I can only agree with your last statement, encause IMO, people have three natural postures regarding hierarchy in their group:
To compete for leadership/status.
To follow the leader.
Apathy.
I agree that apathy can dominate if life has become very comfortable, but a group struggling to survive will naturally form a hierarchy. Practically all human groups throughout history have formed some kind of hierarchy, no need to analyze mandrills.
people have three natural postures regarding hierarchy in their group: To compete for leadership/status, To follow the leader, Apathy.
What makes you think that? And don’t start with the monkeys again.
The reality is that we can’t really say anything about human nature. Analogies to other animals or idealising the status quo as a natural state don’t help either. We live in a capitalist society that makes it necessary to compete with others for resources. Therefore, we must also expect this behavior to manifest itself. Of course, this tells us nothing about human nature, apart from the fact that humans tend to adapt to their circumstances.
It’s not capitalism that makes us compete for resources, it’s the natural consequence of not having infinite resources. Plants and animals compete for resources at every level, blaming capitalism is a leap of logic that could reach the moon.
But anyway, it seems like you want people to be anarchical by nature, and are willing to fall into wishful thinking if needed. All I can add is that we grow hierarchical, little children understand the pecking order easily, and they know they’re at the bottom of the ladder, and the parents at the top. The favorite is between, but the grandparents are even higher than the parents. Anarchy is against our nature, and the nature of most social animals. If it is to be abolished, it better be very thoroughly, encause we’ll have to work against our tendencies.
We humans are animals too, more intelligent, but still pretty animalistic. Don’t discount ape instincts as if they didn’t apply to us.
We do not have infinite resources, but we certainly have far more than we need to cover at least the basic necessities of life for everyone. Capitalism, due to its internal mechanisms, will always lead to scarcity. And this is not socialist folklore, but the consequence of how the system works. The entire structure of capital as private property, owned only by a small fraction of all of humanity, means that the capitalists get most of the wealth generated through the economic activity of the overwhelming majority of people. This alone creates scarcity, because a large amount of resources ends up in the hands of a very small number of people. But that’s only one side of the coin. The scarcity created by capitalism is completely irrational in many respects (even if it is perfectly rational from the capitalists’ point of view). A few examples:
Destroying perfectly good products to prevent them from being used for free. A well-known example is the EU Common Agricultural Policy, which saw a huge destruction of food to ensure prices remained stable for fruit and vegetables; 60% of withdrawn food was destroyed
Planned or artificial obsolesce. A wonderful current example is Microsoft’s update policy. If it weren’t for Linux, I would have been forced to throw away my current PC because there are no more security updates for Windows 10, but Windows 11 doesn’t run on it.
Environmental destruction. One of the clearest examples of artificial scarcity is how capital is significantly damaging the environment, for instance by polluting fresh water, which creates investment opportunities for capital to come in and clean up the mess, rebuild water infrastructure, and so on.
Time. Despite all the new technology and labour-saving devices in our lives, we still work long hours, spending more time working than a mediaeval peasant. The scarcity of time is a major factor in many people’s lives.
Moreover, scarcity is a necessary precondition for making profit (since things that are abundant cannot properly embody much exchange value). Take housing, for example. Here in Germany, and certainly everywhere else, rents are rising. The neoliberal government’s solution lies in the private sector. But this sector will never build enough to eliminate the scarcity. Because without it rents would fall (which would be good for us), meaning that the investment would yield no or less profit (which would be bad for the capitalists). Scarcity is the prerequisite for profits and that’s precisely why it will always exist in capitalism. No matter how efficient or productive we get or how much we work. It is at the heart of one of the basic contradictions of the capitalist system: that artificial what is irrational to us is completely rational from the point of view of the capitalist class.
The consequence for us, however, is that we are now forced to compete for scarce resources. From an individual perspective, it is then disadvantageous to cooperate with others, as they pose a threat to us. Suddenly, what you represent, namely a need for hierarchies, becomes at least a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hopefully, we can agree that under such circumstances, we cannot really say whether this behavior is natural or not. My experience shows that in situations without hardship, people are much more inclined to treat their fellow human beings (and, frankly, other living beings) well and show no need to dominate others.
I think the mistake in your thinking lies in a naturalistic fallacy. You start from the status quo and draw conclusions about the natural state. Hierarchies, society, and scarcity then become something we cannot change. The result is a legitimisation of the status quo through naturalness. And I would say that this is the result of many decades to centuries of capitalist ideology, to which we are all exposed at almost every moment of our lives.
I don’t think we can agree on this. But I want to encourage you to at least consider that what we have learned and taken for granted throughout our lives could be, as Marx put it, more appearance than reality.
I can only agree with your last statement, encause IMO, people have three natural postures regarding hierarchy in their group:
I agree that apathy can dominate if life has become very comfortable, but a group struggling to survive will naturally form a hierarchy. Practically all human groups throughout history have formed some kind of hierarchy, no need to analyze mandrills.
What makes you think that? And don’t start with the monkeys again.
The reality is that we can’t really say anything about human nature. Analogies to other animals or idealising the status quo as a natural state don’t help either. We live in a capitalist society that makes it necessary to compete with others for resources. Therefore, we must also expect this behavior to manifest itself. Of course, this tells us nothing about human nature, apart from the fact that humans tend to adapt to their circumstances.
It’s not capitalism that makes us compete for resources, it’s the natural consequence of not having infinite resources. Plants and animals compete for resources at every level, blaming capitalism is a leap of logic that could reach the moon.
But anyway, it seems like you want people to be anarchical by nature, and are willing to fall into wishful thinking if needed. All I can add is that we grow hierarchical, little children understand the pecking order easily, and they know they’re at the bottom of the ladder, and the parents at the top. The favorite is between, but the grandparents are even higher than the parents. Anarchy is against our nature, and the nature of most social animals. If it is to be abolished, it better be very thoroughly, encause we’ll have to work against our tendencies.
We humans are animals too, more intelligent, but still pretty animalistic. Don’t discount ape instincts as if they didn’t apply to us.
We do not have infinite resources, but we certainly have far more than we need to cover at least the basic necessities of life for everyone. Capitalism, due to its internal mechanisms, will always lead to scarcity. And this is not socialist folklore, but the consequence of how the system works. The entire structure of capital as private property, owned only by a small fraction of all of humanity, means that the capitalists get most of the wealth generated through the economic activity of the overwhelming majority of people. This alone creates scarcity, because a large amount of resources ends up in the hands of a very small number of people. But that’s only one side of the coin. The scarcity created by capitalism is completely irrational in many respects (even if it is perfectly rational from the capitalists’ point of view). A few examples:
Moreover, scarcity is a necessary precondition for making profit (since things that are abundant cannot properly embody much exchange value). Take housing, for example. Here in Germany, and certainly everywhere else, rents are rising. The neoliberal government’s solution lies in the private sector. But this sector will never build enough to eliminate the scarcity. Because without it rents would fall (which would be good for us), meaning that the investment would yield no or less profit (which would be bad for the capitalists). Scarcity is the prerequisite for profits and that’s precisely why it will always exist in capitalism. No matter how efficient or productive we get or how much we work. It is at the heart of one of the basic contradictions of the capitalist system: that artificial what is irrational to us is completely rational from the point of view of the capitalist class.
The consequence for us, however, is that we are now forced to compete for scarce resources. From an individual perspective, it is then disadvantageous to cooperate with others, as they pose a threat to us. Suddenly, what you represent, namely a need for hierarchies, becomes at least a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hopefully, we can agree that under such circumstances, we cannot really say whether this behavior is natural or not. My experience shows that in situations without hardship, people are much more inclined to treat their fellow human beings (and, frankly, other living beings) well and show no need to dominate others.
I think the mistake in your thinking lies in a naturalistic fallacy. You start from the status quo and draw conclusions about the natural state. Hierarchies, society, and scarcity then become something we cannot change. The result is a legitimisation of the status quo through naturalness. And I would say that this is the result of many decades to centuries of capitalist ideology, to which we are all exposed at almost every moment of our lives.
I don’t think we can agree on this. But I want to encourage you to at least consider that what we have learned and taken for granted throughout our lives could be, as Marx put it, more appearance than reality.