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   HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 24-Mar-2024 16:39:37 JST HeavenlyPossum

   The idea of human beings as rational utility-maximizing particles with insatiable hedonic desires is very much the product of an ideological project to justify capitalism as “natural” and has virtually no relationship to how actual human beings live but a lot of people have genuinely internalized it.

   Trying to derive “human nature” by observing people under capitalist modernity is like looking at a bored, depressed wolf obsessively pacing a circle in a tiny zoo enclosure and concluding that this is “wolf nature.”

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     bamfic (bamfic@autonomous.zone)'s status on Sunday, 24-Mar-2024 16:39:42 JST bamfic

     in reply to

     @HeavenlyPossum Sounds like you've read David Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything". If not, some of these stories, and more, are in there.

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 24-Mar-2024 16:39:43 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     And I just so utterly reject this cynicism, because it’s so ugly and boring and *smug.* It’s so pointless. Humans are too terrible to save or be worth saving? Fine. You’re uniquely amazing and everyone else is awful. Go away and be smugly self-congratulating somewhere else.

     In reality, humans are a giant tangle of competing impulses and motivations that can be expressed in endless combinations in endless contexts. We are *self-constructing,* able to think about and then act upon the ways we live individually and socially. This is our unique nature as one of many species of animals on earth: to *not* be bound to any particular lifeway but rather to be able to critically analyze and deliberately construct our lifeways.

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 24-Mar-2024 16:39:43 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     “Humans are naturally acquisitive. We want to endlessly accumulate.”

     The Mbendjele BaYaka people of Central African Republic will periodically leave their camp to go start a new one and leave all their material possessions behind.

     The people of Trypillia would periodically and deliberately burn their houses down and build new ones atop the rubble.

     “Humans are naturally greedy and selfish.”

     The Nyaka people of Uganda engage in demand sharing. If you say “I want that” about something they have, they will give it to you as readily as an American might hold a door open for a stranger.

     “Humans are an invasive species that naturally over-exploits its environment with reckless and shortsighted abandon.”

     The Yurok of California deliberately lived off a diet of primarily acorns, leaving many other resources un-exploited, because they were wary of the hierarchical and exploitive lifestyle of their neighbors to the north.

     “Humans are naturally and myopically self-centered and descend into violent competition when resources are scarce.”

     Starvation is rare among forager societies, despite the common perception that they live on the constant knife’s edge of survivability, because people in these communities tend to share with each other unless there is literally nothing left for anyone.

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 24-Mar-2024 16:39:44 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     There’s a deeply cynical and misanthropic thread among some people on the left that posits people are too *bad* in some way to live together in a way that is better than what we have now.

     Too greedy, too aggressive, too shortsighted, too parochial, too irrational, too stupid, too petty.

     (Never the observer, of course; they’re part of the enlightened elite who can see us as we really are, and—if they’re not too cynical—will be in charge of forcing the ignorant masses into a better world.)

     It’s paralleled by a similar argument on the right, that people are genuinely terrible and so a better world is impossible because this world of hierarchy and abuse and exploitation is the best of all worlds.

     Both probably owe quite a bit to the deeply Christian idea of the Fall, of people as fundamentally broken and in need of heroic redemption.

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Sunday, 24-Mar-2024 16:39:47 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     This is how you end up with the pro-capitalist right and the authoritarian left both deciding that people need to be forced to labor in socially useful ways.

     This is how you get eco-fascists like Garret Hardin marrying lefty ecological concern about the environment with right wing racism and obsession with private property.

     “Those other people over there are doing it wrong. They’re working the wrong way, or they’re touching the earth the wrong way, or they’re living together the wrong way. I, an enlightened being, know better than them and will teach them or force them to behave properly.”

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     Andrew (shivviness@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 24-Mar-2024 16:39:47 JST Andrew

     in reply to

     @HeavenlyPossum
     This thread was excellent and I agree with many of your points.
     I am, I fear, one of those misanthropes to which you refer, however. Such an outlook was borne of my consistently negative experiences of people. I do maintain a glimmer of hope that people aren't as bad as all that though

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     CleoQc aka Nicole 🦜🌈🧶🐍🍁 :mstdn: (cleoqc@mstdn.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Mar-2024 14:47:46 JST CleoQc aka Nicole 🦜🌈🧶🐍🍁 :mstdn:

     in reply to

     @HeavenlyPossum
     See "Humankind" book by Rutger Bregman.
     https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52879286-humankind

     This book was such an uplifting read for me. And my daughter also loved reading it. For once, an optimistic view of humanity.

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     NeonSnake (neonsnake@kolektiva.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Mar-2024 14:48:04 JST NeonSnake

     in reply to

     @HeavenlyPossum

     "Starvation is rare among forager societies"

     I'm sure some smart alec will come up with "natural disasters" as a counterpoint.

     And that might be true. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it was - although I've little idea how common it was, to be very fair.

     The situation we're in now, though, is a little different - we're perfectly able to help people who suffer from "natural disasters"...but we don't.

     So we've gone from "nature is against us" which is not great - to "our own species is against us" - which is much worse.

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     violetmadder (violetmadder@kolektiva.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Mar-2024 14:48:04 JST violetmadder

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     • NeonSnake

     @neonsnake @HeavenlyPossum

     Studying native plants involves getting glimpses of how the landscape used to be.

     Lewis & Clark kept mistaking what they thought looked like bodies of water in the distance, but turned out to be fields of blue camas in bloom.

     A single oak tree can produce more than a ton of acorns. 1\3rd of the trees in forests in the eastern half of America were chestnuts, also highly productive. And then there's the tonnage of food that used to self-deliver upstream in the form of salmon, and how much beef could be harvested from the massive herds of bison, with not a fence or rancher in sight?

     It takes a VERY BAD year, for people in an unspoiled landscape and the skills to understand it, to go hungry.

     And it takes VERY BAD PEOPLE, for anyone in a modern world producing so much more than it needs, to go hungry.

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     violetmadder (violetmadder@kolektiva.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Mar-2024 14:48:07 JST violetmadder

     in reply to

     • NeonSnake
     • CedarTea

     @CedarTea @neonsnake @HeavenlyPossum

     Those camas fields were cultivated, too. I was just watching a video about restoring native prairies in Washington and they had some ironic trouble because they eventually realized that the best and fastest way to spread and maintain the camas was to dig it up regularly-- the way people used to when harvesting it. It went on for so long the plants are adapted to it. But in the protected area this project was working in, it's ILLEGAL to harvest anything. So they ask the local tribes to come in and exercise their right to do it.

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     CedarTea (cedartea@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Mar-2024 14:48:09 JST CedarTea

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     • violetmadder
     • NeonSnake

     @violetmadder
     Anishinaabe friends have told me that in really hard winters, they would resort to eating cambium (inner tree bark) and similar survival foods. It would be enough to get by on on, but it's terrible. So diligence in food production and harvest was mostly done to avoid having to eat cambium rather than actually avoiding starvation.

     @neonsnake @HeavenlyPossum