[cryptica]

As I get older, I'm realizing that there's no such thing as 'human nature.' It's a broad spectrum. My view is that poor and average people are alright but as you get closer to power, people become increasingly corrupt and evil. Relationships become more calculated and transactional to the point that they become unpleasant; though apparently some people either don't feel this effect or maybe their hunger for power is so strong that it overrides those feelings... Or maybe it's a bit of both. In any case, by the time you get really close to power, all moderately normal people have been filtered out; both voluntarily and also because non-psychopaths generally struggle to fit in.

The psychopaths in power want to remove the moral element because it makes things unpredictable for them. They prefer everything to be kept stable and under control through blackmail and other forms of coercive leverage.

Something else I've found is that, as you get closer to power, people become much 'nicer' (superficially) but they are definitely more evil in reality if you look at their actions. It's like they make up for their evil deeds by being extra nice to people in person. Nowadays, when I meet people who are too friendly with their words, I immediately feel skeptical; I don't trust them.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "My view is that poor and average people are alright..."

My preferred counterexample is the actions of soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army invading various Asian countries in the years leading up to WW2 and during it, perfectly ordinary people conscripted to the military behaving in absolutely savage ways to a civilian population. There is a reason the Japanese are still despised by their neighbors, though it has become more muted over the years. It is also a large enough sample (~4 million in occupied territories from a casual search) that it cannot be handwaved away as being some kind of isolated aberration.

[shrubby]

Spectrum of moral development mostly IMO.

I wrote this just a few days ago here and it applies here too nicely:

"Pre-conventional level is the narcissist me-me-me level, that seems to dominate the geopolitics and tech.

Conventional is most of us as the sheep. This level follows the loudest crowd that right now is the pre-conventional.

Post-conventional is the few that can do standalone thinking and morals.

Most conventionals can though understand the difference between and also the outcome we're headed to with the pre-conventional human gods, but we need to build the normalcy for the post-conventional ones together and make it structural.

My hunch is that first step could be to start the discussion on what is excessive on personal level. Consumption, wealth, political power.

Something like Mamdani or Polanski have showed, only more blunt. The majority of people are waking up that the current trajectory means the end of the world and extinction after the short period of accelerationist-dystopian hellscape."