The idea of human beings as rational utility-maximizing particles with insatiable hedonic desires is very much the product of an ideological project to justify capitalism as “natural” and has virtually no relationship to how actual human beings live but a lot of people have genuinely internalized it.

Trying to derive “human nature” by observing people under capitalist modernity is like looking at a bored, depressed wolf obsessively pacing a circle in a tiny zoo enclosure and concluding that this is “wolf nature.”

There’s a deeply cynical and misanthropic thread among some people on the left that posits people are too *bad* in some way to live together in a way that is better than what we have now.

Too greedy, too aggressive, too shortsighted, too parochial, too irrational, too stupid, too petty.

(Never the observer, of course; they’re part of the enlightened elite who can see us as we really are, and—if they’re not too cynical—will be in charge of forcing the ignorant masses into a better world.)

It’s paralleled by a similar argument on the right, that people are genuinely terrible and so a better world is impossible because this world of hierarchy and abuse and exploitation is the best of all worlds.

Both probably owe quite a bit to the deeply Christian idea of the Fall, of people as fundamentally broken and in need of heroic redemption.

And I just so utterly reject this cynicism, because it’s so ugly and boring and *smug.* It’s so pointless. Humans are too terrible to save or be worth saving? Fine. You’re uniquely amazing and everyone else is awful. Go away and be smugly self-congratulating somewhere else.

In reality, humans are a giant tangle of competing impulses and motivations that can be expressed in endless combinations in endless contexts. We are *self-constructing,* able to think about and then act upon the ways we live individually and socially. This is our unique nature as one of many species of animals on earth: to *not* be bound to any particular lifeway but rather to be able to critically analyze and deliberately construct our lifeways.

“Humans are naturally acquisitive. We want to endlessly accumulate.”

The Mbendjele BaYaka people of Central African Republic will periodically leave their camp to go start a new one and leave all their material possessions behind.

The people of Trypillia would periodically and deliberately burn their houses down and build new ones atop the rubble.

“Humans are naturally greedy and selfish.”

The Nyaka people of Uganda engage in demand sharing. If you say “I want that” about something they have, they will give it to you as readily as an American might hold a door open for a stranger.

“Humans are an invasive species that naturally over-exploits its environment with reckless and shortsighted abandon.”

The Yurok of California deliberately lived off a diet of primarily acorns, leaving many other resources un-exploited, because they were wary of the hierarchical and exploitive lifestyle of their neighbors to the north.

“Humans are naturally and myopically self-centered and descend into violent competition when resources are scarce.”

Starvation is rare among forager societies, despite the common perception that they live on the constant knife’s edge of survivability, because people in these communities tend to share with each other unless there is literally nothing left for anyone.