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 see everyone in the comments referencing pre-capitalist human civilizations. I’m not sure we can ever get back to that level of selflessness and community in our atomized modern world. The decline in living standards and climate crisis will necessitate cooperation, hopefully
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, talks about it. More than just “humans who hoarded didn’t fare well,” there was literally nothing to hoard for 99% of humanity’s existence. Surplus is a product of agriculture and production-enhancing technologies, and we spent hundreds of thousands of years as homo sapiens before we had any of that shit.
Ok top of that, cooperative labor is simply more efficient than individual labor for a thousand reasons. Physical proximity means low cost of transportation of resources, the ability to share knowledge, greater strength than any one person can muster, social cohesion, and so on.
On mobile so I can’t do fancy research and links, but I recall a story of an anthropologist being asked a question of a similar nature, basically “how do we know early humans were cooperative” and she gave the example of one of the ealiest bones we have on record is a femur, and whats remarkable is that it shows signs of being broken but having healed, even getting to old age. She explains it’s remarkable because the femur is a critical bone, clearly, and super hard to break yet despite lack of modern medicine someone bothered to care for someone else with a life-ending injury until they could get better. Not like you can do much hunting or gathering with a broken femur after all
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.
