[rowanajmarshall]

> mankind has demonstrated through thousands of years of history that tribes of men can't really cooperate in any grand sense

I'd argue the fact that humans can live in reasonably stable polities of more than a billion people proves, and in an economic space of practically the entire planet (globalisation!) proves we absolutely can cooperate at grand, epic scales.Whether or not that means Kropotkin is right is another thing, but we're built for cooperation.

[082349872349872]

Domesticated animals are often more cooperative than their wildtype kin.

I suspect humans, over tens of thousands of years, have successfully domesticated not only b taurus and c familiaris, but also h sapiens.

[PeterisP]

I'd argue that the fact that humans can live in reasonably stable polities of more than a billion people only proves that there exist social systems and structures which can achieve reasonable outcomes even without cooperation by incentives which ensure that agents who do not intend to cooperate but act competitively and even maliciously still act reasonably out of pure self-interest and fear of retaliation for defecting.

[PartiallyTyped]

We are not cooperating at grand scales, not in what matters to the average person, but we certainly cooperate on helping the rich get richer.

[SyzygistSix]

Are you ignoring the billion and a half people that have been lifted out of poverty since the 50s or 60s? We can definitely cooperate to benefit the masses of humankind and we do.

[PartiallyTyped]

Are you ignoring that despite knowing the consequences of climate change for a hundred or so years, "we" chose to ignore them for corporate profits?

What's the point of lifting anyone out of poverty if we are actively ruining our environment through obviously unsustainable behaviour?

How many more billions of people could we have brought out of poverty if the goal wasn't to improve bottom lines? What about all the displaced people due to wars for oil?

[SyzygistSix]

No, I'm not. Some of that wealth was created by externalizing costs in the form of pollution. Because that is how our society was designed and we did not have good alternatives until around the turn of the century. But most of it was not. Most was genuine wealth that improved many people's lives.

The point of lifting people out of poverty - which doesn't mean they have now have money; it more means they have more access to education, healthcare, and capital - is that those people are now in a better position to help us deal with the future challenges, climate change being one of them. In addition to their quality of life being much better. There is a significant bootstrapping effect.

>How many more billions of people could we have brought out of poverty if the goal wasn't to improve bottom lines?

We don't know. It is difficult to say what would happen in a different timeline. But if Mao-era China and the Soviet Union are any indication, what we decided upon was a much better outcome than that. If you can design a system where wealth is allocated in a way that creates more wealth than it does currently, plenty of folks are all ears. Lots of people in positions of influence like creating more wealth.

[PartiallyTyped]

There is a mountain of difference between:

We did not have good alternatives, until we did; and

We suppressed progress, had people killed, and squashed all attempts at public ownership of the goods, launched defamation campaigns, buried people in lawsuits, had them locked in their homes or jail for no reason other than being a block at corporate earnings.

If you have to slave away your life to pay for access to education, you clearly don’t have access to it, you are paying with your life for it.

What wall street and the rich are asking for is absurd. Gains on top of gains, chasing growth on rate of growth.

People in places of influence care about creating more wealth for themselves. They clearly don’t care about the average person because they are not the average person.

lets assume for a moment that we don’t have access to space, we are confined on earth, and have finite resources to work with. Certain people by virtue of chance end up consuming orders of magnitude more resources by virtue of their lineage and the place they were born it.

By said virtue, they impose onto the rest of us their will, and make it so they don’t face any repercussions for their wastefulness.

Can you argue, in good conscience, that all the resources spent on and by somebody like Musk, are better spent on Musk than feeding families in Africa, building infrastructure and providing top notch education to have more doctors and researchers do stuff like, idk find cures to all the different forms of cancer that we have?

[SyzygistSix]

I think you're on the wrong forum.