this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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I believe people are like this due to the conditions they live in. Capitalism is a system that encourages selfishness in order to survive. I whole heartedly believe that if conditions changed, people would change. Not immediately of course. No anarchist is saying that it wouldn't be a rough transition, or that it's a flawless society, or any of that. But we do think that it would work and that it'd be better in the long run than what we have rn
Good on you to believe that. It's really sweet that you have so much faith in people.
... I don't. Look at any society on Earth. Pre-capitalism, feudal, the celts, medieval japan, whatever. Shit ain't rosy, in fact shit really fucking sucks and people suck and too many of them will mooch and rape and steal and trick and kill and endlessly seek to achieve absolute power over others if they're allowed to. That's a basic fact of human nature.
To pretend it's capitalism's fault that some people are awful to others or complete freeloaders, is just an insult to those people's intelligence of free will. A lot of people just suck, they don't need excuses.
IDK, it's not like I much care to have this conversation to be honest. It is a purely academic study of a (imo) overly utopist viewpoint, because the vast majority of people either aren't "good" in the way that you think everyone is (i.e. they know they wouldn't be a good member of an anarchist society, so they deduce that other people would be either), or they don't have such faith in their peers due to experience. Either way this is the fundamental reason why anarchism never has, and never will, take off on a large scale, regardless of how much you theorycraft it and try to explain it. Anarchists just disagree, fundamentally, with everyone else on the very nature of humankind.