So the first person who acquired wealth and/or power got no pleasure from it, because that’s not in their nature, but nonetheless kept it and passed it down to their children, who also derived no pleasure from it but also kept it and passed it down, until it had become ingrained tradition, and then people started to acquire the desire for the wealth and power they had had for generations?
Yes. Because it benefited them over others. Humans are capable of choosing to do things that benefit them and it has nothing to do with their “nature”. Human nature is to not die and in the ages when humans could barely produce enough food for their own survival, it was beneficial to be in a position of power because it let you control the resources, ensuring you had enough for yourself and maybe some of your subjects as an afterthought. Marxism does not reject the notion that power benefits the people who have then, in fact that’s a core fact that Marxism is based on, and it calls out the fact that feudal/monarchist/capitalist power benefits the ruling class by subjugating and exploiting the working class, and proposes that fully collective control of resources will benefit everyone much more equally than the current system. I don’t think you have to agree with Marxism’s proposed solution to this to recognize the problem it points out. It asserts that because we have lived in such systems our whole lives, we think it’s human nature when in reality a person born and living in some other system (Marxist or otherwise) will think their system is human nature, because in reality no system is and they’re all abstract inventions with nothing to do with our neurobiology or evolution.
For a non political example, I write code all day because it benefits me and I think it’s the most normal and intuitive thing ever, even though I doubt programming was something humans evolved to do, we figured it out ourselves and it had nothing to do with our nature. You literally have to learn and practice abstract computational thinking while learning to program because it’s very unintuitive at times compared to how humans think by default, yet people learn it just fine and once you do, it becomes your nature.
The cool thing about humans is we’re not bound to natural instincts and can choose to live however we want. I think we should leverage this ability instead of using it as a justification for maintaining the same broken systems that have let us down over and over again.
Define “doing things which enable you to survive.” In my definition, that doesn’t involve being king or exploiting others to hoard more wealth than you could ever hope to spend. You need some minimum amount of resources to survive but hoarding many times more than you need doesn’t help you survive and only harms others.
“If a monkey hoards more bananas than it can eat, causing its peers to starve while most of the bananas rot in its pile, scientists will study its brain to find out what the hell is wrong with it. But when a human does it, they get celebrated under capitalism.”
Also, it was once human nature to flee from fire, but once we learned to control it, it became an integral part of our lives. Human “nature” changes over time because your brain is pretty much a blank slate when you’re born and doesn’t fully finish structuring itself until your 20s. Your entire childhood is spent developing your “nature” that you’ll have for your adult life (and even then you can change it at will even in adulthood if you change your living conditions), which is why we’re more influenced by the conditions we grow up in than any sort of innate biology. What “nature” was best for hunter gatherer or even medieval times are totally obsolete in our modern day, so they stop being our default “nature” due to children no longer growing up in those conditions.
The idea that your nature is influenced by your conditions isn’t even unique to humans. Most animals are the same, a house cat or dog will learn from a very young age how to beg for food from their owners while a feral cat/dog won’t because that’s not beneficial for their survival when they’re not a pet. Hell, house cats keep making kitten sounds because their owners keep treating them like kittens, while feral cats stop meowing once they leave their parents. Animals born and raised in captivity in general often show completely different behaviors and personality compared to wild animals of the same species, because their brains are literally structured differently due to growing up in different conditions.
So the first person who acquired wealth and/or power got no pleasure from it, because that’s not in their nature, but nonetheless kept it and passed it down to their children, who also derived no pleasure from it but also kept it and passed it down, until it had become ingrained tradition, and then people started to acquire the desire for the wealth and power they had had for generations?
Yes. Because it benefited them over others. Humans are capable of choosing to do things that benefit them and it has nothing to do with their “nature”. Human nature is to not die and in the ages when humans could barely produce enough food for their own survival, it was beneficial to be in a position of power because it let you control the resources, ensuring you had enough for yourself and maybe some of your subjects as an afterthought. Marxism does not reject the notion that power benefits the people who have then, in fact that’s a core fact that Marxism is based on, and it calls out the fact that feudal/monarchist/capitalist power benefits the ruling class by subjugating and exploiting the working class, and proposes that fully collective control of resources will benefit everyone much more equally than the current system. I don’t think you have to agree with Marxism’s proposed solution to this to recognize the problem it points out. It asserts that because we have lived in such systems our whole lives, we think it’s human nature when in reality a person born and living in some other system (Marxist or otherwise) will think their system is human nature, because in reality no system is and they’re all abstract inventions with nothing to do with our neurobiology or evolution.
For a non political example, I write code all day because it benefits me and I think it’s the most normal and intuitive thing ever, even though I doubt programming was something humans evolved to do, we figured it out ourselves and it had nothing to do with our nature. You literally have to learn and practice abstract computational thinking while learning to program because it’s very unintuitive at times compared to how humans think by default, yet people learn it just fine and once you do, it becomes your nature.
The cool thing about humans is we’re not bound to natural instincts and can choose to live however we want. I think we should leverage this ability instead of using it as a justification for maintaining the same broken systems that have let us down over and over again.
It’s human nature to survive, but doing things which enable you to survive is not part of human nature?
Define “doing things which enable you to survive.” In my definition, that doesn’t involve being king or exploiting others to hoard more wealth than you could ever hope to spend. You need some minimum amount of resources to survive but hoarding many times more than you need doesn’t help you survive and only harms others.
“If a monkey hoards more bananas than it can eat, causing its peers to starve while most of the bananas rot in its pile, scientists will study its brain to find out what the hell is wrong with it. But when a human does it, they get celebrated under capitalism.”
Also, it was once human nature to flee from fire, but once we learned to control it, it became an integral part of our lives. Human “nature” changes over time because your brain is pretty much a blank slate when you’re born and doesn’t fully finish structuring itself until your 20s. Your entire childhood is spent developing your “nature” that you’ll have for your adult life (and even then you can change it at will even in adulthood if you change your living conditions), which is why we’re more influenced by the conditions we grow up in than any sort of innate biology. What “nature” was best for hunter gatherer or even medieval times are totally obsolete in our modern day, so they stop being our default “nature” due to children no longer growing up in those conditions.
The idea that your nature is influenced by your conditions isn’t even unique to humans. Most animals are the same, a house cat or dog will learn from a very young age how to beg for food from their owners while a feral cat/dog won’t because that’s not beneficial for their survival when they’re not a pet. Hell, house cats keep making kitten sounds because their owners keep treating them like kittens, while feral cats stop meowing once they leave their parents. Animals born and raised in captivity in general often show completely different behaviors and personality compared to wild animals of the same species, because their brains are literally structured differently due to growing up in different conditions.