Human nature

The same people who claim that socialism is against human nature because humans are naturally self-driven and competitive are usually also the ones that complain about schools giving their students "participation awards", claiming that this doesn't properly develop their drive and competitiveness.

Why do children need to have their own nature indoctrinated into them at school?

I think the complaint is more so that the awards move against what they perceive to be human nature and they think that this will subvert the person's natural competitiveness and replace it with an expectation to be rewarded simply for trying in what are generally meritocrit situations like sports.

But if your nature can be subverted and changed, was it really your nature to begin with?

I never gave a fuck at school, i'm lazy as fuck. I never participated in class unless when asked by the teachers, i never studied for a standardized exam more than two before the date, i never bothered to have good marks, although they sometimes happened wothout effort. I don't give a fuck about a career, i'm too lazy to learn how to drive the, studying road safety laws is boring. I hate big cities, i will always want to live in small places. I don't need much to be happpy, i've got my home, my job, my sallary, my cat, my intertnet connection, my weed, my music, my books and my films.

Am i an alien?

no, and that's why essentialism as a base for a political ideology is extremely dumb.
that is also why nazism as an ideology needs the ephemereal Jew

Yeah, actually. Just because it can be subverted doesn't mean it's unnatural.

Doesn't the fact that something needs to actively be taught and encouraged imply that it isn't "nature", but a learned behavior?

It's in our nature to need to eat, sleep and shit, and no one needs to teach us to do those things, nor is it possible to get over them by "subversion"

It is almost as if our competitive drive is determined by personality, material conditions and social pressure. And not because it is our nature. Our nature is to survive, either by cooperation or by competition. Capitalism is actually very unnatural. Police enforce property right, even though stealing would also be part of competition. At work, we are specialised in a very specific job, which makes us dependent on others. We are supposed to work together to create a product/service, yet still, compete over promotions. We are rewarded based on performance, but the reward is nothing more than we could manage with teamwork and less effort in a communist society. It removes what we see as meaningful and replaces it with money and trinkets. It creates value out of nothing and abstract ideas. What they call human nature is nothing more than making us slaves to our survival instinct and our dopamine receptors.

In order to produce material wealth, you need to have worker to wake up early, force themself to do menial, repetitive tasks and to ignore the complain of their body.

You need to give people a reason to do that or they won't.

You know, you actually got me to bring out my notebook and start drawing out the idea I had in my mind and it truly occurred to me that what I was drawing out depending on two things:

1. The values given to the medals are derivative of some higher authority and are completely man-made.

2. The inclusion of the participation medal only subverts (undermines) the competitiveness of the competition when compared to a competition that lacks a participation medal but that competition still falls victim to my first point.

I concede that it is in fact a learned behavior and that it is not only man-made but looking at it from a new perspective can be used to actually manipulate the competitors. I assume that this too applies to workers and the harsh realities of capitalism and the fact that we can be manipulated on the premise of having more capital wealth than we did before and/or than someone else. In this scenario, like the first, value is only ever ascertained when compared to the worth of something else.

Human nature is a misnomer, it's human programming. If there was any inherent unchangeable human nature, propaganda wouldn't be a thing that exists. The human brain is plastic, it can be programmed to believe anything and everything.

isn't it because participation trophies don't exist in the real world and at some point you need to realize that?

Fuck nature

As long as it believes this is "natural"

But you have to concede that there are behaviors that humans universally exhibit. Rape exists everywhere, betrayal for personal gain exists everywhere, religion exists everywhere, pornography exists everywhere etc. While I don't think there's a "rape gene" or any bullshit, humans tend to act the same regardless of culture or time period. If they didn't then marketing and advertising wouldn't be so effective. While there are always exceptions on an individual level, would you really argue against statements like "parents love their children" to not be human nature?

I'm not even against competition per se, but in capitalism it's a fairy tail. It's who can extract the most profit our of workers/produce more with small variations.

Because their parents are too uninvolved to bother with their own kids. Their parents need to read Kroptokin anyways.

I know plenty of parents who don't love their kids.

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Oh, I didn't know you already knew who I was. What are my views, user?

… except they do?

What is a wage if not a "participation award" for coming to work?

Class society exists everywhere.