“my, my! humans! so aggressive.”
rape, murder, nukes, war, torture, power, seemingly unlimited greed…
why don’t i have that insatiable drive?
can’t all be how i was raised, can it?
do you know of any studies or philosophical insights?
thx! 🙂
Lead exposure in childhood is one thing we know leads to poorer impulse control; that is to say, being short-sighted and selfish.
I have awful impulse control (severe ADHD) but usually I just eat an entire packet of Oreos instead of exploiting people for selfish reasons.
Imagine you were filthy rich and a country had all Oreos and would ban all exports and tourists. Sure you wouldn’t bribe a minister or two? Give a poor kid some money and exploit them to build an over the border Oreo smugglers ring …?!
The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has theorized that empathy and altruism are acquired in early childhood by observing when one’s caretakers show empathy towards oneself, which both gives infants a sense of security in interacting with other people and which, because babies learn through observation and pattern recognition, establishes a standard in their minds that tells them humans are supposed to be selfless and kind to one another. This theory is relevant to us because, since most of us live in decaying neoliberal hellholes, many people’s parents are too busy working to give them appropriate care during their formative years and are not rich enough to pay for people who are qualified to do so in their stead. When it comes to people whose parents are rich, the selfishness that lead to them accumulating wealth could get passed on to their children by the same method. In other words, the conditions created by capitalism could be fucking with the ability of infants to become good people later in life
Power corrupts. I’d say probably 95% of people who consider themselves altruistic, if you gave them significant power, would end up abusing it before too long.
Probably not 95%…
What skews your perception is the fact that the people who find themselves in power (CEOs, politicians, cops, and dictators) are the ones who wanted to gain power and took steps to ensure they get it. If you gave the average altruistic person a lot of power, I don’t think half of them would completely turn into a different person too quickly. This is because people who aren’t greedy don’t particularly care about gaining power beyond what they need to live comfortably.
I disagree completely. I strongly believe that people can start with the absolute best intentions and attain power with good morals and ethics, but eventually the temptation to use power for your own benefit is too strong for most people to ignore.
If you had the power to divert $0.01 from every bank account in the US to your own account, would you do it?
Another thing to consider - you have power over animals. Do you use it for your own benefit?
This guy wrote a book a long time ago which goes into this. Something about ‘material conditions’?
