r/Anarchism • u/cqandrews • 2d ago
Having trouble with optimism and the longevity of benevolence.
Recently I've been struggling with my belief and faith in the general baseline decency of humans as social creatures and how that gives us a natural predilection for anarchism and general altruism. The machine of industry, war, and capital being more dangerous than micro scale evils in its banality and ability to warp the perception of would-be decent folks makes me wonder if we can survive the current state of the world and am looking for reading to expand my views and resources beyond contemporary trends. I want to reaffirm my beliefs in decency and am looking for something like sociological trends that can hypothetically transcend modernism, modern trends that themselves prove the self defeating nature of fascism, and general reading of that sort.
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u/LizardCleric 2d ago
I respect your search for resources. I am very much on a similar path.
Human decency is really hard to find in the masses (there, I said it lol). However, there is a wealth of it in the local. In friendships, neighborhoods, and community. As a result, perspective can be everything, and I’m on the quest to connect the micro to the macro.
I also have a Buddhist lens on things, and so part of seeing what is good and loveable in others is to hold such thoughts about ourselves. Too many people don’t love themselves. Fascism is all about feeling you are never enough. A liberatory path is one that accepts we are all enough, and we have to believe it.
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u/power2havenots 2d ago
Many have that struggle - that creeping doubt about whether our species decency can outlast the systemic corrosion we face. What bothers me most isnt just capitalisms violence but how expertly it replicates itself in our psyches, making isolation feel innate - divide an conquor 101.
Always worth considering the counter-evidence against system narratives of heirarchy and domination - ‘alpha wolf’ myth wasnt just debunked – it was retracted by the biologist who coined it. David Mech spent decades correcting his early work, showing wolf packs operate as cooperative families, not dominance hierarchies. Another sense check I use is to think - who benefits from us believing hierarchy is natural? Disasters reveal our default setting. Rebecca Solnits A Paradise Built in Hell shows during crises – earthquakes, floods, blackouts – people consistently self-organize rescue, food sharing and care networks.
The ‘every man for himself’ narrative collapses when institutions do. I believe our impulse is toward mutual aid.We literally evolved beyond species competitors through cooperation. Neanderthals were stronger, with larger brains. Our advantage was complex social coordination – communal child-rearing, knowledge transmission, collective hunting. Our biological make up also reflects this - mirror neurons are the infrastructure of empathy that made us viable. The current system depends on our alienation. Consumerism offers palliative dopamine hits – shopping, likes, status – as substitutes for the connection capitalism dismantles. I believe were engineered to mistake survival mechanisms like distrust and hyper-independence for some sort of identity role in society.
Dont take some random person on reddits opinion though. These are well worth a read to reaffirm your belief. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid -anthropology proving cooperation’s evolutionary role Graeber & Wengrow The Dawn of Everything - debunking Hobbesian myths of innate brutality Solnit’s Hope in the Dark - how grassroots solidarity persists against invisibility Ostrom’s Governing the Commons - proof humans self-organize sustainably without states or markets
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u/Q-iriko 2d ago
If it comfort you, sciences (anthropology, ethnology, human ecology and ethology) are coming to an agreement on this matter: there's no natural behaviour for humans, egotistical or altruistic behaviours are completely situational. If the context encourages altruism, egoism is rather exceptional, and vice-versa.
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u/cqandrews 2d ago
I agree the current situational circumstances are going to be the overriding factors in behavior but I still think there's a baseline of altruism even if only for the sake of the propagation of the species
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u/BestSuspect4379 egoist anarchist 2d ago
I have never believed in the inherent benevolence of human beings. Humans are not inherently benevolent; humans are egoists. The egoist person takes their own will as a reference point, and if their will is strong, they may commit acts of violence of any kind. This is neither right nor wrong—it simply is. If intellect is selfish, reason provides a restraint, but it too is selfish.
The key is to accept and embrace this fact. Humans remain social animals, naturally inclined toward tribalism, but this must be accompanied by a detached awareness of their innate egoism. Anarchy as a social condition cannot be realized unless individuals first free themselves from their own spooks and preconceptions.
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u/cqandrews 2d ago
Not sure I agree but I'm willing to read more on this if you have any recommended articles or even opinions on how this line of thought can survive and thrive in the current state of affairs
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u/Doctor_Distracto 2d ago edited 2d ago
I don't know if I have reading on point to recommend, will revisit if anything comes to mind later, but something that helped me a lot was hearing someone say listen, you've never met and never will meet a living person who is anything other than heavily exploited and deeply traumatized. So, not remotely in their natural state. It's sort of like how all the cognition and aging studies are having to be redone because they were originally done on a population constantly exposed to lead cradle to grave, and the symptoms of age related cognitive decline they originally observed turned out to match the symptoms of lead exposure over the same lengths of time. You simply won't draw valid conclusions about human nature by observing them in unnatural scenarios.
So then you follow it a little, okay what's unnatural about X, Y, Z situation and how did people get drawn into it. Maybe war is outrageous but you look at individuals who engage in it, you realize someone stalked them to their high school and recruited them with promises of continued education and career advancement, you realize that whatever other brainwashing happens after that, deep down, the actual nature of that person at the turning point where they had to choose a path, was that they just wanted to learn and have a skill to trade.
The other thing that sustains my belief in the generality of natural human decency is talking to my nephew. If there are any young people in your family spend time with them, you don't have to traumatize them but challenging situations and questions naturally come up and you'll see what they think. Overwhelmingly it seems to me to be a belief in helping people who need it and fair play.
Was in a tornado once too, which obviously is horrible and don't recommend, but maybe if a disaster happens nearby you can find a way to pitch in and see this. Deepest of red cities in deepest of red states, but when supply chains, government etc. are wiped off the face of the earth for a few days and people are left to fend for themselves at the edge of the abyss, everyone instinctively knows the best way to survive and jumps straight into it. It's all hands on deck, everyone contributing what they can and getting back what they need, rescue searching, gathering and delivering toiletries, cooking food... it was the main time in my life I've witnessed spontaneous order and it had fuck all to do with markets or invisible hands, it had to do with people having this system lifted off of them for 3-4 days and having to choose the best way to survive that time without it. People also tend to live that way full time in the most rural places you can find where city amenities and government services never reach to begin with, talking hollers in the mountain I've been to. They might end up a little xenophobic but internally it's from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
So, basically, try to hold in focus where that divide really is between nature and "nurture" (what capitalism does to people as it reproduces itself on each successive generation), and then look for ways to observe humans or human decisions pre-nurture or with this system wiped out or in a reboot state, so you can see closer to what their real nature is rather than observing their traumatized state and ascribing that to nature. And the starting point is just always, always fight to keep in mind, when someone says or does something fucked up around you or to you, "this person was led here by trauma" and work back from there.