The “selfish human nature” meme was basically invented as a post-hoc justification for the dysfunctional social systems that lead to people behaving that way, it doesn’t actually hold up to scrutiny. Thomas Hobbes for instance was taking the cultural memory of the horrors of war and giving people an easy to swallow explanation, he wasn’t an anthropologist.
Taking survival of the fittest and using it as evidence of vaguely analogous principles for how human society works has a long history of being wrong. That the way we behave is biased towards survival and reproduction in our native habitat does not imply that the concept of self interest must be at the foundation of how our minds function.
The “selfish human nature” meme was basically invented as a post-hoc justification for the dysfunctional social systems that lead to people behaving that way, it doesn’t actually hold up to scrutiny. Thomas Hobbes for instance was taking the cultural memory of the horrors of war and giving people an easy to swallow explanation, he wasn’t an anthropologist.
No, it’s a biological reality rooted all the way in theory of evolution. It’s an inherent part of nature of any living being
Taking survival of the fittest and using it as evidence of vaguely analogous principles for how human society works has a long history of being wrong. That the way we behave is biased towards survival and reproduction in our native habitat does not imply that the concept of self interest must be at the foundation of how our minds function.