I know there are lots of everyday moments of humans being kind to each other, but do you have any good examples on a wider scale to counter that capitalist realist idea?
I usually try and invoke the fact that humanity for hundreds of thousands of years lived in tribes where they had to co-operate or they would die and that “human nature” is just the product of the system under which you live, but are there any better examples you’ve found to convince your lib acquaintances?
I feel like one of the major hurdles towards getting somebody to become a leftist is the idea that humanity can, if organized democratically and if properly educated and with the right ideas of solidatory instilled, create a better system than the capitalists or technocrats have created. It’s easy to look around and superficially see everybody as bumbling idiots or greedy assholes, particularly if you’re socially atomized and apathetic, and so conclude that the working class, if left to it’s own devices, would infight and crumble.
Or is this just one of those axiomatic things where if somebody you know believes it, it’s very difficult to make them not believe it through historical examples unless they do major soul searching after a personal crisis?
I think, in a sense, Darwinism can be applied to social relations, and what we see is that evolutionary pressure has selected for humans to be social and cooperative by nature (it is to the benefit of the proliferation of humanity to be cooperative). The sort of feudal idea of “I could kill my neighbor and take his stuff and be richer” is correct, but there is some force in human society which prevents us from living like this. One could argue it is the state, but the state has not always existed and certainly so in its current form. The state is also a manifestation of social relations (if for instance, humans all decided to kill our neighbor and take his stuff, the state would not exist), so even in this Hobbesian line of thought, there is a tendency towards submission to the greater good.
Of course I am not a Hobbesian and I think what we see is that the division of labor allows for a greater production, therefore a greater surplus, and therefore a greater proliferation of humanity. A division of labor necessitates a degree of social trust though and since the division of labor predates the state apparatus, that trust must be somewhat innate to our genetics. Indeed we see things like the ability to remember human faces or our wide vocal range which must have evolved for a socially cohesive unit. We see these traits in many other creatures with social systems.
All of this is to say, that we did in fact evolve as social creatures and whether that social fabric is maintained through collective violence against those who violate it or that we recognize our common material interest in social cohesion, we are by nature collaborative and respectful of one another rather than constantly seeking to exploit, It is the selective factors of the bourgeois market, a system thrust upon us by the bourgeois class, which promotes greed. There might be an argument that the market is a natural outgrowth of accumulation (a very deterministic approach though not entirely out of line in Marxism), but this has as much merit as the counterargument that the market will be overthrown for planned production based upon cooperative human nature.
Here’s the thing, capitalist realism has so captured peoples minds that they have become incapable of understanding the breathtaking level of trust that goes into our every day lives. Our complex and highly specialized society only functions because of the unacknowledged assumption that everyone around us will behave in a prosocial manner. The fact that we are willing to work for a wage shows immense trust that we will get paid at all and that what we will be paid in is something that has this nebulous concept of value that only exists because of the continuing existence of this social trust. As with all things capitalism only “creates” by enclosing a commons created by all and expropriates value from it without contributing, in this case the common pool of love for person to person. The fact of the matter is that on the whole humans have to be abused and coerced into being antisocial beings, and yet even after all the abuse we collectively take from our sociopathic society those dripping in the ideology of the bourgeois have the gall to ask us for some exemplary PROOF of humanities innate prosociality. And yes there are always people and contexts who will act in an antisocial manner. I speak in terms of statistical distributions and on the median people are much more social than anti social, were this not the case society itself could not exist.
The book HumanKind by Rutger Bregman should be exactly what you’re looking for. He’s a center left humanist, so there’s no real political theory involved, just simple historical/anthropological examples of humans being predisposed to cooperation (and debunking popular examples demonstrating a selfish human nature)
sorry im not taking time to re-find it but there were documentary and interviews with remote tribes on isolated islands in the Indian ocean, South Pacific, elsewhere. Some of these people had easy access to food and water seasonally and the talked about just vibing and chilling and being thankful for the gifts from the land. And they seemed to mostly all get along together.
Also any stories of large scale disasters people usually help each other :shrug-outta-hecks:
