Julien to Nestor, Jared and Hallxy:
>> BTW, selfishness is not a right but a natural and normal mentality
>> (that must of course be balanced by other mentalities).
>
>"Natural and normal", in human beings, is not something written
>solely not even essentially in the genes. It is a social product.
Nestor, it's certainly a social product as well as a product of genes as well as
a product of physical laws, of the hormones in mothers' body and of their diet
as well as the product of many other things like the behaviour and
characteristics of the surrounding species in the environment. Everything is
interconnected. But so what? Does that grant some cosmic judge an authority
to bestow upon some people the "right" of selfishness in not upon others? Or
does it allow us to somehow engeneer selfishness out of the inhabitants of the
USA in the forseeable future?
>... "primitive" cultures
>whose people had no concept of social class and no comprehension of the
>(from our viewpoint) normal human attitudes of individual competitiveness
>and greed.
Jared, competitiveness and greed are not the same thing as selfishness.
Example? In a country where one very rarely starves because one loses
one's job, an alarm clock buzzes and displays 6:30... The competitive and
greedy reaction for the subject of our thought experiment is to wake up. The
selfish one is to power the damned thing down.
>So perhaps, we humans, having lost the paradise of innocence of pre-class
>society, now long to return to it, on a higher plane. Which is why many of
>us strive to transform society, though immediate "self interest" might
>dictate otherwise.
IMO, this is useless but admirable utopia. Nevertheless, self interest DOES
dictate to transform society! What it does not dictate is to stand alone aside of
the crowd and this conflicts with the former dictate.
Hallyx (on another thread),
>... selfishness is the foremost survival trait of any and all living
>organisms, so firmly embedded in our genes that it is even a feature of the
>gene itself.
Are genes living matter? How could they have "features" such as selfishness?
Where does all this gene-fetichism in our culture come from?
And selfishness is certainly not the foremost survivial traits of all living
organisms. Look at mitochondrias f.ex.
>But until then, I will consider any effort to subjegate or
>modify human nature, or to organize in contravention to it -- like socialism
>does -- as wasted effort. You can't fool Mother Nature.
Why do you think that socialism runs against selfishness or humann nature in
general? What organizing several self interested individuals together runs
against is sado-masocistic mentality and inability to relate.
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