Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

IDK if its a modern bias or a recurring one, but people are very drawn to the idea of a core human "nature:" what we are when all the surface level stuff is stripped away.

The way the conversations I've had tend to go is ever more contrived scenarios. Eventually it gets to spaceships carrying sperm and eggs to be raised cultureless by robots. You need to avoid scenarios like these, where the boys know about raising chickens, praying and stuff. lol As if a parentless, cultureless person is more human than the rest of us... more indicative of "true" human nature.

Once we set to answering a question, it seems very hard to question the question.

View on HN

>core human "nature:" what we are when all the surface level stuff is stripped away.

That always seemed out of whack for me. If you change the environment, the individual changes too.

That's just a different individual, calling it more "true" or "pure" seems like asking "how much is 1 + apple?" (where Apple is an actual apple, not a variable).

The whole premise is fundamentally wrong. How I am right now is not false nor unnatural.

>> How (is it) not false nor unnatural.

Exactly. There have never been culturaless, parentless people. If there were/are, then that is simply a terrible circumstance and terrible results will probably occur.

There is an idea that after the bombs fall we all turn into raping and pillaging marauders. I have no idea why people find this idea comforting.

In reality villages will be built, laws written and religions made up.

These villages better build defenses against the marauders or all is for naught. And of course, the best defense is a good offense. And... Fast forward to the presently peaceful times of mutually assured destruction!

That is a point of a village as opposed to living in separate farmsteads. (there are other points to villages, but putting a group of people together is an automatic form of defense)

Historically, this doesn't seem to be true.

Villages appear long before defensive fortifications in the record, in many cases. Pure reason is not very good at forming predictive theories about history, as a general rule.

There are many possible reasons for villages, and cultural reasons are a very big determinant of how people live. So are economic reasons. Many of us live in big cities now, and it's generally less safe.

You get villages because foraging really sucks. It's an ease-of-survival thing around food production.

Foraging is done from villages as well. They tend to not have tents/houses, just a community fire that moves when the tribe moves. Still a village.

Foraging sucks less than subsistence farming. However farmers are able to put a lot more people into given land area and so farming villages won out.

Just having a number of people living together is protection even before fortification. Your point is well taken though.

Don't underestimate just how many people are needed to defend a village.

A village has a lot of land to defend and not many people to do it. The local town or city sized group will just pitch up with many more men and overrun you. All whilst having enough people left for defence. And they are likely to have more access to heavy weapons that can blow your house up from a distance.

Nations will overrun villages, but a city alone doesn't. Cities need villages to provide food, so a city never goes to war - it is instead the nation, headed by the city but also including all the villages.

It can be both, no?

Look at human history: lots of villages and religions, also lots of raping and pillaging.

We tend to record the raping and pillaging because those are the times of disruption. I'm not a historian, but I can imagine that there are long stretches of history that are relatively conflict-free for most of the world, but such times are not really that interesting so no one tells stories about them.

At least in the enlightenment period, tend to come from political philosophy rather than history... though the two are closely related in this period. Notably, Hobbes and his "state of nature" concept.

Philosophy of this period (also Locke, Marx, etc) tended to speculate about the past using reason, rather than empirically. A lot of their ideas have been passed down to us.

Hobbes' saw life in the "natural" state "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." Eventually government arises, using its monopoly of violence to end day-to-day violence, cheating and such.

I don't think the original writers are compelling anymore, but they are hard to shake entirely. Memes die hard.

In any case, I think the reality of people at all times is that cooperation is a fundamental. There are no societies without cooperation, some form of solidarity, love, etc. We could have never survived without it. Violence is also common in history, but we don't need it to survive. We also know that primates, dogs and other creatures have demonstrably empathetic behaviours, a sense of fairness and such.

As I implied at the start, I think the mistake is literal fundamentalism. Human behaviour can't be logically derived from a fundamental nature.

“A Canticle for Leibowitz” is a great book which follows this scenario.

probably the fallout games paint an accurate picture.

People are quick to discount the value of education (or upbringing) from the early age. Humans have started developing quickly with the development of language and especially writing. Take that away, and we are looking at another dozens of thousands of years of getting back to it, if at all.

The best evidence to me is how those "lost in woods, found years later" kids have developed: mostly mimicking other animals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child). It's even hard to change that later on.

Yes of course, the natural course of development of humans is to do away with all other humans. Then you can be fully human.

>Eventually it gets to spaceships carrying sperm and eggs to be raised cultureless by robots.

I recommend "Raised by Wolves".

Awesome show; looking forward to the next season. Explores parenting, "religion" vs "science", desolation, and growing up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com