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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism. If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently. Because what you see in small, specially poor communities is that trust in each other is strong.

You could argue that the church tried it and we had the inquisition, but I think it's different. We have way more benefit of hindsight and the population is way more educated than it was in the middle ages.

Not advocating for a renaissance of the Christian kingdom, but for embedding care and charity as first class moral values in economics.

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Not only is it human, it's far more general than human.

The world is not what you think it is. Social problems are almost never a result of improper social systems.

The game you are playing by virtue of existing is just shit and no amount of "rules" you build on top of it will ever change that fact.

It's not what I see. I go out and I see people helping each other, people having fun and taking care of the environment, social justice being discussed at the government level. I'm Brazilian though so I might be biased, but I think I prefer to be an idealist than a defeatist.

If the world is like what you say it is, shouldn't you just drop dead? Thinking like this is like committing philosophical suicide anyways, if you can't imagine a better world that's worth fighting for, even if it's just in a thought experiment.

This learned helplessness is by design, not by nature, so you don't question the status quo and keep working to make the elites richer without realising it's killing the world.

I think one of the core failures of our current economic religion is that we can rely solely on anonymous transactions. But many transactions fail when everything is black boxes. We can't easily evaluate (1) if the thing we got is of good quality and (2) there wasn't any harmful side effects.

Transactions need more trivially verifiable metadata. That could solve one of many issues.

> I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism

This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?

Being competitive is human nature. People will always compete for things, even if you try to artificially remove or forbid financial incentives. There are always more incentives. There will always be social standing to pursue, a coveted position, or the recognition of having accomplished something.

> If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently.

Alternate economic systems that forbid capitalism rely on heavy government enforcement to prevent people from doing capitalistic things: Running unapproved businesses, being entrepreneurial, selling goods and services at market rate.

This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).

>when we look at animals in nature

We should be able to tell which behaviors are not properly included in the concept of "humanity".

And when we find these behaviors within ourselves, recognize those as a vestige of inhuman nature.

We should be constantly striving not to confuse the unsuitable animalistic stuff as "human nature", otherwise that's the lamest excuse of all and has leveraged more stupidity than probably anything else in history.

I'm with you on competitiveness though, to a degree it's all not purely animalistic, especially not financially ;)

OTOH, the cutthroat stuff can be so inhuman there's not any question, or it wouldn't be called that.

animals do frequently get along and cooperate, ironically what youre doing is a reflection of capitalism, youre projecting the current economic system onto the animal planet. Think of that famously wrong study from the 70s about alpha wolves, its been disproven but people still of it as true because it molds to the economic system they understand.

But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Market economies, command economies, mercantile economies, and any other economic system must deal with these scarcities somehow. Even in the animal kingdom this must be contended with, albeit at a much lower level of abstraction. We deal with scarcity in a number of different ways, e.g. higher prices, waiting lines, by need, or some other metric or any combination thereof. Animals tend to deal with resource (food) scarcity through violence, abandonment, and a few other processes because not eating means death. That isn't to say cooperation doesn't happen, it absolutely does, but it is still constrained by resource scarcity.

> But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly

All economic systems are a set of trade-offs and capitalism in general tends to outperform all other economic systems we know of. That isn't to say it's a perfect system, it isn't, but I've noticed people who profess your opinion implicitly assume the alternative is a utopia that which simply does not exist. We may find a better system in the future but it will still be constrained by the law of supply and demand, resource scarcity, and human nature and hence will have trade-offs.

> animals do frequently get along and cooperate

And humans do, too. So what’s your point? I’m drawing parallels between animals and humans and you are too! You seem to be supporting my point, not refuting it.

Humans get along and cooperate at scales far beyond anything the animal kingdom can do. Capitalism has driven the advancements that enable it.

> will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?

The classic vacuous anti-capitalism rhetoric: Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which doesn’t exist and isn’t described is better. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the non-existent superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person, right?

> Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which doesn’t exist and isn’t described is better. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the non-existent superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person, right?

And this is the classic positivist rethoric that prevents self assertion and self criticism. Every doctrine that can't take criticism and take care of it's flaws while maintaining it's benefits is doomed to fail.

Nobody is saying that you are bad in essence, that is the whole idea. There is no essence. You create the meaning you see in the world.

You've nailed it: this is exactly why Soviet socialism failed in the past, and also paradoxically the reason why neoliberal capitalism is failing today.

Although I am a Marxist, I reject the idea that Communism is going to be the "final" form of human society. We may be able to get there someday, but only constant care and effort towards maintaining the system will be able to sustain it, and there is no "deterministic" answer to what the ultimate form of human society is.

If capitalism destroys the world that seems like a good reason to try an alternative, comrade!

>an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?

Not my downvote, but . . .

More like so there will be massive corporations to work for instead of the appropriate number of small businesses and farms that could substitute. For instance if things wouldn't have pivoted long ago, including major milestones like the formation of the Federal Reserve system.

Nothing like how it could have been if things would have been allowed to continue as they were progressing, the working citizens would have continued to gain wealth at a faster rate than the government, even more so than many established Wall Street capitalists. Especially the ones who have no talent for creating wealth and instead resort to just moving money around, and they were as powerful as any.

All pressure has been put on to reverse independent prosperity, whatever it takes, whenever the threat to centralized control appears on the horizon.

Those who prefer to centralize their power over you are not the ones wanting you to have an opportunity to start a small business someday. They just haven't completely eliminated that possibility. Yet.

> This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?

Even if this was true, humans aren't subjective to their base instincts and can adapt and reinvent themselves.

> Being competitive is human nature.

I'm not and I'm human.

> People will always compete for things

Sometimes you want something, but you let others have it when they need it more than you. Otherwise if you always compete for things you are just a little kid.

> This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).

This is a misunderstanding of what I said. If you read back I never said competition should be tossed out of the window, it's just that caring for the other as it is right now it's not a core value of the economic system. It's just best effort, if we can say that to the eventually charitable billionaire.

its funny how the tech community is so pro capitalism but also pro open source, which seem completely at odds.

This is a weird quirk of history. I feel like open source, and especially free software, was at least left-adjacent when I was coming up in the 90s. The bad guys were the megacorps. Open source was the counter-culture. I guess it changed around the dotcom boom.

Netscape feels like a big part of the story - a company staffed with hackers coming out of a public-funded research institute who rewrote a closed-source version of their browser that quickly killed off the predecessor and helped the company to a massive IPO. Then, only when threatened by a more established player, they finally open-sourced it. From the outside that came across more as a Hail Mary than an authentic expression of principles. Around then we also had the Red Hat IPO, the Slashdot/Andover/VA Linux thing etc. It was clear by then that open source had become another gimmick that capitalists could leverage to compound their wealth, rather than a fundamental belief that users of a piece of software should have the right to modify and reconstruct it as they see fit.

Nowadays capitalists love open source because their startups and big tech investments are the users - open source provides free labor whose products these companies can repackage and sell as a platform. Meanwhile a lot of that "free" labor is no longer done by hobbyists or researchers, but by workers at other for-profit companies looking to boost their personal brand or the company's profile, so the whole motivation to contribute has changed too.

In a free market system people can transact as they wish, including giving away something for free if they want.

There is nothing at odds at all. If you don’t see it, you might have a rather cartoonish, villainy view of a capitalism that gets promulgated by people who refuse to allow anything good or nice to be ascribed to capitalism.

If you can’t understand why capitalists can also like open source, have you considered that maybe it’s your understanding of the system that is flawed, not theirs?

I understand that capitalism is the doctrine that is based on economic growth and profit. This is invariably going to be at odds with the core tenets of open source, because given enough time ownership will have to give way to profit, hence the embrace, extend, extinguish and the various changes in licensing in major opensource projects.

However that's not even the case because op wasn't criticizing capitalism as whole, just how absurd the ethos in HN is where we seem to defend contradictory values.

one of the core tenets of capitalism is the profit motive, its a central piece of it: the idea that people innovate and create and labor for the expected reward of a pile of money, but so much of tech actually bucks this idea between open source projects and public funded initiatives (maybe not as relevant for app based coding, but the space race was pretty important for technology overall.)

>capitalism is the doctrine that is based on economic growth and profit.

These are not actually essential.

I'm not going to put down a better definition of capitalism, but if you're not handling Other Peoples' Money, and they're not handling yours, you are definitely not a capitalist.

No matter how financially successful you are as an entrepreneur with your own money, even when you out-compete capitalists in a pro-capitalist market.

Capitalism =/= free markets.

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