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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

It's not hard to convince a peace activist to support peace. They're already inclined to it, and weren't seriously considering waging war to achieve their aims anyway.

It is incredibly difficult to convince a greedy bastard to support peace. The natural order, for millennia, has been that when a greedy bastard meets a peace-loving activist, the greedy bastard takes the peacenik's stuff and then kills them. That is why we continue to have greedy bastards after millennia, and many of the original peaceful hunter-gatherer tribes have been killed off.

Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-containment vessel. Historically, people who desire world domination achieve it by killing everybody else. Capitalism has managed to convince them that the path to world domination is making stuff and providing services for everybody else. This is a huge change in incentives.

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  > Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-containment vessel.

i used to think this as well, but as time has gone on, i wonder more deeply about this... like what are the conditions that create sociopaths in the first place? what causes these people to act in such ways?

  > Capitalism has managed to convince them that the path to world domination is making stuff and providing services for everybody else.

but in the end, don't we still end up with sociopaths in charge?

You always will since they're strongly favored in short term outcomes. Think of it as a harm reduction strategy, of the viable options it's generally the least disfavorable.

It's probably genetic - the heritability of psychopathy is about as big as intelligence or height [1]. And it's propagated because somebody who kills all the menfolk, takes all the spoils, and rapes all the women manages to pass on their genes to an awful lot of offspring.

Whether you end up with sociopaths in charge depends on whether you view profits as controlling the CEO or CEOs as controlling the profits. IMHO the former view is more accurate: you can reliably predict a psychopathic CEOs actions as that which will increase profits, while if they were actually in charge, their actions should be unpredictable.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-019-0488-z

Capitalism certainly deserves credit for those rose-colored glasses so many people like to wear.

Rather than point at a bunch of historical counterpoints, let me ask you this: are arms manufacturers and dealers engaged in capitalism? Weapons and munitions are certainly 'stuff' that is manufactured and sold in highly competitive markets.

> The natural order, for millennia, has been that when a greedy bastard meets a peace-loving activist, the greedy bastard takes the peacenik's stuff and then kills them

> Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-containment vessel.

So the capitalist plantation owners were convinced to give up slaves peacefully and the civil war was for nothing?

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