So, do we know what decides if a person develops to become more greedy, agressive and selfish while another becomes altruistic and doesn't care much about wealth and power?
"my, my! humans! so aggressive."
rape, murder, nukes, war, torture, power, seemingly unlimited greed...
why don't i have that insatiable drive?
can't all be how i was raised, can it?
do you know of any studies or philosophical insights?
thx! 🙂
Lead exposure in childhood is one thing we know leads to poorer impulse control; that is to say, being short-sighted and selfish.
I have awful impulse control (severe ADHD) but usually I just eat an entire packet of Oreos instead of exploiting people for selfish reasons.
Imagine you were filthy rich and a country had all Oreos and would ban all exports and tourists. Sure you wouldn't bribe a minister or two? Give a poor kid some money and exploit them to build an over the border Oreo smugglers ring ...?!
That kind of comes down to values, though. Does a person value Oreos over honesty and integrity, or do they just enjoy Oreos? Someone might also enjoy most foods, they might prefer to fence, or they might prefer to knit.
TBH if I was filthy rich, I would help my loved ones, keep a decent retirement savings (reasonable), and then probably give the rest away. I would feel pretty bad keeping that kind of money if I knew that other people were starving and homeless. Happier people make for a better society too, imo.
That's exactly the kind of long-term thinking to which lead exposure is deleterious.
Err, yeah, I wouldn’t do that, I’d just buy some other kind of snack!
And not to mention parents with high lead exposure who have anger issues, poor impulse control, etc. don't make for good carers of small, loud and unpredictable children.
We all know of course the environment in which you grow up seriously influences your personality, however a surprising amount of human personality is attributed to genetics. There are case studies of twins separated at birth that will give you chills, as well as adoption studies where personalities of adopted children are more in alignment with their bio parents than the parents who raised them.
There are two personality "disorders" described in psychology that are commonly associated with the behaviors you're describing. Antisocial personality disorder is characterized by a lack of empathy, disregard for cultural norms or rules, and engaging in behavior that harms others. Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by a lack of empathy, a relentless focus on self-promotion and self-preservation without regard for how one's actions affect others, and a drive to project power or status, no matter how real or imagined that power may be. Both of these disorders seem to have some degree of heritability associated with them, but it's not super clear cut, and it's likely that even with a genetic predisposition someone has to be brought up in a certain environment for the disorder to develop.
All this said, even more of human behavior is culturally and socially bound. Go back in time 1500 years, for example, and war, torture, execution, rape, and more were much more prevalent and socially acceptable than they are today. Even today there are cultures that tolerate more or less of each of these things.
This is my completely unsourced two cents
Anecdotally, in my old neighborhood, I knew of three families with a child adopted as an infant from from troubled circumstances. All three were raised together in the same household and with the same parenting as their non-adopted siblings. It's a wealthy neighborhood, so the biological children ended up as studious, stable, high achievers.
The adopted kids, not so much. One worked at the store where I worked, and got fired eventually, since she was flaky, unable to focus on the job, and solicitous of any and all male attention. She showed up on the front page of local news sites one day because her parents reported her as a missing person. Turns out she went home with a guy she met at a bar and didn't bother to tell anybody. Her co-workers were not surprised.
Another was my apartment neighbor, who was 19 and dating a 50-something guy. She couldn't hold down a job, and he supported her. She eventually moved in with him, and told a homeless friend that he could move into the apartment her parents paid for. (He was a lot cleaner than the rabbit she barely cared for.) After she left, the fruit fly infestation in my apartment cleared up, and my landlord threw out the refrigerator from her unit rather than clean the maggots out of it.
The third was the worst. She got involved with a guy, hatched a plan for he and his friend to rob her parents, but the robbery went wrong and they murdered them instead.
The fact that all three turned out the polar opposite of the biological kids in the same environment sure points to some inborn traits.
Well it is an anecdote. Can't draw any real conclusions there. Too many variables. How old were the kids when adopted? Were they abused or neglected or adopted right at birth? How well did the parents treat the adopted vs non-adopted kids? Were the adopted kids healthy at birth or could fetal alcohol syndrome have played a factor? Were there issues with discrimination based on race? And myriad other questions...
Crying babies who are yelled at, spanked and/or ignored, grow their fundamental brain structures around those experiences. Getting moved to loving homes won't erase that.
There are a lot of studies that connect ADHD with early childhood trauma/abuse.
These are crazy stories! And valuable because they show a more well to do side than the usual. My experience with adopted and natural born kids being raised together comes from the other end of the socioeconomic ladder. My brother is a foster parent and they specialize in neonates and babies but also have adopted kids and the difference between their natural and adopted kids are pretty minimal. The kids are still young now but I don't see any difference that would affect future life position outside of chance.
To me it sounds more like an environmental issue as this is what they all have in common.
I think it's most to do with exactly how much wealth a person was born into.
Someone who is constantly on the verge of being homeless, possibly even starving, will very soon get desperate enough to do things they aren't proud of to survive.
On the other hand, someone born into immense wealth will have very little understanding of people who are struggling. That'll make it very hard for them to empathize. And with all that power, their sheer indifference will have them crushing the poor under their boots like ants. This is highly exacerbated by the fact that it is in their best interest to support policy that transfers wealth upwards.
Not sure if I fully agree. I've seen many people who grew up in luxury and safety who care a lot about the less fortunate in society. There's also been many instances of 2 siblings growing up in a very similar environment, yet one is very empathic and altruistic and the other one turns out to be a selfish greedy person.
Not that I think you're completely wrong though. What life you're born into has a huge effect on who you become. Yet people seem to deal differently with the cards they've been handed.
If I look at me personally, I feel like it's partially genetic, partially in what kind of household you grow up, and also partially your experiences while growing up. I was, for instance, quite "soft" for a guy which meant I got bullied by the more dominant and selfish people. I just wanted everyone to get along and didn't want to hurt anyone, and because of that I constantly got kicked down. For me it's turned me into someone who still wants everyone to get along, for everyone to get a chance. Yet it could've easily have fallen the other way, where I would've let the hate and resentment for other people get to me and turn me into a more self-centered and distrustful person. I feel like this often happens when people fall into the incel or alt-right movements. I think it's mostly just a combination of how my brain works (genetic) and the support I had at home that kept me away from that. Had I gown up in an environment where my parents would've been more "rough" themselves, I'm not sure it'd have gone in the same direction.
My thoughts are similar, but I would consider the cause to be the lack of adversity and challenges. If you are brought up in a sheltered environment where every problem is handled by someone else, you don't develop proper empathy or problem solving skills.
The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has theorized that empathy and altruism are acquired in early childhood by observing when one’s caretakers show empathy towards oneself, which both gives infants a sense of security in interacting with other people and which, because babies learn through observation and pattern recognition, establishes a standard in their minds that tells them humans are supposed to be selfless and kind to one another. This theory is relevant to us because, since most of us live in decaying neoliberal hellholes, many people’s parents are too busy working to give them appropriate care during their formative years and are not rich enough to pay for people who are qualified to do so in their stead. When it comes to people whose parents are rich, the selfishness that lead to them accumulating wealth could get passed on to their children by the same method. In other words, the conditions created by capitalism could be fucking with the ability of infants to become good people later in life
I don't have an answer to you but if you like this sort of discussions/topics, I highly recommend the book Behave by Sapolsky.
thanks! :)
Yup. Nature aaaand nurture. There are countless studies and conversations and theories about this, but given the sheer number of variables and the very difficult question of "is anything you experience experienced the same way by others?", there aren't many definitive answers and no universal answers.
If you had the ability to push a button and divert $0.01 from a random million US bank accounts in a way that would leave no trace, would you press the button?
Power corrupts. Most people are not strong enough to resist the abuse of power. It starts very small - such a minor, harmless thing, but then you abuse power more and more to cover your tracks or to benefit yourself more.
I would guess a person's life circumstances. Humans tend to reflect pain they're experiencing onto others. If you're hungry, that's a form of pain. If you're neglected, that's a form of pain. Even the sons of billionaires experience pain, probably in a way that's hard for reg folks to grasp.
Also, I think your dopamine regulation being all messed up might also contribute. Those people who seem to flail and rage because nothing can seem to satisfy them.
Also, everyone does terrible things and hurts others. You can be charitable and kind from one perspective and an oppressor in ways you won't allow yourself to see. We all do it.
We know that people who have less tend to be more generous than people who have more.
Actually, it isn't so much a matter of being rich vs being poor as it is the level of inequality that influences generosity. People who have more are about as likely as those who have less to be generous when inequality is low, and according to some studies they are actually even more likely to do so. But when inequality is high then the generosity of the wealthy decreases.
Thanks, I didn't know. This is interesting: "...there might be something about the experience of elevated power and status that reduces our willingness to give to others." Political realism on a micro scale?
A lot of those shitty things aren't normal in humans, but become much more common if you force them into violent, existential conflicts.
And insatiable greed is promoted as good at almost every level of neoliberal society, so that one should be self-explanatory.
People just say "human nature" as an excuse for their own conservatism
I really like this question and it is one I think about a lot when daydreaming since having kids. When would I know if they've gone bad? If they do end up antisocial or narcissistic will I be able to point to a situation or chain of events that caused it? Will I even know?
Don't have kids. Global fresh water reserves will be 40% over capacity by 2030, and 90% of global top soil and arable land is at risk of depletion by 2050.
And that's just water and food, add climate collapse and fascism, and billions of people are going to die in the next 30 years.
This is not a world you should be looking at and thinking about adding more lives to.
While I'd say altruism is not a virtue the way it is defined in our culture, I will say that who we are is about 50% nature and 50% nurture, and inside we are very different beings for one reason or other. A born sociopath is only human the same as you in visible form, the being is nothing like you. A person who was badly abused and tattoos his face and perpetuates abuse on those around him is completely different from you both. A monk in a monestsry and an Instagram influencer are completely different beings inside, besides some basic neurology that makes them both human. If you could see the being inside every human they'd look as different as Pokémon. That's my philosophical insight.
I don’t think it’s any one factor. I actually think it’s dangerous to think that there iis - the idea that there is some inherent gene or trait or personality type or social condition or event that makes a person evil, has, ironically led to some evil things. The world is a complex web of cause and effect and belief and experience and different ways of reacting to emotion and different decision making and every person is located in a different relationship to all of those things. There’s no one type or person or type of environment or situation that causes bad things, just a series of complex things that are worth being nuanced and thoughtful about.
Empathy is probably your best bet as far as a single variable goes. But otherwise we're talking about something that's incredibly complex on multiple levels, making it near impossible to address as a whole.
I like to envision human behavior and consciousness as a network of tensions and influences. (Perceived) material interests are one such tension, a particularly strong one. Strong enough that I feel confident saying that in general, people will tend to drift towards approximating an ethic that aligns with their material conditions.
The archetypes and behaviors modeled for us in our childhood and throughout our lives are a sort of structure that these forces interact with. We may have empathetic or selfish responses modeled for us by our parents, so those are the responses that spring to our minds when decisions arise. Good behavior modeling could mean the inherent tension towards self interest may be mediated or tempered by the limits of behavior we think to enact. Parents have a big impact on this early on, but so do later role models as well as media portrayals of people.
Social cohesion can be a big tension on people, incentivizing them to not act outside of group norms out of fear of being ostracized. Or on a more subconscious level, perhaps acting out of a "self" interest that benefits the social group, because the lines between Self and Other become blurred. Extending beyond the small self to consider the well-being of the large "Self", sometimes even at the expense of the small self.
Critical theory may be of interest to you.
This guy wrote a book a long time ago which goes into this. Something about 'material conditions'?
This is the answer, though many don’t like it.
Great question. No.
Skyward fan?
just finished the 2nd audiobook a few days ago ;)
No. Though everyone has ideas about it.
There is no one factor that dictates whether someone becomes good or evil. What matters is getting rid of people who are evil for our own benefit, liberty and happiness. To dispute that is to imply people should suffer evil against their best interests, an inherently evil position, so it can be dismissed off-hand.
The long branch is the long arm of altruism, the short branch is the short arm of altruism.
Back in the days only people with a strong will to survive did, infact, survive and the genes from those people are in all of us. Many like to pretend they don't posses these features but that's only because you're living a modern comfortable life, so you never need to rely on it. Especially compared to what it would've been 10k years ago.
You can take any modern man, and put him along with his family in a house and place an angry stranger pounding at the door shouting threats at his wife and kids and you'll soon discover the violence you just thought wasn't there.
As an incredibly nonconfrontational, emotionally flat person, I would absolutely lose my shit if someone were threatening my wife and child.
Pure anger and rage if I felt they were in danger. It's kinda nuts actually.
I am aware of how I can channel that to be productive in familial protection and not make things worse, so I wonder what the difference is between people that can control it and those that can't.
Power corrupts. I’d say probably 95% of people who consider themselves altruistic, if you gave them significant power, would end up abusing it before too long.
Probably not 95%...
What skews your perception is the fact that the people who find themselves in power (CEOs, politicians, cops, and dictators) are the ones who wanted to gain power and took steps to ensure they get it. If you gave the average altruistic person a lot of power, I don't think half of them would completely turn into a different person too quickly. This is because people who aren't greedy don't particularly care about gaining power beyond what they need to live comfortably.
I disagree completely. I strongly believe that people can start with the absolute best intentions and attain power with good morals and ethics, but eventually the temptation to use power for your own benefit is too strong for most people to ignore.
If you had the power to divert $0.01 from every bank account in the US to your own account, would you do it?
Another thing to consider - you have power over animals. Do you use it for your own benefit?
I do agree that overtime it will change and corrupt people, but I was referring to before too long. I think most people would eventually be corrupted by absolute power, but it would take longer.
Also, even people with good intentions can be ambitious, but a lot of people are unambitious. I was responding to the whole "if you gave people power", which is entirely different from people who desired power (even if for a noble goal) and got it. People who desire power are almost certainly going to be corrupted by it, while people unambitious who are given power, are more likely to resist that corruption for far longer.
It happens much faster than you’d think, and it doesn’t have to be absolute power by any means. Have you seen/heard stories of even tiny amounts of power going to people’s heads? It doesn’t happen because they’re evil people, it happens because they had a way to improve their living situation (maybe even for nothing more than an ego boost) at the expense of others, even if in a very minor way, and chose to take it.
We would all like to believe that the world is good and fair and that if we just got the right people in power, everything would be okay, but that is just not realistic unfortunately. Power almost always corrupts anyone who wields it, and as long as there are unequal structures of power, there will be abuses of power.
Ambition isn’t a binary thing. Most people have some amount of ambition, even if it’s just “I aspire to get a decent job so I can live comfortably”. It’s surprisingly seductive to abuse power to further your goals, even seemingly unambitious goals, especially if you think you can get away with it, and doubly so if you think that your abuse of power isn’t really doing any significant harm (as per my example of taking $0.01 from people). If you give yourself a moral justification for your abuse of power on top of those things, you’re doomed.
I want to believe that if I had significant power that I wouldn’t abuse it, but I have to be realistic. I have no reason to think that I’m special or that I would somehow be immune to this. It’s better for all of us that we get rid of as much of the unequal structures of power in our society as possible.
I did not mean to imply that "if we just got the right people in power, everything would be okay", we need checks and balances, and we need to strengthen our democracy by making sure to have an educated, politically engaged population, and reform the democratic system to become a full democracy to prevent the abuse of power.
As for ambition not being binary, I agree with that as well, however, I think most people's desire for power is dependent on their material conditions and social well being.
I do generally agree with your point that we should get rid of the unequal structures of power, just that your 95% assessment seems unrealistically high.
All of the things you suggest (checks and balances, strong education, democratic reform) have consistently been weakened rather than strengthened - this is because they would negatively impact those in power, and those in power make the decisions about implementing those things.
In addition, they would help, but not nearly enough. Checks and balances are a temporary improvement but eventually become captured and consolidated by the power they’re checking/balancing. Education helps people to understand how these systems are abusive, but can be countered by propaganda and misinformation - no one is immune to psychological manipulation. And democratic reform again acts as a temporary improvement, but eventually, power is consolidated and the reforms are integrated.
Humans unfortunately are still quite instinctual creatures, we often don’t have an “off” switch that says “okay, we have enough material wealth / security now, we don’t need to hoard anymore!” because we’re kind of always inclined towards building up a stockpile for winter.
We need to accept the reality of our situation and dismantle power structures - this means the abolition of money, the police, prisons, private property ownership, etc. - this may sound far fetched, but it is the only way that we can have a world without abuses of power and exploitation. I completely believe that it’s possible and worth working towards achieving that goal.
I am aware that we are in democratic decline, one would need to be completely disconnected from reality to not realise that, which is why it is important to fight for it. But abolition of the police means there won't be a way to enforce laws. The corrupt police force must be reformed, and bad cops fired or jailed. A lot of crimes can be prevented by improving people's material conditions, and education, but there will still be crime and violence, and for that we still need some police force, though at a reduced capacity.
The police were founded in 1829. We managed without them just fine before they were founded and we will manage just fine after. I’d propose the creation of a voluntary group of people with no powers beyond that of any other person, but who take some time out of their day to keep watch and deal with any issues that crop up. The overwhelming majority of crime is caused by poverty as you rightly said so there’s likely very little that they would have to deal with.