anarcha wrote:Does it not logically follow that further 'humanisation' or 'moral evolution' or whatever you want to call it we can do away with this 'innate' competitivity and selfishness?
Hell, even if it isn't possible and it will never happen then do you not think that by at least trying to achieve it then we can make the world a better place?
Even if you could breed the drive to better oneself out of humanity what would you have accomplished? Likely nothing good whatsoever.
Couldn't have said it better than the mind rapist, but with the one stipulation for precisely why it fails. No amount of moralizing/indoctrination will change the fact that humans see the world from within themselves looking outwards. Everything that we think and do at a very low level has us, or "me", rather, at the center.
Giving to charities and the less fortunate is one thing, but the drive to center human behavior around helping others is, I think, impossible and unnatural. I'm not saying it's morally bankrupt (though many have argued more persuasively than I could that it is), but I can't see the end benefit to changing fundamentally how people behave like Communism commands.
In the end though, all we really need to go by are the proofs of the countries that are or were actively communist. The Soviet Union: oppression en masse of its people who lacked basic freedoms such as that of criticizing their government. China: ibid. The "Democratic Republic of North Korea": hell on earth. Cuba: a quasi-functioning remnant of a once-decent state.
What happened in every case? The people elected or who clawed their way to power exhibited the same traits that others have spoken of. Namely, the innate capacity of human greed and the drive for self-improvement.
You take those countries and as a whole there's not a single conceivable metric by which they might hold a candle to the predominantly capitalistic US. That's the basis for why people think that Communism is abhorrent; it's proved itself to be so time and time again!