Who we are, what we value, and how we behave are fundamentally rooted in the social, political, and economic structures into which we are born.For example, the “human nature” in hunter/gatherer societies was a much more community-oriented one, than the individualist one of today.
What are the tendencies in deep “human nature” that the common root in the worldviews and values of capitalism supposedly amplifies?
Typically, the Buddhist books I’ve read refer to the „Three Poisons“ of attachment, aversion, and ignorance. Rufus mentioned hatred, greed, delusion, which may be different ways of translating these concepts. But humans have a capacity for symbol use that is completely arbitrary and generative, as opposed to other animals that are also creators and interpreters of signs, but not in a way that leads to meta-representational attachment, aversion, and ignorance - where these qualities can rightly be spoken of as greed, hatred, delusion. A monkey wants the banana in front of it; a human wants “financial security,” “legacy,” "meaning“. Animals fear immediate threats; humans fear symbolic threats (loss of face, damage to reputation, ideological opponents). We treat abstract concepts (money, nation, self) as if they’re solid, real things.
To answer @george’s question: how about eg Buddha’s three poisons of greed, hatred and delusion. There are basic tendencies of liking and disliking at a very basic neurological level.
I at least find it difficult to say: oh we are just greedy (in deep Buddhist sense of grasping) because of eg capitalism or culture. yes culture can (very significantly) channel and amplify … and those tendencies exist quite deeply and to some extent prior to any given culture.
For example, hunter gatherers still have eg in/out group distinctions (ie a kind of othering).
Now there are some subtleties e.g. over time culture may change genetics and “deep nature” e.g. good evidence evolution towards homo sapiens (and during home sapiens) for more cooperation.
TODO: have a chunk of slides on this with a soil and seeds metaphor from 2025 Second Renaissance course.
Here is an assortment from my favorite macro-historians:
"Ian Morris argues in Why the West Rules—for Now that the underlying drivers of human advancement and history are three innate, petty human impulses: sloth, fear, and greed.
Peter Turchin’s models in Cliodynamics (the mathematical study of history) move away from the assumption that humans are purely rational, utility-maximizing actors. Instead, his work models human populations driven by basic biological imperatives, the deeply rooted psychological need for status, and the inherent capacity for cooperation.
In his work on existential risk and civilizational collapse, Cambridge researcher Luke Kemp models human nature as fundamentally altruistic, social, and egalitarian. However, he models modern societal structures and historical collapses as being driven by opportunistic elites motivated by power, coercion, and accumulation"
In the case of Kemp, I’d say the summary idealizes the hunter-gatherer era a bit (for an example close to my geography, check out Nootka slave raiding), but compared to the temple/palace cultures that arose with every civilization, yes, hunter/gatherer lifestyles were far more egalitarian.
The UTOK theory of mind synthesizes Life-Mind at one level and Culture-Person at the next level up. Further, human mind is modeled in three layers, with Mind 1 being something we have in common with apes and other creatures, Mind 2 being self or ego, and Mind 3 being our social-facing self, heavily engaged the navigating culture. In UTOK action theory, the three main drivers are Behavior Investment Theory, the Influence Matrix, and Justification Systems Theory. We share BIT with all life - what to run from, what to eat, what to mate with? The Influence Matrix is generally mammalian and very ape-like - how do I fit emotionally with the troop? JUST is where your analysis of cultural amplification kicks in. (Not to mention your semiotics). With symbolic speech came the first opportunity for misrepresentation. What UTOK calls “justification” is the process of me convincing you that I am not full of it, and vice versa. The history of cultural evolution, in short, is the emergence of ever more elaborate symbolic systems to justify what this group or that is doing to meet their animal needs (BIT) or their status-in-the-troop needs (Influence Matrix).
Bottom line: Human nature? Yes. Human culture? Yes.
Just musing on what this might entail: if we go with Christian theology, eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge gave birth to culture. Turning this upside down, most Gnostics see the serpent as a bringer of enlightenment or embodiment of the Christ principle.
I’m currently reading Martin Luther right now (as interpreted by Habermas), and I expected to be somewhere between annoyed and disgusted at the lot of it. Instead - and this rather shocked me! - I started crafting a post-metaphysical spin on Luther’s key insights that I might actually wish to work with.
Luther begins with the utter depravity of human nature. Take Paul’s Letter to the Romans, add 14 centuries of medieval superstition about Satan, spice with liberal does of antisemitism, and now we are ready to cook with Luther. But here’s the thing. Luther has a point about the relationship between good works and free will. Anybody here want to save the world? Or at least toss a few coins in the charity basket? Where did that impulse come from? Feeling love, joy, hope, interbeing, kumbaya, pick-your-bliss? Did you invent that? For that matter, did you even invent yourself? Where did that self even come from? Do mom and dad get any credit? How about all those people you interacted with along the way? How about the millions who suffered, died, and were buried so we can all hang out together now on an internet forum? When Ego rolls the credits on the Story of Me, how many names should properly be attached to the production? Everyone ever - more or less?
To frame it more like Luther did, we are nothing without God. Less than dirt. (The term “God” may be too much to work with here - substitute “reality” or “quantum flux” or whatever your favorite ultimate is). I think he is generally right about that. Any bright ideas any of us might channel are but reflections of much brighter Light that manifested for the first time so many eons ago and flows perpetually through layers of complexification, some of which are available to human mind and perception. Amazing grace!
The capitalist era represents a small portion of human history. Even the last 4,000 years - the history we know - is a relatively small fraction. What we can observe in historical records, prehistoric remains and cultures as yet untouched or not fully absorbed into Capitalism is this:-
Tribal or close community living
Rituals and ceremonies
Respect, adoration and protection of nature or parts thereof
Communion with nature to access the divine (plant medicines appear consistently, what we call psychedelics)
It is in human nature to fear.
Scarcity, whether real or imagined, has often been stoked by capitalism.
I don’t think it’s embedded in humans to desire personnel possessions. Rather, that arises from fear of scarcity and also wishing to feel belonging within a community. In capitalism the latter comes from the assumed prestige of being wealthy.
Fear of the unknown and 'outsider threats may also be part of human nature. Capitalism tends to fragment and divide communities, so human sense of security comes even more from owning things.
It takes well over a decade to properly indoctrinate these things into people from birth. Another decade to truly cement them. By that time, coupled with the uniform nature of society which offers few opportunities to escape the paradigm, the only real hope for adults is either a significant period of meditation or measured use of psychedelics. All, ideally, whilst living in and serving a community which has roots to pre-capitalist ideals (and practices them more than not).
“Nuu-Chah-Nulth chiefs kept slaves (war captives) and every village had slaves who performed its heavy labor. Slaves had no rights or privileges”
I’m always a bit sceptical of accounts of slavery from a western society observing a tribal one. Imagine, for instance, a warring tribe is defeated. Its members no longer have a community to go back to. Maybe they also caused damage. In this instance, captivity and labour return may seem just. Moreover, we need only remember how, for the abolition of slavery in America, some slaves noted a preference for remaining in slavery, due to the relative benign conditions and conduct of their masters.
This, of course, is not a defense of slavery. Rather, it is a reminder that we should be careful not to attach the same meaning to it for all societies and instances.
As for chiefs taking ownership of things, I recall reading that in many tribes their role was to distribute goods to the community, not to hoard it for themselves. Benevolence, protection and guardianship was the standard foundation of tribal chiefdom in most tribes.
This is not to justify anything that happened to these peoples during European colonization. But I’m allergic to “noble savage” mythology, which mythology I consider it’s own sort of colonization.
I agree there should be balance, and that we should avoid a monofocus on tribes. That said, as equally as we should be cautious with the ‘noble savage’ idea, we need to be mindful not to attribute negative aspects as inherent to human nature. Cruelty, possession and exploitation are often depicted by present social systems as the darker foundations of human nature to defend the way those systems function.
These peoples were warriors. Killing and being killed was central to their society. By way of comparison, I’m currently reading a book about the Ostrogoths, Longobards, Franks, Saxons, etc. Pretty much the same idea. These were peoples at arms. They would have felt shame only for cowardice, not for combat.
Any current distaste for such matters is a function of what Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” in which kings brought their violent nobility to heal and transformed them into perfumed courtiers. Bourgeois parents applied similar techniques to their rowdy children, transforming ruffian toddles into proper clerks and moneychangers. We should keep that in mind before rubbishing “modernity” entirely. When cracks form in modern society, ruffian mobs sprout up in those cracks. That’s not a perversion. It’s a reversion to behaviors that once were quite natural to peoples of all continents and races.
I think there’s some major differences between the kind of warfare and warrior archetype we see in those cases and what we see now.
Capitalism is the antithesis of chivalry and honor in my opinion. Instead of defeating enemies and taking a victory, it instead exploits them, without code or restraint, with the modus operandi being maximum eextraction. The capitalist victory is that of complete monopoly and centralised control, which is somewhat ironic given how its proponents advocate it serves to do the opposite.
I don’t disagree at all! The best current analogs to ancient warriors are found in street gangs or in the armed cadres of anarchic failed states. Launching missiles from thousands of miles away is a very different matter.
Here’s a perspective that somehow challenges the idea of a “universal” human nature, copied from the brilliant essay by Brandon ( @Enli10ment ):
The classical spectrum runs from Rousseau (people are naturally cooperative and made selfish by institutions) through Smith (people are naturally self-interested but their self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective good) to Hobbes (people are naturally rivalrous and must be constrained by institutional force).
Thanks @George and I feel I want to place myself between Smith and Rousseau, but with the caveat that I only believe that the wrong sorts of institutions are what often makes people act selfish or antisocial. The best sorts of institutions are those that enhance our cooperative nature and channel it into scalable coordination in service of flourishing and sustainable living.
Various commons initiatives and eco-villages are good at the first half of what is required to become such institutions; not so good at the second part. AI can help them with scalable coordination, to some extent, when edge AI becomes hyperlocal.
But the bottleneck on the journey to large-scale, bottom-up coordination of archipelagos of coherence is not technology but consciousness.
cc: @Gen
IMO, there may be “both/and” here. Technically, a bunch of feedback loops. (Binding, for example, all the Wilberian quadrants). To start the loop somewhere, consider a largely non-technical, human-centric vision quest. Like something involving caves and ancestors. OK, then vision emerges, in an embodied way. That’s consciousness-tech. All cultures going back to the paleolithic had something like that. But what appears in visions can also be further embodied in cultural artifacts and practices, which in turn feeds back into consciousness-tech. It’s pretty clear, for example, that the advent of writing had a lot to do with the emergence of Gebserian “mental” structure. It’s no coincidence that the pre-Socratics got going relatively soon after Homer was committed to print.
I blundered into this a few years ago in the context of a spiritual crisis during COVID. Instead of searching for meaning in South Asian ashrams, I just used YouTube. Which features lots of people who have been in and around the ashrams. I let all that sink into my head, then I want out and cooked my own “vision” quest out of local materials, and that really rewired a whole bunch of stuff! Also got me seeking and finding community online (with this forum being my current favorite “sweat lodge”, so to speak!)
My more recent moves have involved bouncing out of the internet and doing more community-centric vision questing in local face-to-face community. But again, the same stream flows through all of it! AI is involved lately too. The key to all of it, however, is no matter how information gets sourced, to “own” it needs a physical practice. That’s how bits stick in the bones.
Yes, to all of the above, AND I think for islands of coherence to join up in archipelagos, the scale of coordination required is unlikely to be reached with communities and organizations that have their center of gravity in Green, Orange, or narrower consciousness.
