Not that the vast majority would be without empathy, just that power would raise it from where it sits currently. Thought I should clarify that.
You don’t get to positions of power by being nice. You’re either corrupt to begin with or you will become corrupt on the journey. It’s like any other competitive situation without proper refs and rules. People without morals do things to “win” that people with morals wouldn’t. This is why the shit floats to the top
Oh my god are you THE reanukeeves? Who was in ‘mhe tatrix’? Holy shit dude I love your work, but why did you shave your facial hair when you started getting old?
Don’t forget my roles in “Wohn Jick”, “Boint Preak” and “Till and Bed”. I actually don’t shave, it’s due to the testosterone blockers I’ve been taking because I feel that I am too manly and am setting an unrealistic goal for humanity.
That’s reasonable. Yes.
Gotta build a world where compassion and empathy are rewarded and that will happen
We are organised in such a way that authority and empathy exclude each other. Never forget that authority is an authority by collective agreement, even when enforced by violence. A king never rules alone. If you elevate basic morality as a prerequisite for your participation with said authority it has no choice but to do so. So reach out to people and have important talks about these things. It is very important that agreement is formed as broadly as possible.
Between a third and a half of the world’s wealth comes from inheritance. If your parents have savings you will likely become privileged when they die. You’ll experience some small windfall, and may even move up a class. Will you keep your empathy and class politics? What will you do with the money? Or will you just hide and perpetuate the system?
It would but unfortunately we have built a world where our systemic structures incentivize abandoning empathy and solidarity in order to get ahead of “the competition” (i.e. your fellow man)
Bad people always will exist to some extent, those people are irrelevant. The major problem is that we have a society that turns good people bad in order to survive.
I think our inverse relationship between power and empathy is essentially a society-wide maladaptive response to trauma.
It is beneficial to a society in times of famine, war, and general disaster, to have a leader who is able to say that 12 year olds should be fed before 14 year olds. It is also beneficial to a society in those times for the majority of people to be more willing to do something if an authority figure tells them to than they are willing to decide to do something.
When a society is generally secure, this becomes hugely problematic, because some portion of us are predisposed to be both heartless and powerful (the causation is largely irrelevant, because there’s a definite correlation), and most of the rest of us will support them and carry out their wishes.
Highly recommend reading David Graeber’s “Dawn of Everything”, “Debt: the First 5000 Years”, and “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”. It explains a lot about how humanity ended up this way.
And the causation between people being heartlessness and power of authority is incredibly important: the way we build society creates the incentive structure of how we behave within that society. We have created a society that rewards abandoning empathy and solidarity to gain power and authority (i.e. security and stability) Thus we have a society of people who have no empathy or solidarity.
I love David graeber, that’s always a good recommendation.
I think that causation would be important for dealing with the issue, but I also believe there is zero practical chance we do deal with it, so it’s realistically irrelevant. We’re in a self-reinforcing cycle and it’s not changing unless we actually change it. Only in the last few years, I’ve seen us hit a dozen of what would have seemed like breaking points in the nineties, and we’re not breaking.
As Ursula K LeGuin put it
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
There is no such thing as “breaking points”. Revolutions aren’t this spontaneous thing that just happens all of a sudden. It is the result of years of deliberate and concerted effort by communities to change their way of life.
I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not talking about capitalism or even anything created intentionally by humans.
I’m talking about much more fundamental aspects of humanity- that we become tribalist and like a strongman leader during tough times, that we want to protect children over the elderly in emergencies.
Those play well into capitalism, but they also play well into most systems people have created (because they’re fundamentally human). I don’t think they’re immutable, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near being able to change them right now.
Not because I think they’re as inevitable as monarchy, but because it would be pointless to fix those things first without figuring out a way to stop fighting wars with each other, because those tendencies will return immediately in response to war.
It’s like working with someone to help them with PTSD, then sending them immediately back to the environment that gave it to them. A) PTSD might have been protective, if it made them more sensitive to loud noises or hyperaware of any changes that might indicate a danger; and B) they’re just going to develop symptoms of PTSD again.
So yes, we could change these aspects of humanity, but it would be pointless unless we can figure out a way to coexist without developing them anew.
You need to read more about the anarchist aspects that Graeber and LeGuin advocate. Conflict in inevitable with the ruling powers that create these circumstances which dictate how society at large behaves but conflict doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
What you’re talking about is in fact created by humans. We create the conditions that incentivizes that behavior. He goes over the mechanisms behind it in his books “Debt” and “Dawn of Everything”. Humanity doesn’t just default to hierarchy.
It is entirely possible to build new and then enforce our autonomy from the current ruling class. We know it is possible. We have done it before and we can do it again.
This is why I think there’s a communication error here, but maybe it’s on my side. I am not advocating against anarchy at all. I am pro mutual aid and believe that it’s the best way forward for people from here (and was also the best way forward thirty years ago, and a hundred, and two hundred, etc.).
I am trying to say that a society that doesn’t meet our psychological needs (as ours doesn’t) will never enable us en masse to work on the tendencies that cause us to create oppressive societies in times of stress.
We can create societies that are less oppressive, even with those tendencies, and we have continually (but obviously not exclusively) over our history, including many examples of non-oppressive societies.
Those societies are vulnerable to outside interference or internal revolt, in my opinion because they aren’t able to prioritize minimizing our authoritarian tendencies over the long term. I am suggesting that the reason they can’t prioritize that is because they are generally plagued by violent conflict at the hands of more authoritarian groups, and they’ve had to make survival their priority.
To prioritize their survival in response to outside attacks, they must become less accessible to outsiders, which can lead to tribalism if the reasoning behind and clear limits on that reduced accessibility are not communicated with complete fidelity from generation to generation.
A society besieged by war must also have well organized response teams with the authority to defend the society: these should be impermanent groups with no special privileges outside of that which is necessary for as long as it is necessary, but it has happened many times that these groups become entrenched and their members begin to use their positions to influence their society.
I think that’s partially because any type of group authorized to use violence (even in self defense) will necessarily reward people who can easily commit violence. I vomited in high school when I had to dissect a crayfish, and I can’t watch a boxing match without turning away. Almost anyone would do better in a combat role than I would, but most people who can enact necessary defensive violence would still be less enthusiastic than someone who enjoys hurting others. Abusive people are therefore very easy to unintentionally select for, unless the society actively guards against that, generation after generation.
These defensive groups must also operate within a hierarchy, so that they can respond quickly and cooperatively to attacks. That’s not inherently problematic, because it’s not an unnecessary hierarchy, but it is the other reason the power of these groups becomes entrenched. People who respond well to authority and enjoy wielding it will do better in these groups than those who don’t, and once the immediate conflict is over, the group made up of people who like following and giving orders and are capable of enacting violence must voluntarily disband (or be forcibly disbanded, which just creates a new group of people tasked with enacting defensive violence).
The people can resist this tendency towards authoritarianism, but I think it’s difficult, because of the inherent contradiction between our survival response and our desire for a less oppressive society. We must, to some degree, close ourselves off and enact violence to have an open and nonviolent society.
I don’t think the contradiction means that an open or nonviolent society is impossible, nor do I think it’s a gotcha to show that some part of the equation is wrong. I just think the contradiction causes societal problems (much like how many people think they want a life completely without struggle, but a completely conflict free life is unhealthy for us, which leads to people striving for something they don’t want, contributing to things like mid-life crises).
The ones that have been the most successful and longest lasting are those which incorporate antiauthoritarianism into their culture, meaning that even when the first and second generation of the society are gone, the society doesn’t lose its anarchist nature.
I think it does, except for the kind of person who seeks and covets that power, they’re already damaged goods.
