this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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In capitalism there is every incentive to be cruel to other people. Most people probably feel horrible when seeing a homeless person on the street. We want to help them but we are told that helping them is bad, because they want to be homeless and if we give money they’ll just ‘waste it’. That’s not a normal human reaction, that’s learned behaviour.
Those specific cases are learned behaviour, but general purpose cruelty and theft is something that's been around longer than capitalism has, and has to be unlearned as kids, not learned.
General purpose cooperation is what took homosapiens to the top, baby !
Altruism and compassion have been part of us for 50,000 years.
The Burial Site at Shandihar Cave included evidence of Flowers being put in graves
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/new-neanderthal-remains-associated-with-the-flower-burial-at-shanidar-cave/E7E94F650FF5488680829048FA72E32A
"But What About Human Nature!?" is the Dumbest Conservative Argument
It's true that cruelty has been around for longer than capitalism; it's untrue, though, that it has to be "unlearned". Every experiment (that I've learned about) demonstrated that even toddlers care about fairness, which (I would argue) is inherently opposed to cruelty