this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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US Authoritarianism
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What made us successful as a species, required us to be ruthless by design.
I feel like it was more learning to work together that's made us so successful compared to other animals. Not having to spend our lives solely dedicated to hunting/growing food for ourselves and our families has allowed people to specialize in other fields. The advancement of science wouldn't have been possible without people collaborating and working together, though conflict has also played a role as well. Ruthlessness only works for a small number of individuals who exploit the good will of others, but the whole thing falls apart if everybody was always ruthless.
That's patently false. Before agriculture, societies were just tribes of at most a hundred individuals, with not much in the way of hierarchy due to the lack of division of labor, essentially a very primitive form of anarcho-communism. Humans are extremely empathetic and there's plenty of evidence that prehistoric humans took care of people with disabilities or with serious injuries despite them possibly (not necessarily) being a liability for the tribe in terms of food-to-labor ratio.
Tribes that fought each other for hunting grounds
The taking care of your own when it’s a handful of people doesn’t scale up to millions
So you agree that by human nature humans can do both good and bad things, and that society is the one that imposes which ones we do?
It kinda does, look at Cuba. Peaceful as it gets, extremely high number of doctors per capita to the point of exporting doctors in times of crisis in other countries, fastest country to vaccinate its population against COVID, guaranteed housing for everyone, really low crime rates and no mafias or drug cartels... You can accuse Cuba of many things, but it proves you can take care of millions of people
I take it that you’ve never been there
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/7/19/as-cubas-private-sector-roars-back-choices-and-inequality-rise
https://raceandequality.org/where_we_work/cuba/
A comment as smart as your username. Why take actual data when you can take personal experience, amirite?
Edit: my comment was written before links were provided through an edit to the previous comment
Oh you got me sir, well played being the one of us to cite sources
Your source aren't even related to anything the conversation talked about. You're bringing an article by a Washington-based think tank to talk about oppression in Cuba, and the economic conditions of an island under an economic blockade. How does that invalidate, or even remotely have anything to do with, my previous points? The conversation was about "taking care of people instead of being violent". That Cuba manages to do so even in a context of relative poverty, tells us a lot about what humans can do "when talking about millions"
There are protests in Cuba and they are dealt with violently
Also pointing out inequality (not poverty) is relevant to discussions about taking care of people
Protests in Cuba are dealt with in a more peaceful manner than the literal riot-geared cops violently kicking protestors out of universities in the USA for daring to oppose a genocide.
Please enlighten me about inequality in a price with guaranteed state jobs and price controls
Did you read the link about private enterprise?
Please tell me how Cuba isn't one of the most peaceful countries in America, and by which metric. Please tell me how it's not one of the ones with least inequality and by which metric.
Psychopathy
Somebody read and agreed with Might is Right…
What made us successful as a species is our societies and those came as a direct rejection of ‘ruthlessness’. Society is built on cooperation.
Sure, we’re still bloodthirsty monsters. But that will be our downfall.
Nonsense.