Yeah... people forget that ancient humans survived through cooperation long before states existed and the fights they did have were mostly just over territory and resources. Not some deep evil ''human nature''
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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To be fair, getting people to coordinate gets exponentially harder the more people you have. We evolved to work in relatively small groups, not millions or billions.
Yeah true but humans have evolved to cooperate on a large scale, unlike most primates
The violence we see today has nothing to do with culture clashes or a lack of evolution... it’s driven by inequality. And the state wasn't created to solve coordination problems, it emerged from inequality to protect those who had too much
And yet society has evolved historically towards greater and greater interconnection, rather than fragmentation. Shouldn't that say something about how human nature depends more on our ever-changing material conditions, than as something fixed and static?
Cooperation against other humans (and Neanderthals and such)
There was cooperation, sure. There was also a lot of killing.
It's not just human nature, even chimps kill chimps from other groups who stray into the wrong territory.
I would make the argument that our species resorting to violent conflict over shareable resources is a pretty damning indictment of human nature.
Tribalism exists, it's a scientific fact. You can overcome the biases it imposes through cognitive effort, but at a baseline we are predisposed to hate anyone who we believe "doesn't belong." That's not inherently evil, but it is asshole behavior.
"Communism doesn't work because people are inherently corrupt, so it makes sense to choose an alternative that actively selects for it"
And they're confusing learned societal encouraged behavior as innate despite all evidence to the contrary from anthology.
Or they’ve just met a reasonable number of a*holes…
Not quite, if that were the case the statement would be "because assholes". By blaming "human nature" they're self identifying as one of the assholes.
Assholism is a diverse group with many discrete types of sub-asshole.
Not necessarily. People could have an outlook similar to "a person is smart, people are idiots"
It's the nature of humanity that in any reasonably sized group, there are always a few assholes.
Agreed, but IMHO that is a different conjecture to that of the meme.
I don't think so. Good things can't happen because of human nature: making good things happen involves groups making decisions, and in every group there are bound to be some assholes because that's human nature, that limits the kinds of good things that can happen.
And that they've observed that once groups reach a certain size, it's inevitable that the group contains at least one asshole.
It's like the fable of the scorpion and the frog. It doesn't mean that it's impossible to cross the river. It just means that you need a more complex plan than just carrying the scorpion across on your back.