Human Nature

Note: I'm not a Communist nor do I have any intent of becoming one. That said, I joined this website so that whenever some of my acquaintances cannot adequately argue their own politics (they are Socialists and Communists) I can come here to ask some of you more learned folks for the real answers.

The biggest gripe I have, of late, is this pervasive notion that human nature can somehow be changed / removed by virtue of the social establishments -- that is to say that natural "greed" or "selfishness" or "patriotism" or "jealousies" simply disappear when people are living in a happy, egalitarian-like society. And I've yet to meet somebody from this political mindset that does not believe this to be an absolute truth.

I think what most of them are trying to talk about is the collective valuation / devaluation of certain behaviors (i.e. we don't like killing, don't do it, it's bad) but they're going one step further and saying that social environment can actually physically remove base instincts which makes absolutely no scientific sense; a donkey raised in an eagles nest cannot do things supernatural to other donkeys, he is still a donkey and regardless of how he thinks of himself, good or bad, he will not be able to remove his baser donkey instincts only hone them and condition himself to use the ones he likes.

So how do most of you feel? I'm curious.

Are greed and selfishness not evolutionary responses to scarcity or the danger of losing material goods? If one has all the material and intellectual commodities he needs to lead a satisfied life, then where is there place for greed and selfishness?

Patriotism is not instinct. Most of us on the left view patriotism as a dangerous idea, and reject it.

Jealousy, as in social interaction? 2 factors:
- Competition over a mating partner (this I believe is instinctive in most animals)
- Social construct caused by monogamy and morals.

Humans are naturally competitive and self-interested, but also naturally co-operative at the same time. The concrete circumstances in which a person finds herself is what determines how these abstract tendencies manifest themselves. Under a system like capitalism, where there is artificial scarcity and a systemic thwarting of any attempt to produce co-operatively, it's easy to understand why the egoistic side is the most visible, and why many people have a mistakenly pessimistic understanding of human nature.

OK, some of my thoughts on the matter, in no particular order:

1. We are not entirely socially constructed beings. However, part of our material condition is that we humans, more than any other animal, are born with a relatively underdeveloped brain which is particularly open to environmental adjustment. We have little in the way of true instincts - nearly everything we need to learn to make us human is learned after birth through interaction with other humans. We learn to walk on two legs by observing adults (feral children walk on all fours!), we learn to speak from adults (children will not "naturally" develop speech - experiments were actually made with this) and we learn to engage in cooperative problem solving. In short, many of our "instincts" are in fact learned behaviors most people incorrectly take for granted.

2. While humans certainly have the potential to be selfish and greedy, there is no evidence to suggest they are universally predominant over collectivism and compassion in our psyche. Rather, they will only surface when material conditions dictate their necessity. Thus, when we live in a society that alienates individuals from their fellows through wage labor and places such great emphasis on the dog-eat-dog mentality, isn't it understandable that greed holds such predominance in our psyche?

3. Remember that self-interest does not equal greed. Sometimes it is in our personal interests to act cooperatively. Until quite recently humans absolutely needed to cooperate in order to survive. As a side note: this is why exiling someone was considered a particularly harsh punishment in past societies.

4. Finally, I don't think anyone here would claim that crime and social problems would disappear in a communist society. But I do believe that they would be greatly reduced. For example, consider theft. If there's no private property and no wage labor system, how could theft be a serious problem? Sure, someone could steal your toothbrush, but there's no way someone could existentially threaten you by stealing your stuff (as is very much possible under our current system).

Who said that they would go away? Certainly there will be the occasional murder, theft, rape, ect, but under socialism there would be less incentive to steal and kill. When it would happen, I would say that the perpetrator would undergo a trial and then either jail, re-education, or ostracization. Material conditions cannot control behavior, only provide a path of least resistance. Most will follow it to ground.

There's no such thing as human nature. Who you are has to do with your upbringing and your environment, among many other things. So to say that people are "naturally" greedy is a bit misguided. If most factors that contribute to human personality are pushed towards the side of the spectrum that fosters a more "ideal" human behaviour, then humanity will move in that direction. However, that can't work very fast or work successfully on a small scale. For example, a family could try their very best to shape their child even before they are born (pre-natal psychological development is important), and even while they grow up, but once that child goes out into a world that has seemingly opposite ideals, they will probably change to go with the flow, or they will have a hard time continuing in their ways. The system that exists in society also matters a lot, because if greed weren't a rampant trait, people would have other things to focus on, like cooperation, and other things. Capitalism does foster a sort of "need" for people to be greedy and extremely individualistic (not saying it's a bad thing, but when you only care about yourself, then it can be detrimental to others) to survive and it promotes massive inequality that really doesn't need to be there (arguably).

All in all, don't let anyone say that human nature is one way or another. It's impossible to be pinned down, except when you look at examples of people that have been conditioned their entire lives to act a certain way, which give a false conclusion at the true nature of humans. However, there will always be deviancy from the norm, whatever the norm may be, and there's a lot of other elements involved in this, like socialization, among other things.

No, greed and selfishness are rational responses to scarcity. There's nothing "evolutionary" about it. Of course, greed and selfishness are not the only possible responses to scarcity, it will depend on a calculation of the situation and the social values that inform the person and/or collective.

Our ability to control our behaviour on the basis of a calculation of our (mutual) self-interest within particular contexts, means that we can behave in any way we see as beneficial.

The evolutionary aspect of all this is our possession of rationality itself.

Your argument is stupid, OP. Human nature is common to all humans, yes? So by this logic all humans are greedy and selfish regardless of the societal structure they find themselves in. Consequently, one counter-example will dismiss your entire claim to human nature. I can probably list 100 if you'd like, but a few will be enough.

1) The San Bushmen of Botswana. This group of people live in a hunter-gatherer society, what has been called by many 'primitive communism'. They have no formal leader, instead leadership is temporarily assigned when certain tasks require it - such as the best hunter leading the hunt. They have no conception of property, and thus no concept of ownership. This means that everything is shared by everyone.

2) the Mbuti of the Congo jungle - This group of people are really interesting, actually; their ideas of human origin are based upon pure equality and egalitarianism between them and all the animals of the forest (they even see the forest itself as a living entity). Their 'fall from grace' was the accidental killing of an animal, which banished them to mortality. So they simultaneously strive to recreate this past of equality while living with the inequality of mortality, which is evidenced in their anguish felt when killing an animal to be consumed (it's necessary because we are now mortal). Again, no concept of ownership - their concept of belonging is even seen in marriage, as a woman does not belong to a man (vice versa) and is then free to sleep with whomever.

Are these people not human? how do you explain their 'nature'? What separates us from them other than material conditions and societal structure?

"Human nature" is a dubious term as it is. We all have a subjective conscious perception of the world. That subjectivity, however, is based on social relations, which are based on economic relations, which, in turn, are based on objective, material conditions. So you can see that there is a mediated but clear path between subjective consciousness and objective reality-and the cause of any person's consciousness is, ultimately, the material conditions of the person's society.

Well, I don't even think that Marx claimed that greed/selfishness.. etc would all disappear in a egalitarian society. The idea is to create a society that does not just satisfy the "greed" and "selfish" desires.

"Human nature" is ideological in the same way "original sin" is, an argument to bolster "the way things are," whether that's economic or religious.

Sorry to say but for someone worried about scientific evidence you sure did not bring any to the table. I do not get how people who say humans are naturally greedy explain all of the hunter gatherer societies that lived on egalitarians values for thousands of years and continue to to this day. The greediness you address is formed through a process of socialization a pretty well documented phenomenon. For some actual scientific evidence humans are not motivated by greed check out any study into the matter in behavioral science in say.... the past 60 years.

Originally posted in this thread: http://www.revleft.com/vb/nature-vs-...95#post2259995



I honestly think the nurture vs nature argument should really have more scientific research done, beyond genetically altered mice, but to humans.

A little reading of history would show anyone that ideas about social norms thought to be inherent in people are really fluid. In the feudal era, men were thought to not be motivated by sex whereas women were thought to be more lusty and sex-driven - obviously now most people have the opposite prejudice and pseudo-scientific efforts even create drugs or come up with explanations for why women are supposedly not driven by sex as much as men. Or think about ancient Greek culture where male homosexual relationships were sometimes thought to be more noble than heterosexual ones.

Is greed human nature or based on conditions? Why don't you horde the water that comes from your kitchen pipes the way someone in a desert or a slum without fresh running water would? You might be at a store and buy bottled water, so why doesn't anyone horde tap-water? Could it be because they expect they can get it whenever they need it? Could hording water be due more to situation than human nature?

Or selflessness.

Considering that this didn't exist until a couple hundred years ago, that the concept of a nation didn't exist until then, makes it a bit of a stretch to say that human nature includes something that didn't exist in the human experience for 99.999 percent of our existence.

I agree, emotion is actually inherent and normal in the vast majority of humans for most of our existence - though ideas about these emotions have changed based on conditions of the times. I don't think there is anything about scientific socialism which claims that people will be "happier" subjectively or not have interpersonal problems. The argument is that it would be a more rational and democratic way to live and so the problems CREATED by the current organization of society would not be factors. So we might get jealous that someone is more popular or has better luck romantically, but that popularity won't be because she has rare clothes that only rich people have or because of economic status. We might be jealous of someone's singing ability, but we won't suffer inequality which has a side effect of making people resentful of the very well-off and rich.

Instincts really have very little to do with most human behaviors... birds don't teach or learn, whereas humans don't know how to make a fire or a spear or drive a car without either discovering it themselves or being taught how to do this. Learning and adapting to our environmental and social situation is one of the features that allowed humans to spread all over and develop culture and civilization - many different civilizations in fact with many different ways of organizing itself and many different ways of living.

It's not that we think that a better organized society will make "human nature" improve, it's that we think the current organization of society with an elite at the top, and misery for many many others in which we constantly have to compete with people for jobs and are subject to the whims of modern capitalist society CREATES many avoidable problems which will be alleviated by a more democratic society where we have more control and power over our own social destinies.

Human values and behaviour are strongly shaped by the nature of the society they live in. Give humans a society where greed and selfishness is rewarded and you'll get greed and selfishness. If you can't see this then you've probably fallen into the trap of treating some kinds of society normatively and others as not so.

Even on a more fundamental level, the idea of human nature is false. Humans and humanity are just transitionary things. Where does humanity begin and end? When did the first ape first display human nature? I think to say that there is such a concept as human nature then that would imply that humanity is this constant thing that never changes, that does not adapt, that does not adhere to changes in the environment or society, that it is some platonic cosmic ideal.

Greed isn't a hard-wired human instict, we are greedy/selfish because that's whats required to succeed in the Capitalist system.

'Human nature' is just a loose term to describe human characteristics, just because it's our nature to be greedy doesn't mean that we're genetically programmed to be greedy.

For 200k years there were no bosses, no surplus value, no states, no personal gain placed over the group, etc (note that those are all the exact same things), and for maybe 12k years there has... and this is supposed to be some kind of "human nature" argument?

Humans are naturally humans. They will act according to their desires. Most of the time, this is based on a collective progressivism (tell me you don't feel good if you create some value for someone else, like developing a new product, or even doing a good deed). Sometimes this is placed on a personal struggle (I like it when I make/win some extra money, or masturbate).

Sometimes this is based on greed, meaning putting self-interest above all, regardless of its effects on the group; this we want to crush. This is capitalism, and class society in general.

Human nature changes.. A lot.. Hell, we've seen change in the past 200 years. (Example: It was human nature to own slaves in the south pre-1865)

It depends on the material conditions of the society at hand.

And based on social experience, it is more so the second factor. Especially Morals.