It seems that most of the time, my discussions with people about socialism and communism end up on the topic of “but people are inherently bad, or at least a few people are, and will always take advatange of others. Even during natural disorders, some go steal everything in the stores while other help strangers”
I always have a hard time arguing that human nature depend on the environment, that it takes a few generations, and that there is probably always going to be violence but it’s marginal and can be taken care of.
What main ideas am I missing? And how to argue about this and respond to this central idea that refrain a lot of liberals?
Thank you!
If you have any theory that you want to point at, that would also be great
Why use a system that deliberately selects for those evil people instead of a system that aims to do the most good for the most people in spite of those evil people?
Selfish behavior is learned behavior. It is learned from the material conditions in which people live. That’s why most of the wealthy people behave avariciously. This behavior can also be unlearned. It’s basic psychology. You get more of the behavior that is rewarded.
You can ask questions about why do “bad” people do “bad” things. For example, why do people steal from stores? Would they steal stuff if they could afford it? Would people take advantage over others if there was a way to take advantage without hurting other people?
Or you can mention some counterexamples, like why don’t people steal the free handkerchiefs at tables?
> “Would they steal stuff if they could afford it?”
What if the other person answers: “Yes. For the thrill of it.”?
> “why don’t people steal the free handkerchiefs at tables?”
Again, they could simply answer: “Some people do. Most people don’t because the risk vs reward is not worth it.”
I don’t find this line of reasoning convincing because it requires that the other person accept your view of the world.
Someone who has fully internalized the “human nature is greed” indoctrination will not be convinced by you simply stating the opposite.
> Q: “why do “bad” people do “bad” things”
> A: “Bad people do bad things because they are bad people.”
As materialists this statement sounds like nonsense to us but you have to try and put yourself in the mind of the person you are arguing against: to them this statement makes perfect sense, and because it already explains everything it would be a waste of time trying to think of other reasons.
More than that even: the mere fact that you are trying to find material reasons why bad people would do bad things is, in their view, you trying to justify and excuse those bad people doing bad things, which makes you a bad person too. This is how idealism works.
…in their view, you trying to justify and excuse those bad people doing bad things, which makes you a bad person too
Isn’t this why some people hate lawyers?
Even if human nature is selfish, it doesn’t make sense to encourage it even more.
The way people think is shaped by the way people live, and the way we produce and distribute in society is the driving force here. People are only selfish to this degree because capitalism is based on such a process, whereas earlier societies before class struggle were based on mutual cooperation. We can remake ourselves by moving to a classless society.
“Do you steal? Do you knowingly hurt people for personal profit? Why not? isn’t that the ‘human nature’ that capitalism promotes? Greed and self centeredness are not human nature. Human nature is social. Antisocial behavior is not human nature. Greedy sociopaths just keep repeating the lie that everyone is as sick as they are so they can get away with stealing and hurting people.”
Do you steal? Do you knowingly hurt people for personal profit?
A lot of people would say no, because it’s not monetary profit. But will absolutely hurt someone else because they lack simple, honest, and pure qualities the other has, to price they are more clever and deserving.
I find this line of reasoning will not convince people who have bought into the “human nature” argument. It’s too easy to dismiss.
> “Do you steal?”
> “Sometimes.”
> “Do you knowingly hurt people for personal profit?”
> “Sometimes.”
> “Why not?”
> “You mean why not all the time? Fear of punishment. I can’t always get away with it.”
> “isn’t that the ‘human nature’ that capitalism promotes?”
> “Capitalism is human nature.”
> “Greed and self centeredness are not human nature.”
> “Says who?”
> “Human nature is social. Antisocial behavior is not human nature.”
> “I am proof of the opposite. Am i not human?”
> “Greedy sociopaths just keep repeating the lie that everyone is as sick as they are so they can get away with stealing and hurting people.”
> “Everyone *is* like me. They just lie to themselves.”
I think the explanation is simpler than this. In any communal organism, there are two competing evolutionary desires: the desire to beat everyone else around you (and therefore be the fittest and spread your genes the most) and the force of cooperating to build something bigger together (so there’s more to go around, so you have more resources with which to spread your genes alongside everyone else.)
We can look at a hypothetical wolf pack, for example. Every wolf has thought at some point that, “if I simply killed the other wolves in my pack, I could eat more of the current catch. But if I do that, I won’t ever be able to get another big catch again because no one will be left to help me, so I won’t.”
Imagine instead if this wolf pack killed the weakest member every single time because that’s “just wolf nature.” Every wolf is weak when they’re young, when they’re old, or when they get sick. Pretty soon, if you keep culling the weak, there will be no one left in the wolf pack, and it will die out. Therefore, evolution favors some amount of communal benefit.
Human civilization would not exist if we spent all day just competing with each other. If Caveman 1 killed Caveman 2 instead of deciding to all work together on agriculture, all of us would still be living in caves eating rocks. Everything great that humans have ever built has been built through working together, not through killing each other to see who is the strongest. Therefore, it makes sense that, while capitalism has done a great job allowing more people to work together on innovations than feudalism, it also makes sense that we should progress to the next stage of cooperation via socialism, so that we can all work together to build a state and industry, and live better lives (and have more offspring if you really want to fulfill your ‘human nature’ evolutionary desire).
Nothing is going to convince people like this other than years of incarceration and reeducation.
Wanting to jail people instead of being empathetic and listening? Peak example of violent human nature from you. /s
Individualism is cancer.
You don’t argue against it. You argue it away.
Human nature doesn’t matter, it’s irrelevant to the question of communism.
Look, let’s just look at history. Capitalism started in the 1600s. If capitalism was human nature, why did it take hundreds of thousands of years to show up?
I can agree that the nature of humans includes all of their behaviors. How could it not? It’s not like I believe the behaviors of humans come from aliens or something. Of course everything any human has ever done is inherently a potential within the natural human animal. That’s true.
But every single system of society has always had to deal with that. Do you imagine communism is just a couple of naive bullet points? Is that what you think communism is? That’s not real. You don’t have a half-dozen successful communist revolutions, pull almost a billion people out of poverty, set the world record for industrialization speed running industrialization twice, and defeat the Nazis on a paper thin wish list form of government. Communism would never have left the page and no one would know Marx’s name if communism didn’t account for human nature. Even Marx himself said that there’s no way to run a society that relies entirely on everyone’s good will and voluntary cooperation out of altruism. He knew that the only way for people to cooperate is if it served their needs more than competing did and he showed mathematicallly how that was true.
So yeah, fine, human nature, whatever. It’s irrelevant to the specific system we use. All systems everywhere will always account for human nature because creating systems of government is literally in our nature and whenever a system goes against our nature long enough we will destroy it.
Next time he argues like that, talk about material conditions ask him “If all your needs were met and you could afford the things you want, would you steal?”
Someone who believes that “human nature” is inherently selfish would probably answer yes.
Then I would ask them why everybody doesn’t do it, then. 🤷
I guess thieves think all men steal, ehThen I just give up on that person and stop talking to them
Human nature is determined by the material conditions of a society, e.g. the relations of production, the productive forces, and the mode of production. It’s a historical development and doesn’t exist in a vacuum, neither does it float above us in the sky and beyond our comprehension. To understand human nature we must study how society reproduces itself, from the way our ape ancestors lived up to how human beings live now. Historical materialism is the method we should use to study human nature. We always had to produce in order to exist, however primitive those means of production may have been, and our labor has always been social, however primitive those means of communication were, such as language.
Stalin’s https://redsails.org/dialectical-and-historical-materialism/ is a necessary read for any ML who wants to advance the cause of communism in all aspects of our movement. I suspect that the “human nature” argument that the libs throw at us constantly is one of these aspect we need to understand thoroughly because they keep pushing it and without seeing the misanthropy underlying their logic, no progress can be achieve against “individualism.”
Human nature is complex. We have many urges and desires, each pulling us in different directions. We contain both good and evil inside is and while it is true that humans are inherently selfish it is just as true that humans are inherently altruistic and inherently social.
Human society should be organised in such a way that cultivates the good sides and disincentives the bad. The capitalist system does just the opposite, it rewards selfish predators, con men and abusers. The bad impulses in people would not magically disappear under socialism but the material conditions of society would allow the good sides to flourish. If you ask people who lived under AES systems before the 1989 counter-revolutions nearly all of them will tell you about how there was a different spirit back then of community, safety and solidarity that was lost with the restoration of capitalism.
Good counter to people who bring up anecdotes like ‘My family fled communism in 1994 I know how bad it was’
In a 2005 survey, 66% of Russians said they agreed “It is a great misfortune that the USSR no longer exists”, while only 30% disagreed. In addition, 57% supported some form of Soviet-based system as their preferred political system
polling since the mid-1990s on the preferred political and economic system of Russians also shows nostalgia for the Soviet Union, with the most recent polling in 2021 showing 49% preferring the Soviet political system, compared to 18% preferring the current system, and 16% preferring Western democracy, as well as 62% saying they preferred a system of economic planning compared to 24% preferring a market capitalist economy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_nostalgia#Russia
(numbers are even higher when selected for people who actually lived under both systems)
You can find the sources from the citation on that page or even just googling you can find spoll that show the same thing for other SSRs outside of Russia, and from sources libs will generally trust or atleast no dismiss out of hand
[West] German media has come up with a diminutive term for this, since they can’t hide the facts. “Ostalgie” (east-nostalgia) refers to people who are nostalgic about the DDR, and obviously the media means to say the people with Ostalgie are wrong.
human nature is neither good nor evil. because man at birth is like a blank sheet of paper as taught by john locke and islam.
human become good and evil because:
- the conditions they feel. people who are full will not steal food, people do not dare to steal if the law is enforced.
- people around them. people in love will obey their partner’s wishes.
- education.
- their own decisions. some people become evil because of their own desires.
in addition, the purpose of knowing human nature is not to give up but to improve conditions.
There’s a good quote by British philosopher Andrew Collier: “To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough”
The main problem is that the factory spends trillions of dollars convincing people that coughing and black lung is part of human nature.
This really isn’t about “liberals”, it’s about the individual liberals and their characteristics. For example Black liberals don’t really use the human nature argument because Black people used to be property very recently with the excuse of human nature. You will most likely exclusively argue this with White men who will not listen to you because they will easily denote you to an emotional natural slave or an emotional foid…
If you try to point to examples of high trust societies they will say it’s because those countries lack immigrants/are homogeneous. If you think you caught them by pointing out that the USSR was high trust and so is China, they will tell you that they admire those countries for being racially homogeneous, anti-feminist (Erroneous belief).
I am exhausted just from thinking about this argument but best of luck to you comrade and I hope the comments have some insights
Black liberals where I love absolutely argue human nature.
I don’t think it serves us to paint with so broad a brush. I think there are certain beliefs that are in common with most people, in most regions (even if subconscious), and beliefs that are similar here, different there, and beliefs that seem wholly different, until understood at intimate levels, maybe they’re not so much.
Really? 🤔 I couldn’t imagine people doing that, I know that when I was a liberal I believed that capitalism actually liberated us from slavery. Now that I think about it I didn’t think much at all during my lib days
A lot of things I couldn’t imagine when I was younger, that I can now. And plenty I have yet to imagine.
Isn’t the counterargument here pretty simple? Ask: “Is it human nature for a black person to be a slave? Then is it human nature for you to be a slave to capital?”
Hah! I’ll try that, although most religious people argue some version of this nonsense:
Romans: 13 Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.
2 Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.
3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:
4 For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.
Don’t these lines just tell you to shut up and be a good tool for your master (who conveniently has that position because he is ordained by God)? This is the exact shit that they taught the serfs and slaves, and it’s only after they were abolished that this was reinterpreted to support modern government.
The good thing about the Bible is that it is so convoluted that you can always find a verse that you can interpret to mean the exact opposite:
Acts 5:
29 Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than human beings!
Luke 4:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Psalm 2:
10 Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth.
11 Serve the Lord with fear and celebrate his rule with trembling.
12 Kiss his son, or he will be angry and your way will lead to your destruction, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.
For instance, if you connect these three sets of verses, it can be interpreted that Jesus was sent to help the poor and disabled. Thus it is our mission to obey God in doing this, to follow Jesus in his mission, rather than to obey other human beings. If these other humans try to stop our mission and end up experiencing destruction, it is because they are getting in the way of God’s mission.
If you spend all day around religious people, it is a good idea to get familiar with every single verse so you can counter-argue all their reactionary positions using the “authority” of the Bible. DarkMatter2525 is a decent resource for this purpose.
Im pretty familiar, the problem is getting frustrated, because Christians, specifically of the more conservative ilk, can not comprehend the Bible is a compendium of selected arguments and debates of various Rabbi and other learned Jews about the nature of divine essence, rather than definitive and established infallible word of that Essence, directly.
I am a little bit encouraged after a conversation with someone today but not much since people tend to revert to ingrained doctrine after hours of biblically explaining a different POV.
A personal example is simply refraining from saying “G-d” by way of respecting the Essence as ineffable, or at the very least, people who hold that ideal; yet I constantly find myself saying it, because nearly six decades of it being used regularly, in daily conversation around me is a deeply ingrained bad habit.
Thank you for the reference, it will help me deepen my personal understanding.
I think you could also talk about how human nature wasn’t always there. Like, if you go back in time enough, humans were just fish in the ocean that – through material conditions – evolved their current “nature”.
So, be a scientist, I guess. Greed is due to the necessity of hoarding scarce resources for later use, violence is a tool for the protection of the self and their group etc.
Aside from all the great comments here already, I’ve also seen it put like this:
Communism is a social-economic-political system designed to put people first and improve everyone’s life. This is (after the revolution at least) a systemic and structural thing, not a choice of individuals. You can be awful and selfish, but you’ll either be punished for it or it will end up helping society anyway.
By the same logic, someone who genuinely wants working people’s lives to improve under capitalism isn’t going to get anywhere. The entire system stands against pro-social choices.
Those are the negative feedbacks, the positive ones are that the people who uplift others will themselves be uplifted in a communist society. In capitalist societies those who are the most selfish and sociopathic are successful by the definition of the system and are promoted by it.
