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Politics and religion are control.

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ORIGINAL: dbloomer

[...]I've perused your thread and it's clear to me you're more interested in conflict than getting at the truth. I'll be skipping past your posts from here on in.

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ORIGINAL: MeenMrMustard

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Politics and religion are control.

Those who wallow in politics and in religion wallow in emotion, not logic.

The current system creates perceived scarcity, which itself breeds fear.

Logic will not go far on a playing field of fear.

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ORIGINAL: AquaticSub
Are we Vulcan now? Didn't we learn anything from Star Trek? A society based solely on logic does not a utopia make.

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ORIGINAL: heartcream

Looking out for yourself is a healthy and righteous approach to take to living one's life. This does in no way mean we need to exploit any one else in order to look out for ourselves and do the right thing for ourselves. Two totally different things.

When one has unmoved fear lying undercurrent this will motivate someone to do things they dont necessarily feel aligned with. This is action motivated by denied emotion and it happens all over the place all the time.

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Statistics have shown we could easily feed everyone on the planet given the resources we have.

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ORIGINAL: dbloomer

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It was in response to your comment about the end of greed and private interests as a driving force in decision making.  What I meant was that greed is part of human nature, and therefore humans will always tend to make choices that reflect their private interests.  Even if you create an alternative incentive system, people will always do what is in their self-interest.  Maybe others would call it something else, but I would still call this greed even if the incentive is no longer monetary profit.  It could be social status or something else intangible.  But people will always look out for themselves first.

1) Greed is an unfortunate necessity for survival when resources are scarce, not NECESSARILY an element of human nature.
2) Even if greed WERE human nature, which it isn't in my opinion, So What? We do many things contrary to human nature or natural law. We smoke cigarettes and give ourselves cancer, we sit in front of a TV for hours at a time, motionless, we put blades on our feet and stand on sheets of ice, pushing a peice of rubber around with wooden sticks (hockey).

The point is, we posess the capacity to change our behavior when it's beneficial to do so. In capitalism, it's beneficial to be greedy, so people are greedy. This is an UNDENIABLE fact. People, EVERYONE in this day and age, believe greed is part of human nature, despite the fact that none of them have done any research to prove this fact other than examine the world around them. Well of COURSE a world that rewards greed will result in a greedy world. The problem is with the establishment more-so than the people.

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One thing that is definitely a part of human nature is the desire for POWER. This type of greed may not be in everybody, but it exists in enough people that I cannot imagine that it will ever go away. This desire created the great empires and civilizations of the past, but it also leads to war and its associated evils like famine and genocide. And for those who have it, it is insatiable. History is filled with leaders who's lust for power propelled them to greatness and, in many cases, led to their downfall. These leaders lived or could have lived lives of extreme opulence and luxury, but they chose to pursue more power instead.

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This type of greed may not be in everybody, but it exists in enough people that I cannot imagine that it will ever go away.

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Just because you can't envision a possibility does not make that possibility any less viable, as history has shown us time, and time, and time again.

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ORIGINAL: dbloomer

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One thing that is definitely a part of human nature is the desire for POWER. This type of greed may not be in everybody, but it exists in enough people that I cannot imagine that it will ever go away. This desire created the great empires and civilizations of the past, but it also leads to war and its associated evils like famine and genocide. And for those who have it, it is insatiable. History is filled with leaders who's lust for power propelled them to greatness and, in many cases, led to their downfall. These leaders lived or could have lived lives of extreme opulence and luxury, but they chose to pursue more power instead.

What you're failing to take in to account is how much influence one person can have. Hitler rose to power and influenced nazi germany in a terrible way. You could say the holocaust was just "a natural by-product of human nature and the desire for power, greed, and corruption", or you could look at it for what it ACTUALLY was, a small group of people in a big position of power. The above example is precisely why control mechanisms like the money system, religion, and politics need to be done away with (amongst many many more significant reasons). So that individual people can't achieve positions of unimaginable power.

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This type of greed may not be in everybody, but it exists in enough people that I cannot imagine that it will ever go away.

Just because you can't envision a possibility does not make that possibility any less viable, as history has shown us time, and time, and time again.

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People, EVERYONE in this day and age, believe greed is part of human nature, despite the fact that none of them have done any research to prove this fact other than examine the world around them.

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I've perused your thread and it's clear to me you're more interested in conflict than getting at the truth. I'll be skipping past your posts from here on in.

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Greed does not necessarily imply exploitation.

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all periods and most parts of the world...and greed does indeed appear as a constant

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What you're failing to take in to account is how much influence one person can have. Hitler rose to power and influenced nazi germany in a terrible way. You could say the holocaust was just "a natural by-product of human nature and the desire for power, greed, and corruption", or you could look at it for what it ACTUALLY was, a small group of people in a big position of power. The above example is precisely why control mechanisms like the money system, religion, and politics need to be done away with (amongst many many more significant reasons). So that individual people can't achieve positions of unimaginable power.

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In her reporting of the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, which evolved into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness—the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without critically thinking about the results of their action or inaction.

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The fact of it is that capitalism takes one of the seven deadly sins- greed, obviously- and uses graduated taxation to turn it to the public good.