not all of them walk around on clouds feeling like saints. Some of them even experience crippling guilt because they feel they do not do enough. How is that egoism?
that’s a very grim way of looking at goodness. Of course doing things you believe are making a positive change makes you feel good, of course helping your community makes you feel good, and it does feel nice to be recognised and known as a good person.
It’s a strange ambient idea in our society, that to be truly good you must suffer, and never find joy in the good things you do. Not to turn conspiratorial, but to me it sounds like a cope from actually selfish people who look at people who do nice things and think to themselves “they’re only doing it to be popular and feel good about themselves, why else would anyone do anything”
Yeah people are born selfish yet so generous with their idiotic ideas
The very existence of society and the fact that we aren’t blindly killing eachother for resources proves that civilization is not based on humanities animalistic instincts. Therefore the claim that humans cannot overcome their own base instincts (as claimed by many Liberals) would imply that we are no morally or intellectually superior to animals.
Even animals are not based on such “animalistic instinct”, most of animals cooperate on some level.
Indeed, all intelligent creatures are capable of acting beyond what is strictly needed for survival.
Cooperation is needed for survival in many cases, or at least improve the odds.
Yeah, and eating hot dogs also goes against human nature. That shit didn’t exist in 3,500 BCE.
are you really saying emulsified rat lips, chicken trimmings, porkins, and beef slurry didn’t exist in 3500 BCE?
Not in such a convenient package!
Considering Ayn Rand’s novels as literature was a mistake.
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We’re always going to end up with people who can manipulate a crowd being in charge. We’re stupid like that.
This is what I always find amusing about the Communist argument.
Like, the elected politicians and bureaucracy can’t be trusted enough to regulate industry under capitalism so we’ll centralize things and then trust them to regulate industry under Communism?
Edit: whoof, should’ve thought about human nature when I dared to criticize communism. Almost lime there is another lesson somehwere there.
so, it’s the goddamn weekend. How does everyone have so much free time this late on a Saturday? I’ll do my best to get back to y’all on a dirty capitalist’s time slot.
I feel like you’re ignoring a lot of background, but let’s run with your argument. Let’s assume that we have to have some elected politicians and some appointed or elected bureaucrats, and either we should try to have a capitalist system or a communist system of some kind.
Let’s try to keep things as equal as possible, knowing that we really can’t, but just for the sake of argument. Which system is more likely to be corrupted? Remember, the express goal of capitalism is to throw wealth at the capitalists. If the regular person gets screwed, that’s not corruption, that’s a feature of the system… Oh, wait a second, I guess we already have an answer to our hypothetical, don’t we.
But you did raise a good point. Any government, if it’s to function somewhat reasonably, needs to be one that has a lot of transparency, oversight, and accountability. If you don’t have those, it doesn’t matter how you start off because it’s going to end badly. So I agree with you, we shouldn’t be trusting politicians.
Like, the elected politicians and bureaucracy can’t be trusted enough to regulate industry under capitalism so we’ll centralize things and then trust them to regulate industry under Communism?
If that’s your understanding of Communism, then you need to read The State and Revolution. Quite a lot of Communist theory is concerned with eliminating the concept of beauracracy.
In theory, democracy produces satisfactory outcomes…
Of course bourgeois democracy doesn’t produce satisfactory outcomes for the working class. It doesn’t represent the will of the working class, but rather that of the capitalist class.
Democracy does produce satisfactory outcomes, what changes reality is the structure of said democracy. Very few systems are direct democracies, and direct democracies themselves are flawed even in theory.
You should read the text.
To be fair, I don’t have to trust elected politicians to distrust unelected CEOs and other upper management more
But it’s not like companies or business entities won’t have folks in charge of them under communism… Someone has to run the whatevers…
But it’s also not like the person who runs the whatevers has to be beholden to shareholders and profits. They could instead be incentivized to prioritize the collective well being of the workers.
And for that matter, politicians and the bureaucracy also live in a system that incentivizes (to the tune of millions in bribes) them to prioritize the interests of businesses owners, and thusly shareholders and profits, at the cost of the common good. Which is a major reason they can’t be trusted.
Or, as has happened in capitalism, people will find ways to bend the system to benefit themselves. Except this time without boards so much as bribable officials and whatnot.
Capitalism is explicitly designed for people to benefit themselves at the expense of others. Capital begets more capital in a positive feedback loop that results in massively powerful billionaires.
If you elect representatives, those representatives are checked somewhat by the threat of being voted out. Capitalism has no such check. Sure, ostensibly people can choose not to buy a product, but unregulated capitalism selects for monopolies.
And now we find ourselves at the beginning of the meme.
Also, I find “people are greedy” to be an uncompelling reason to support a system that incentivizes greed and exploitation. If people bending a system to benefit themselves is a problem, then the system should be designed to be resistant to this, in a way that incentivizes promoting the common good. Or at the very least shouldn’t encourage these problems.
Capitalism encourages these problems.
Ideally, supervision over most non critical sectors would fall to randomly drafted, single term committees of the people, think jury duty except better compensated and obviously with bureaucratic resources available to enable these committees to fulfil their role adequately.
Now this isn’t suited for everything, but in either system any true oversight is done by the people, not the state.
Half of America wants to vote for trump and you want to trust in random people? That seems like a wild leap of faith.
Around 30% tops but more importantly what do those trump supporters want? The exact same things you do, they just believe different causes for the problems we all see and thus have wildly different solutions.
Shit, you’d better tell that to my aunt who told me how my lifestyle hurts her.
It’s more like 30% and that’s with Americans being some of the most wildly mis-educated people out there. I’m sick of seeing sortition shit, but sicker still of misanthropy.
Okay, would you rather the Germans who voted AFD? Or the rise of the French National Party? Or Fidesz in Hungary? Or PPV in Denmark?
the initial argument only applies to Utopian Socialism anyway – fighting for your personal interest is exactly the point of communism, destroying all the enemies of the working class
People are neither inherently selfish or inherently generous. People are survivors regardless of what is necessary to do so. A human will give the shirt off his back to his neighbor but will spite a customer service worker because they’re in a bad mood or feel slighted. Your tribe is your most important social aspect
But it is that selfishness that communism can’t control for and that capitalism only dampens the effect of. You need a system that counteracts those selfish tendencies in order to reach lasting stability.
‘A system that counteracts those selfish tendencies’ you mean a system in which:
- housing is not controlled by companies with no moral incentive to keep them liveable and affordable?
- people don’t learn from a young age that their value is directly connected to their willingness to fuck people over for money?
- there is no monetary incentive to create artificial deficits in essential goods like housing and food?
- the whole economy is not based on ‘cheap labour’ and the illegal extraction of minerals from other countries?
In what way does capitalism “dampen” selfishness?
In that it makes it open. In capitalism, ot is assumed that everyone is a selfish actor. Under communism, everyone is supposed to work together for the greater good, and when they aren’t, you can’t call them out, because they would accuse you of ‘undermining the unity’. And because they tend to be in positions of power, you will end up in the Gulag.
It reserves selfishness for a handful of weirdos, and allows every worker to be selfless.
it rewards it in my view. it conditions us to be selfish
