It's pointless to look for solutions that's against human nature.
I don’t dispute capitalism and democracy.
Just trying to figure out what I (as person) really need.
Every weekend travelling by plane just to experience something else?
Ordering some stuff across the globe from Temu, Aliexpress just because it is cheap(er)?
Eating e.g. tuna because it is healthy that had to be transported around the globe?
Drinking wine from South Africa because I don’t like Californian? (Blind tests by Wine Spectator magazine confirm that even a sommelier doesn’t recognize cheap from expensive ones.)
Global export-import statistics is staggering… just a few: all metals, honey, fish, vegetables from Spain, avocados from Peru, almonds from California, cheaper than local milk transported across Europe , bananas from everywhere you can imagine… supply and demand - a lot of people have a much more money.
Vessel and plane trackers show so many vehicles moving around that I wonder how whales can handle this traffic.
There is chemical and industry that is real spin doctors.
(Almost) everyone wants to have house, car, cheap everything, travel everywhere. Those who can’t afford do everything to become rich.
Wealth is good. Plundering to get more money not so much. And mankind plunders like there is no tomorrow. All the CSR, circular economy etc is nice but brainwashing and stuff for distraction so people could feel better.
I do the capitalism part, or more specifically what form of capitalism because there is a vast range between "society should work for capitalism" and "capitalism should work for society".
I'd likely argue that on the whole capitalism in it's current form isn't working for society and the trend is towards that getting worse over time.
But we should. This is a taboo topic but pretending that these consequences are either disconnected from capitalism or that capitalism is some natural law of the universe that should never be challenged is, for lack of a better word, delusional.
These consequences are inherent to capitalism because people benefiting from it demand infinite growth and nobody is incentivized to care about the environment. People who care about it get outcompeted by those who don't in ruthless pursuit of "efficiency".
We can try to regulate it to the point that people wouldn't call it capitalism anymore but the nature of a system where the only incentive is maximizing profit will always have a natural tendency to harm the environment, so it should be disputed.
We should also not forget that a lot of effort has gone into decarbonising, and there's plenty of work going on in international cooperation, engineering, urban planning, education etc. whose work has already decreased the potential warming of the planet. We're still on a very bad trajectory that still needs more work, and there are moneyed organisations trying to stop the transition, but we shouldn't be so doomer to believe that nothing is happening.
If I pour some water in a bucket and come back to find it's all leaked out, and do this every day for all of human history and always get the same result, I don't conclude the water wouldn't leak if it just tried a little harder.
There's a hole in the bucket.
That doesn't mean it's possible for every problem. There's always a coordination cost. The larger your per-person cost times the number of people you need, the more unlikely the coordinated action is to happen. Spontaneous coordination is an oxymoron and improbable by definition. It's a situation where the system doesn't do what's energetically favored and instead does something else that isn't.
Ascribing agency to systems is a human bias. Ascribing it to groups of agents is both human nature and the fallacy of composition. Blaming individuals instead of looking at the system and the context is both human nature and the fundamental attribution error. This is one of many places where the bucket leaks.
Currently some groups with low coordination costs (and so high leverage) are coordinating to increase coordination costs for the groups that oppose them, using tactics that are independently high-leverage, multiplying their effect so much that they can make the opposition's costs effectively unbounded. Human nature makes the opposition wilfully, aggressively deny this and insist their costs are low and people are just bad and lazy. (Somehow, everybody being bad and lazy all at once does not reflect on human nature.)
The argument about coordination costs is more or less uncontroversial when projected into any other subject. It's only controversial here because of human nature. It's another leak.
Your opposition's agency is concentrated and yours is dilute. Human nature tilts the playing field, diluting yours and concentrating theirs. Accept this and adjust your strategy, or lose.
But it seems you actually agree with my initial statement? Or what are you arguing against? Because in my mind, altering our social and political systems is the only way to adjust our strategy.
Ugh, this is like my catchphrase now, but: "If everybody just" is a description of a problem, not a solution. Specifically a problem that exists because they haven't justed and will never just, no matter what could happen if they just.
Coordination metaproblems where coordination problems that exist cannot be solved because of human nature are a consequence of human nature interacting with the laws of nature.
My argument is that we don't have that capacity. The system that we have is what we have because it's what has self-assembled and would self-assemble every time if we ran it again.
I may be wrong, but that's what I'm claiming.
If we want a system different than what self-assembles, we should first admit what self-assembles, and admit it's not because of individuals not doing their part or whatever. The system is the way it is because the natural laws it follows lead it to that state. This is where the whole idea of coordination as a simple answer fails.
People won't spontaneously all accept an unappealing, morally unpleasant, complicated explanation of why things aren't better when a simple, pleasant, satisfying, even righteous explanation is available and fits their preexisting worldview.
I am tired of the moralizing arguments[0] from people sabotaging their own causes, blaming people who are doing something that might work instead of sabotaging harder. If I misunderstood and that's not you, I'm sorry.
I should have been less snippy at the top either way.
---
But different societies have developed different systems over the course of human history, no? You're probably looking at the "system" from a different perspective than I do, so I'd appreciate if you could describe this in more detail!
> My argument is that we don't have that capacity.
If humans don't have the capacity for long term collective action against individual interests, there is literally no point in trying any other system.
> If we want a system different than what self-assembles, we should first admit what self-assembles, and admit it's not because of individuals not doing their part or whatever. The system is the way it is because the natural laws it follows lead it to that state.
I really think you're reading positions into my initial comment that I've never stated, because this seems tangential to my thesis.
---
Edit: just saw the part starting at "I am tired of the moralizing arguments", not sure if I overlooked it or you edited. Either way I get your frustrations and agree that simplistic answers don't help. My initial comment was not meant as "it would be so simple if everyone just did X", but as a rebuttal to the idea that humans are incapable of long term collective action against individual interests. If humans fundamentally don't have the ability there'd be no point in trying, but I believe that we do have the capacity and should try, just as I understand you do too.
> If I misunderstood and that's not you, I'm sorry.
> I should have been less snippy at the top either way.
No worries, and thanks. I appreciate that you've explained your thoughts further!
I can't keep writing now but I will try to organize some thoughts and come back later.
As far as I can see, greed isn't automatically the biggest determining factor in such systems. It can be, but I'd need to read convincing studies by historians to believe you on this.
(of course I'm not advocating for monarchy)
That is to say, it's not always a monarch versus their general, oftentimes peasant, populace, it's rich and powerful people against other rich and powerful people.
All these relationships were incredibly important to the power dynamics, and you don't get to redefine "greedy" as "greedy, except those who are too greedy to properly play the political game". Greedy monarchs didn't last, and the greediest non-monarch-rich were unlikely to have enough allies to become dangerous.
We saw during the COVID lockdowns that a few months of no cars and drastically reduced oil usage in general how much things improved for nature in general, in fact. Earth will recover very quickly once we're gone, the question is more how do we avoid the "humans gone" part because we presumably want to keep the human species going.
We're already in an ice age (there is ice at the poles). I suspect you mean this would make Europe cooler, but do nothing to reverse the trend of increasing global mean surface (land + ocean) temperature.
Such confidence.
> This is definitely an interglacial period.
Absolutely, and therefore just as I stated, by your link, we are in an Ice Age.
(Perhaps you could read to the end of the very first sentence of your link?)
> that's not how glacial periods are defined.
What, exactly, made you think I was defining a glacial period when I spoke of "Ice Age".
If it's not clear by now, I was responding to an abuse of the term Ice age, after all ... https://youtu.be/zQuGub7yzpA?t=98
Edit: For reference: https://colossal.com/direwolf/ https://colossal.com/mammoth/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
>>>
Arguments based on human nature are nearly always awful.
...
It's human nature to care about yourself, but it's also human nature to care about others.
Different norms develop around different aspects of our nature.
You can't then use human nature to explain why it's okay to violently enforce social norms related to property,
but an unworkable injustice to violently enforce social norms related to charity.
...
While it might be human nature to consider the wood I chop mine, and the wood you chop yours,
it's probably not human nature to consider the wood as belonging to an entirely made-up legal entity
that neither planted the trees nor cut them down.
The fact of this weird arrangement, which goes against the self-interest of every woodsman,
does seem natural to a lot of people, points to the core of the problem with appeals to human nature.
...
The human nature being appealed to is shaped by the system it's being used to defend.