Comment by kachnuv_ocasek
7 hours ago
I, for one, would appreciate if we could just move on past these incessantly destructive power struggles as humanity.
7 hours ago
I, for one, would appreciate if we could just move on past these incessantly destructive power struggles as humanity.
It's a fundamental attribute of reality. Take it up with mother nature, because power struggles exist everywhere, even in dumb systems with no intelligence. Weak things go away, strong things stay around. Weak things need to become stronger than strong things to displace them.
There's more than enough energy and resources to go around for humans to peacefully coexist "forever", albeit in lesser numbers than today. The civilization meta game is what ruins it, despite our best attempts to regulate that. And a global self destruct button helps massively... until it does not.
Like I replied to the other commenter, it's an unstable equilibrium. Lots of things can stay perfect forever if nothing throws off the delicate balance.
We can focus effort on maintaining this balance...but doing that requires power to be used. And just like that we are back at step one.
We can communally build up trust to such a high level that everyone can act independently to maintain balance, but this naturally creates a situation where the more trust there is, the bigger the payoff for the one who breaks it. Essentially the prisoners dilemma.
Not really, kindness also exists. It is the escape hatch from the evolutionary zero sum game and let's you pick a better equilibrium (bargaining vs pure Nash).
We can just not fight. There is enough room and resources,we can get more of them and build more efficient tech, and we are all more alike than different.
Kindness is an unstable equilibrium unfortunately. Mother nature is totally uninterested in it. Otherwise we would still all be protolife quasi-cells, because consuming other cells and not sharing resources isn't kind.
Maybe you argue that we are human and intelligent, so we can override this inconvenience with a system of our own design. My response would be "Sure, put your guns down and burn them, I won't stop you."
Again, it's an unstable equilibrium. Power on the other hand is dramatically more stable.
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Humans can not “move on” from human nature no matter how much people try to will it
It's as much "human nature" as being a slave was once the nature of some (chosen) peoples.
Conflict between humans is much much more nature than slavery was. Just look at animals. Flock animals often have conflicts which others. But none of them have ”slaves” (at least no how humans understand it)
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Being a slave isn't human nature, but wanting to be a slave owner is. "Human nature" is, more often than not, a shorthand for "the parts of game theory that evolution distilled into humans"
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