[a wide character looks smug with a wide smile]
Your ideology is wrong and can't work because "human nature" is to exploit others

[a thought bubble is connected to their head]
I really really want to exploit others, exploiting or being exploited is the only way I can picture society please God I play that you let me become an exploiter I dream of it every day

https://thebad.website/comic/the_human_nature_alibi

It might not be that the person wants to exploit others but that exploitation is the norm in their experience in life.

The prehistoric southern levenant was peaceful for over 10,000 years.

The best reason to have children is for the free labor on your farm. Don't live on a farm? Force them to make shit you can sell on Etsy. Gotta make a profit somehow.

From the time of the Natufians, beginning around 13100 BC , up to the Early Bronze Age IIb around 3200 BC, there are only a handful of violent deaths indicated by skeletal remains:

Guess the Bronze Age Collapse never happened. The Sea Peoples never swept through coastal cities raiding and plundering in the Mediterranean. Egypt and Assyria never dominated their neighbors. All those books I read were wrong. Even in Egyptian tombs, the extensive records of wars are all wrong.

Listen up. New information. All reports of societies duking it out in ancient history didn't happen. It's time to realign our understanding of human nature. War is a modern concept. In fact, I'm gonna go even further and declare that until the USA and our genocidal partner attacked Iran this year, there had never been a war EVER. Tell your friends.

We’ve said the word exploit so many fucking times they’ve lost all damn meaning!

I apologize for the exploitives.

You can think something is human nature, but also think that you’re above that nature

I am above drinking, eating, and defecating.

I will proceed to live the rest of my life without doing any of those things.

Bad@jlai.lu exploited me to comment

Just other people. Obviously I'm better than them. Maybe better than the gods.

But I need to excuse my bad behavior and shitty ideas with an intellectual lacuna that brooks no argument. Do you have some better alternative?

Uh, NO, the best reason to have children is that the line must go up and the social security system is going to be partially unfunded within six years!

And must be excused by intellectual lacunae?

I mean. That's exactly why all these systems fail. The shitty people get ahead by exploitation or breaking the rules.

American leftists becoming addicted to extracting social capital this last decade kind of low-key has me thinking he might be right. Not that it's impossible to live that way but the will to power is just too strong for egalitarian notions to ever become a significant thing again.

We've got like a dormant virus in our souls that was just waiting for the internet to exist and for money to get low

There's no thing like an American leftist because there's no left in the US.

Right, and imo most people just want to get along. We just need a way to defend the commons from the shitty people rather than make them trillionaires.

Like, even if that was human nature, shouldn't we try to overcome it?

And who thinks otherwise are just dumb mouth shitters who only had US propaganda for meals pasture all their lives.

You sure will!

Right, surely you must question your assumptions when there are no violent deaths at all.

The kinds of injuries they're talking about cranial fractures, a blow to the head, multiple fractures, etc. surely are seen today in people who die on construction sites, or in car crashes or after falling off a building.

If you're not finding those kinds of remains, something else must be happening. Maybe there was a taboo against burying people who didn't have perfect bodies. Maybe anybody who died from violence or violent accident was given a "sky burial" or something.

I mean, put aside the idea that there was no war. Is it reasonable to think that in the bronze age, people aren't getting mauled by wild animals? They're not getting kicked in the head by their livestock? They're not falling off buildings?

Well, the serial killer problem became much less pronounced

I think it's not that everyone wants to exploit, but if the opportunity exists and there are insufficient systems to discourage it, then some will. As demonstrated by [wide gesture at everything]

Aka republicans

Well, I thought you had an accurate take up until the tourettes goblin made you reply to yourself there. Something tells me your own ability to make anything good in the world might be a vestigial non-prority next to impotently talking shit on the internet. So at least we have that in common

Don't ever compare your greedy cynicism with my accurate take on such brain dead society divided between bleach drinkers and those who expect voting out genociders (to make other genociders take place).

"☹️ I'm not like other internet snark idiots. I fight people on the internet for real"

wait I think I just realized who you are. my bad, I enjoy reading you fight with other people but obviously couldn't take the heat myself. Carry on.

The one that gets me is "Without the profit motive, no one would innovate."

Like, my dude, have you ever met an innovative person? You can't pay them to stop. It's a compulsion. Working for money is only impeding their innovative capacity.

Or "Who would go through the years of training to be a doctor or engineer?". Uh, the good doctors and engineers who do it because it's their passion. I don't want to go to a doctor who only did it for the money.

aka Democrats aka every career politician in existence
They all serve capital in the end

If those books told you the bronze age collapse happened between 13 thousand and 3 thousand BC then they were absolutely 100% wrong.

13100 BC , up to the Early Bronze Age IIb around 3200

Guess the Bronze Age Collapse never happened.

...And this, kids, is why "a little learning is a dangerous thing".

That's bullshit. Along with the seven deadly sins there are seven living virtues. You have free will and you decide what good or bad shit you get up to in life. Although there are exceptions to every rule. Sometimes we are shunted in specific directions towards the chute, just like cattle, and most choice goes out the window.

We should. And in an ideologically pure society we would. I honestly think people try.

But you don't have to be a manipulative person to see the value of this argument, like the comic is suggesting. You simply need to look at the world you want to make through a defensive lens. The truth is, even if we built a society where it was not the norm to be manipulative and exploitative, there would still be manipulative and exploitative people - and in such a society they would quickly climb to the top of the social hierarchy and reclaim power. And the world would decline back to what it was.

This is not an argument for inaction, imo. Its an argument for vigilance. But it also means we cannot consider ourselves "above" or "beyond" the undesirable traits of humanity, because that would make us victims of the cruel and the selfish. It also means the acceptance of checks and balances on power, which sadly... don't always stick around.

Funny how they all just disappeared

Have they ever heard of github?

Lmao this guy believes the MSM. Iran isn't real lmao

What does extracting social capital mean?

Like using other people or their conditions in a social setting to benefit yourself. Think of like how desperate people on the internet are to be seen saying the correct things in front of the correct people.

Or the phenomenon of dunking. When you dunk on somebody on the internet you're extracting a social value from them. It isn't as easy of a thing to do IRL or before the internet age but here we're operating in a marketplace of attention. Capitalism has infiltrated our very social interactions so we act like capitalists even when there's no money involved.

How is this measured?

Vibes mostly. Tracking karma like reddit encouraged people to act like they're in a market but it wasn't a real measurement in any way other than affecting the sort of posts and comments. I suppose if you wanted to put a number on it it's probably the number of people a given interaction reaches. Or maybe the amount of time people spend engaging with it.

Peace in the prehistory is kinda difficult to prove. But if we consider the fact that they only started to build fortifications when the egyptians invaded, its likely that they lived peacefully prior to the invasion.

Considering that we know that chimps engage in "war", and war has been part of recorded history since as long as there has been recorded history, it's pretty easy to assume that there has always been "war".

But humans also descended from the more peaceful Bonobos. If we were really warlike by default like the chimps we would be more than happy to engage in warfare no?

We didn't descend from either chimps or bonobos. Chimps, bonobos and humans all descended from a common ancestor.

In addition, bonobos do engage in violent conflicts. Much less often than chimps, but it does happen.