Comment on People Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Make Daily Life Worse
treefrog@lemm.ee 1 year agoPeople are capable of both competition and cooperation.
Capitalism goes out of the way to make the former a value.
Yes, greed is in our nature. But so is altruism. And the idea that people are just greedy by nature, and that all altruism has ulterior motivation, is something capitalists have actively encouraged to justify their values.
So yes, when it comes to greed in the West and how it’s become a value rather than a sin (Jesus eye if the needle parable), I blame capitalism. Of course, if humans didn’t have the capacity for greed capitalism wouldn’t exist.
But to dismiss capitalism as a non-factor at this point in history because humans are greedy by nature, well, it’s propaganda and not based on a modern scientific understanding of human nature.
Estiar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah that’s fair. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. We shouldn’t rely on greed to make a system nor altruism alone. The difficult part is actually making a system that works.
treefrog@lemm.ee 1 year ago
The Buddhist economy is essentially a gift economy that has survived for 2500 years.
Shit, our genealogy is also basically a gift economy, and one much more ancient than Buddhism.
Which is my way of saying I think the system is in our nature. If we can learn to embrace life and stop being so terrified of our individual deaths.
The best systems happen organically after all. And without coercion.