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Comment by customguy | Hacker News Reader

No, these are really fucked up people, to leap from that to "the species" and from that to "evolution" which humans had no clue about even hundreds of years ago... is just avoiding confronting that and them. It's half of the the reason for why these things happen and get worse, a sort of global bystander effect. We feel okay to in public dismiss this.

If you were one in a group of 4 people, and one of them fed poison to a child to remove a stain from their shoe, or just for a laugh, or for 2 cents, and someone got upset, would you talk about the species or evolution first thing? What habit did we normalise here?

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No, we as a civilization are ultimately responsible for giving bad actors power, and indeed often glorifying those actors. There are evolutionary reasons why it is so, but that's absolutely not to say that these things just happen and a species with a very different psychology couldn't avoid the same trap.

As a society we tend to reward sociopaths with power, which leads to stuff like forever chemicals. But society providing neither checks-and-balances nor even a credible thread of punishment after the fact is also part of the issue. Even sociopaths are influenced by the threat of punishment

Perhaps the centralization of governance and the asymmetric power of government over the people is the problem.

If a village of 20 people found out one of their members had been poisoning them for years, knowingly, to attain status as the mage/technocrat/leader, I suspect their punishment would be severe.

Instead, any one person or small group of people feels powerless against a seemingly infinite bureaucracy and a justice system that would sooner punish "vigilantes" than hold powerful people to account for their malice and damage to society.

You give more agency to the modern individual than I do, I think.

Exactly. It's a pretty small number of people who are this terrible. Thinking of it in evolutionary terms creates a sense of fatalism. If you look globally since the invention of agriculture, it's very clear that a) humans are extremely flexible, and b) culture matters hugely to how societies turn out.

Culture is something we inherit, but it's something we can change. If we want things to be less fucked up for the next generation, we can do that. As many before us have.

Nah, it's the species. Corporate greed is near the bottom of the list among the accolades of human cruelty.

No previous era of cruelty has threatened the existence of life itself. Corporate greed is the most hideous, horrific, inhumane era of human culture that has ever been.

these people were simply handed money and power to not do anything about it

I blame governments for not providing a way for whistleblowers to put the companies in a bind to actually do something

the best way to stop these is to force them to do something, not have them voluntarily admit wrongdoing etc.

it's like the whole "well the other ones are doing it too!" which can only be solved with aggressive regulation.

I don't think even today this stuff is being taken seriously enough.

In the real world, two out of these four people vote to protect the poisoner because poison is a conspiracy against the freedom to feed children anything you want.

The only thing that allowed them to be this 'fucked up' is allowing the creation of corperations which can make your companies actions not directly responsible to you. If boards of directors were able to be jailed for their companies actions, we would not be in anywhere near this situation. Corperation law has a lot to answer fdor.

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