0:00 Socialism sounds great in theory, but it just goes against human nature. >> Human nature is to be selfish and individualistic and only care about yourself and to want to get as much stuff as possible. >> Have the people making those statements considered that perhaps they might be projecting? That might be your personal human nature, but what you do naturally or even what you do as a result of societal conditioning cannot be extrapolated and universalized to all of humanity. Not all 8 billion of us are just like you, John. The idea that human nature prevents humans from realizing more egalitarian ways of organizing society is goofy on so many levels. And yet, it's such a prevalent argument that people keep bringing up constantly. Even though it's ahistorical, unscientific, and denies the fact that the only reason humans are where we are today and not
0:47 like living in caves is because of our tendency to cooperate and to use our big brains to build on top of the knowledge already uncovered by other members of our species. We survive through cooperation and depending on each other. We're also pretty powerful when working together and pretty useless when alone. Like, I think I can confidently say that you are watching this video on a device that you bought and not one that you mined the minerals for yourself, created blueprints and designs for from scratch and then assembled with your own two hands and somehow generated the Wi-Fi signal for. You are dependent on this massive web of global cooperation just to watch this video because the idea of a fully independent, self-made, self-reliant human being is a fantasy. Anyway, this narrative that human nature
1:33 is competitive, individualistic, and selfish, and that socialism is impossible because of it is not a truism that reflects the true nature of reality. It's just a really convenient way of upholding the current status quo. Which is why this myth still persists despite being wrong. And that's what this video will be talking about. We're going to talk about human nature obviously and why claiming that human nature is a particular way is not helpful. How this narrative that human nature is evil upholds the status quo. What actually determines and shapes human nature and how we can use that information to build a better world. >> [music] >> Something kind of funny I've noticed is that when people make statements about human nature, they're usually just
2:20 projecting. Like no matter what the claim is, because as a human, you only really have consistent access to one perspective and that's your own. There are a lot of commonalities among humans because we are all humans having a human experience. But can we really generalize that human experience to a few adjectives that are supposed to describe everyone? Human nature is greedy. Human nature is selfish. Human nature is altruistic. My hot take is that anyone who says any of these things is just projecting. Like if someone says human nature is to want to exploit others, they're just confessing that they personally would exploit others if given the chance. If you say that human nature is to be altruistic and kind and helpful, congrats. you're probably altruistic and kind and helpful, or at least think that those things are good and valuable, and I'd honestly rather
3:05 have people do the latter than the former, but put a pin in that. We'll talk about why that's still not exactly correct later. I mean, if you're a selfish person, you'd probably never claim that human nature is inherently generous, but you personally are just a super weird freak that needs to sit at top a pile of gold in your mansion, right? That'd be so weird. human nature is to be greedy except I'm built different and I'm the only generous person in the world somehow because once you start saying that no there are people whose nature goes against human nature then is that even human nature I don't know if the people claiming that human nature is evil really understand that what they're doing is a cell phone but whatever and regardless of that the only utility of such claims is not to reveal some deeper truth about humanity or to change the world for the better or
3:51 anything useful but to maintain and uphold hold the current status quo, which I don't know, I think that's a bad idea. Before we dive deeper into human nature, I wanted to talk about the sponsor of today's video, Flexispot. Flexispot sent me this desk and walking pad, and I am such a huge fan. These are so awesome. Fun fact, my master's degree is in human factors and ergonomics. So, I love an ergonomic workstation, especially cuz I kind of need it for my hyper mobile body. And this standing desk and walking pad just takes my work setup to the next level. I got the bamboo desk with the black frame, and it's super sturdy, beautiful, and well-designed. This incredible height adjustable desk comes with a 15-year warranty and 30-day risk-free returns. The height also goes up to 49.4 in, which is perfect for my tall baddies who struggle to find a standing desk that's
4:37 tall enough, and it can even hold up to 355 lbs. And the walking pad, of course, is super easy to use. You just plug it in, and then use the remote that comes with it, and then bam, you get your steps in and don't even have to go outside. It's the best. Like this is legit one of the coolest sponsors I've worked with because I just love ergonomics. I actually wrote part of the script using this setup and it was amazing. I definitely recommend this to anyone whose job involves sitting in front of the computer so you can actually get some steps in during the day and maintain that hip mobility. 10 out of 10. I'm going to keep writing scripts while walking. If you're looking for new ergonomic office furniture like this amazing standing desk and walking pad, click the link below to get yours today. Thank you to Flexispot for sponsoring this video. Now, back to the video. The idea that people are inherently selfish, greedy, evil, individualistic, whatever, because it's
5:24 human nature very conveniently upholds the current neoliberal status quo and shapes what we think is possible. Neoliberalism is the form of capitalism we live under now in the West, characterized by deregulation, privatization, and austerity with limited state intervention. It claims that if we just let markets run wild and don't allow people to be dependent on the state, then wealth will magically trickle down, generating an unprecedented era of well-being for the entire world. Still waiting for that to happen. By the way, the reality is is that neoliberalism actually causes extreme wealth inequality, reduces people's access to necessary social services, and only benefits the ruling class, the bourgeoisi. It also individualizes all these problems and essentially makes you believe that if you're poor, uneducated, don't have
6:10 healthare, can't find a job, etc., that's your own personal failing. Neoliberalism basically offloads the problems of the system onto individuals and blames them for what are actually systemic failures. Issues like homelessness, unemployment, poor access to healthcare, and poor education are all systemic issues that are blamed on individuals under this model despite being policy choices. Saying that humans are naturally evil and selfish is extremely helpful for upholding this particular status quo. If humans are naturally evil and selfish, then the bourgeoisi who privately own the means of production, the factories, facilities, whatever required to do labor are just doing what any human would naturally do. Even if that requires destroying the environment and
6:57 exploiting their own workers. They're just looking out for their own self-interest, guided by the invisible hand of the free market, which is not a real thing, but we won't get into that right now. Large corporations love state subsidies, though. If humans are naturally compelled by their very nature to exploit other humans for their own benefit, then there is no way that you can ever build a society free of exploitation. So why even try? Uh do do you see how this logic works? It's also why we read so much dystopian fiction in middle and high school in the US. So you start to believe that attempting to organize society around the principles of cooperation and meeting everyone's needs will always devolve into something much worse than the current status quo. So don't even try. Again, it's all part of this very convenient narrative that does nothing but umble the status quo,
7:44 which makes things pretty bad for the entire working class. As Marxist psychologist Eric from argues in his book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, most people are quite ready to denounce faith in man's improvement as unrealistic. But they do not recognize that despair is often just as unrealistic. It is easy to say man has always been a killer, but the statement nevertheless is not correct for it neglects to take into account the intricacies of the history of destructiveness. It is equally easy to say the desire to exploit others is just human nature. But again, the statement neglects or distorts the facts. In brief, the statement human nature is evil is not a bit more realistic than
8:30 the statement human nature is good. But the first statement is much easier to make. Anyone who wants to prove man's evilness finds followers most readily, for he offers everybody an alibi for his own sins and seemingly risks nothing. Yet the spreading of irrational despair is in itself destructive as all untruth is. It discourages and confuses. Also, just because people are a certain way, that doesn't mean that you need to structure society around their worst impulses. Like people have bad traits and do bad things. So we should structure society around those bad traits and make it easier to do bad things is not really a compelling argument. We actually don't have to do
9:15 that. Especially because structuring society in that particular way is how you end up shaping human nature to be that way and to suck. Plus a system that's only been around for 3 to 400 years cannot possibly represent the entirety of human nature. That would be absurd. Not even class society could represent all of human nature because humans were not always living in class societies. [music] As we established, human nature cannot be defined by particular truisms or specific adjectives like good or evil. But of course, we also can't just say that humans share zero commonalities with all other humans or that we're all blank slates and there's no such thing as human nature. So what is human
10:00 nature? From a Marxist standpoint, human nature is whatever is incentivized in the society that you live in. And like everything else, it is also a dialectical struggle of opposites. What does this mean? According to Karl Marx, it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. This means that our material conditions such as the mode of production we live under, the work you do, what you need to do to survive, what society rewards or punishes give rise to our ideas, culture, values, and what feels natural to you. And then all of that impacts the material. And it's an everlooping cycle.
10:47 Watch my dialectical materialism video. What we value largely depends on what is incentivized by our current material conditions. If society incentivizes hoarding wealth, people will see greed as a good and smart thing. If it incentivizes cooperation, people will see helping others as the logical thing to do. Human nature being a dialectical struggle of opposites means that we aren't 100% beholden to our societal conditioning. We contain contradictions and different potentials that get activated depending on what's incentivized, but also depending on who we are as a person, our material conditions. It's a whole thing. We have the capacity to be altruistic or selfish, good or evil, cooperative or competitive. And you're making decisions about this every single day and reinforcing one or the other. But any
11:34 one of those qualities can win out depending on who you are as a person combined with your material conditions. The material conditions definitely have a huge impact, but you still have the capacity to resist societal conditioning through struggle. Human nature is not greedy, but it's not altruistic. It's that you have two wolves inside of you. One is greedy and the other is altruistic. And your family, your society, the media, and you can pick a wolf to feed and they're embroiled in a dialectical struggle. And then you have a bunch of other wolves also within you that are embroiled in a similar dialectical struggle and also influenced by all of these forces. I feel like this metaphor is falling apart. If the society that you grow up in incentivizes being competitive and greedy, then yeah, the majority of people are going to end
12:20 up that way. But because it's dialectical and there is a struggle of opposites, that does not mean that a greed incentivizing society will generate a 100% greedy population. Every single society has its dissident and people who disagree with its core values. Under capitalism, the dissident tend to be people whose values oppose the things that get incentivized under the capitalist mode of production and who have nurtured the values of solidarity and cooperation. Basically, human nature is not some eternal timeless default. Like everything else, it's always changing. Selfishness or altruism by themselves are not human nature. Not exactly at least. But the struggle between altruism and selfishness is very much a part of human nature. [music]
13:07 In the anatomy of human destructiveness, From explores the roots of human violence and discusses how prehistoric huntergatherer humans were characterized by minimum destructiveness because, as you would guess, they had to cooperate and share to survive. He argues that only with the increasing productivity and division of labor, the formation of a large surplus, and the building of states with hierarchies and elites, large-scale destructiveness and cruelty came into existence and grew as civilization and the role of power grew. The increase in large-scale human destructiveness coincided with the advent of agriculture. Not because agriculture makes people violent, but because class society arose alongside it. And also the patriarchy and the state. This new hierarchical way of organizing society by class. This new
13:54 social being led to a social character that normalized and incentivized violence, greed, and hoarding while alienating people from their labor, the fruits of their labor, their fellow laborers, and their own human essence. This alienation can lead to a sense of powerlessness and loneliness. In an attempt to overcome those negative feelings, some people act in ways that are destructive towards others and seek control and dominance over them. Others turn that destructiveness inward and try to keep their head down, submit to the powers that be and avoid being disruptive in the hopes that if they follow all the rules, everything will be okay for them. Since we still live in a class society after all these years, all of that is still the case. Hoarding wealth and resources, getting to the top
14:40 of the hierarchy, exploiting others, and doing whatever it takes to benefit yourself, even if it's at the expense of others, are still very much incentivized under capitalism. According to Marxist sociologist Eric Olen Wright, >> capitalist cultures generally affirm two clusters of broadly shared values that are in tension with community and solidarity. Competitive individualism and privatized consumerism. Competitive individualism refers to the set of values arising from the fact that under capitalism, companies must compete to attain the highest market share and earn the most profits. You know, the profit motive. This material fact gives rise to social norms such as measuring one's self-worth through comparison with others. Striving for success even at the expense of others. Valuing self-reliance
15:27 and independence and stigmatizing dependence. This value is reflected in slogans like greed is good. Looking out for number one and nice guys finish last. Under capitalism, the social context in which values like community and solidarity are viewed as relevant is constantly narrowing. Like it's fine to feel a sense of community and solidarity with your family, for example. But having solidarity with the entire working class, including people in the global south, what are you, some sort of commie? It's not too late to become one if you're not. The other value that capitalism affirms is privatized consumerism. In consumerrist cultures, people tend to believe that life satisfaction depends on buying more and more stuff regardless of the harm that doing so may cause to others. As a
16:15 result, necessities like housing are viewed as a factor of personal consumption and sometimes even a business investment rather than as a public good and a human right. Essentially, capitalism conditions people into not wanting to rely on others, viewing their problems as purely individual in nature, and prioritizing themselves, even if it's at the expense of others, which disrupts working-class solidarity. People also live in constant fear of losing access to their livelihood and all the things that come along with it, like housing and health care if you're in the US. So, they learn to comply with the system to maintain some semblance of stability. Would you say that people are by their very nature compliant or disruptive? That's a trick question. The answer is both because it's a dialectical struggle of opposites.
17:00 Uh so it depends. These values don't arise in a vacuum. They're the result of material conditions which incentivize these values. Under the system, hoarding wealth is rewarded. Buying up houses to rent them out at a higher price is rewarded. Building data centers near already vulnerable communities and getting people sick as a result is rewarded. Letting a vascular disease that causes chronic illness and sometimes sudden and eventual death rip through the entire population is rewarded. Destroying the environment is rewarded. Building clean air infrastructure or green energy infrastructure or like a high-speed rail is not rewarded because it's not profitable so it doesn't get done. The existence of the profit motive in this class society means that as long as the ruling class is making record profits,
17:47 then everything's fine. I mean, it's not fine for most people, but we don't live in a class neutral society. So, that doesn't actually matter to the powers that be. As Victor Leonard Allen states in his book, The Russians Are Coming: The Politics of Antis Sovietism, capitalism comprises sets and layers of exploitative relations derived from the antagonistic class relationship between the owners and non-owners of property. Exploiters are pitted against the exploited and rival exploiters are pitted against each other. This system operates with a ruthless disregard of personalities and of compassion for people. This characteristic is present within a single capitalist country and in its relations with others. On an international level, there is a hierarchy of nations exploiting and being exploited. This is what makes up
18:34 the capitalist system. A system is what it does. And this current system outputs values like competitive individualism and privatized consumerism while alienating everyone, disrupting solidarity, stressing everyone out, and exploiting everyone who doesn't own private property, especially people in the global south. Wow, that sucks as a system, right? And when I say property or private property, I don't mean personal property like a house that you live in or a car that you drive, but like private property or means of production like an apartment complex that you rent out or a factory that you hire workers to work at or whatever. Just because this current society generates those terrible outcomes like exploitation, that does not mean that any of it is human nature. It literally doesn't have to be this way. And if you think it does, my brother in Christ, you lack imagination.
19:21 The problem is within you. Develop your imagination. If the material base of society determines what is incentivized and thus what we value, the obvious solution to creating a new human nature that incentivizes cooperation and solidarity is to create a new material base that incentivizes these pro-social behaviors. One where the means of production are owned collectively rather than privately. So workers own their workplaces and can make decisions about those workplaces together while collectively contributing to building society. That's called socialism, which is the necessary transitional period before we can achieve a classless, stateless, moneyless society, which is communism. And this isn't just me being
20:07 like, well, if we try really hard, we can change people for the better. It's never been done before, but we can make it happen if we try. Maybe. No, this is not just theoretical. Changing human nature to be more cooperative by incentivizing cooperation has successfully been done before multiple times. Before I get into that, let me prime your brain to better understand what I'm going to be talking about with a very very small scale example. The smallest you can think of. You can see how cooperation can be incentivized even on a small scale and even under capitalism when you look at workplaces where everyone is rewarded for working together towards a common goal. When I worked in skincare retail like 10 years ago, remember to wear sunscreen daily. By the way, one of the stores I worked at would get a holiday bonus if the
20:52 store as a whole made a certain amount of money. We also had an amazing manager which certainly helped. And obviously this was under capitalism. But despite that, this working together towards a common goal fostered an environment of cooperation and friendship among all of us. I mean, we still strove to get the best KPIs and whatever, but no one attempted to sabotage anyone or anything like that because it would literally help no one and hurt everyone in this scenario. Cooperation was very much incentivized, which is why that was like one of the best jobs I've ever had. And I've had like 13 jobs. A few of my co-workers at the job had previously worked for the same parent company, but in department stores where workers earned an individual commission and were rewarded for getting as many sales as possible individually rather than as a store. And of course, because
21:37 competition was incentivized rather than cooperation, my old co-workers described their former workplaces as not really conducive to fostering a sense of community or friendship among workers, unlike our store. Instead, people were like cutthroat and backstabby and would do things like stealing other people's regular clients so they could maximize their own incomes. Like, people just really didn't care if what they were doing was at the expense of others as long as they got that bag. And this is just a micro tiny tiny tiny example of how incentivizing certain things can influence individual behavior. As you can imagine, incentivizing cooperation on an even larger scale by creating an economic system built around it yields some pretty good results. Anna Louise Strong talks about this exact phenomenon in her 1936 book, This Soviet World,
22:25 where she shares her brilliant observations of how people were actively changed for the better by the incentivization of pro-social behavior under the Soviet Union's socialist economic base. Anna Louise Strong even makes a point to be like, "No, dude. Trust me, Russians sucked before the revolution, but they're way better now thanks to the socialist system where workers collectively own productive property." Americans often ask me whether Russians are not naturally more altruistic than Americans, more fit for communism, they imply. No, it is something quite different. Russians at the time of revolution were more medieval than Americans, which means naturally more petty, unreliable, inefficient, given to bargaining and cheating. Joint possession of the country's resources and productive mechanism is the economic reality which
23:12 unifies Soviet life and makes it dynamic. It is this that washes out the antagonism between personal and public good. That makes men say we. It is this that makes men conscious planners of the future. For owners plan, but non-owners can only fight or drift. The chief quality of Soviet civilization is the sense that the world is ours to seize, understand, and make over. This is because according to Strong, ownership brings freedom in planning. Clearness of goal, harmony of intellect and will in expanding life. Joint ownership brings comradeship reinforcing freedom and a new widened will to conquer space and time.
23:59 In a socialist system, the people, the masses, are also able to function as a single unit working towards a unified collective goal, which you guessed it incentivizes cooperation. It makes people cooperate more and means that large-scale changes for the better can be made way more easily and way faster. Unlike under capitalism where a bunch of different capitalists develop whatever they have power over in whatever way they personally think will be good for their bottom line and compete against each other while constantly looking to expand into new markets. And that's resulted in all sorts of terrible things like imperialism and colonialism and neoc colonialism. Because of this unity that Soviet people felt as a result of their collective ownership over their workplaces, their country, and society, you could find a lot of older folks from the former Soviet Union who say that
24:45 they missed the USSR because the vibes were just way better back then. People were kinder. They had everything they needed. They could do all sorts of fun activities for basically free. They felt a sense of pride in being a part of something larger than themselves. And everyone was equal. one sport.
26:00 Let's go. >> [music] >> Foreign speech. Foreign speech. Foreign speech. [music] And when people talk about the bad stuff in the Soviet Union, it's always like we didn't have enough stuff and we couldn't go on vacation outside the country and we had to wait in line to buy things, which honestly like sure that sucks, but
26:45 that's not like that big of a deal, you know? Like I know so many people in the Russian Ukrainian diaspora because I am part of that. And the majority of them are pretty antis-siet by default cuz you can't immigrate to this country to the US as a communist. And those are like unanimously their complaints. It's really funny actually. Like damn, you just wanted blue jeans and rock and roll and a vacation to Western Europe and didn't care at all about equality and peace and building a better world. Okay, I see why you're in the US. But if those were your biggest problems, then you got it pretty good, you know. Anyway, enough diaspora roasting. Back to human nature. The Soviet Union, despite the fact that it's no longer around and despite the fact that it had many contradictions, showed us that you can indeed change human nature for the
27:31 better. It proved the Marxist point that if you change the economic base from private to collective ownership, you change social consciousness along with it. You can create a populace that is kinder, more cooperative, and more trusting of each other if you simply structure society around people's best impulses instead of their worst impulses. [music] The current system we live under in the West incentivizes you to either seek to dominate others via exploitation and violence or to keep your head down and obey in hopes that you'll maintain some semblance of safety and stability. It basically feels like your only two options are being under the boot and obeying it to not get crushed or
28:16 becoming the boot. But again, this is not human nature. Even though not acting is incentivized, it's not safer to not act. My friend Lady Idahar made an excellent video that you should definitely watch about this very point. She talks about how fear is political and how relative comfort under capitalism makes people afraid to resist out of fear that the system will discipline them and take away their access to necessities like housing or healthcare. But even though that's what's incentivized by the system and this leads many people to being defeist before even trying to change things for the better, doing nothing is not safer than resisting. In fact, the only way that the working class has ever gotten concessions from the ruling class in this country is through resistance. If you feel hopeless and like nothing can
29:01 be done, that's exactly what the system wants you to think. That's not your human nature, and neither is whatever other capitalist conditioning you may have. Obviously, the best way to change human nature is to change the economic base. But even under capitalism, who you are is not set in stone or 100% determined solely by the economic base. You are also constantly changing. And you are not doomed to be the worst version of yourself or to just accept the horrors lying down just because of the system we live under. You can develop your revolutionary consciousness through study, struggle, and organization. And you can resist the constant onslaught of capitalist conditioning, which also takes struggle because it's everywhere. Capitalism is always trying to condition you. The extremely doomerilled claim that capitalism is human nature and you can't change human nature is completely false
29:47 and contradicts history. And you don't actually have to choose between going with or against human nature. The powers that be know this, which is why they spend billions on propaganda to get you to believe that human nature is set in stone and that because of that, socialism is impossible to achieve. But as I just outlined, that's absolutely not true. The question isn't really what human nature actually is because, as we just discussed, it's a dialectical struggle of opposites. The question is also not whether we can shape human nature because obviously we can. The real question is what kind of humans do we want our system to create? Do we want to keep living under a system that incentivizes competitive individualism and privatized consumerism? Or do we want a system that creates humans who
30:32 value care, cooperation, and solidarity and who understand that we are all connected? If you want the latter, you're going to have to go do something about it. Thanks for watching. This video was made possible by my amazing patrons on Patreon. If you like my videos, consider joining this fun community for early access to adree uncensored videos, bimonthly exclusive patrons only videos that you can help pick the topics of or ask questions for if it's a Q&A, and the ability to yap with a group of insightful like-minded people. You can also send me a one-time tip on Kofi or PayPal. And remember to like and subscribe and share this video with anyone you think would like it. It really helps support the channel. If you've gotten this far, leave me your favorite weather themed emoji. Because if there's one thing we can say about human nature other than the fact that it's a diladial struggle of opposites that arises from our material
31:18 conditions, it's that people love talking about the weather. How's the weather where you're at? It's been pretty nice here, actually. I do have to have the heater on though for the first time that I've ever lived here which is good I
