Re: Number 4

You call it defeatism, I call it realism. Which of us is right? The science is on my side, I'm afraid. Human beings, when left to their own devices, are self-centered and animalistic. It's just a natural fact; it's in our genes. Someone in a program I was watching on TV last night, in a program about the hippie movement in fact, made the point perfectly. He said if we were capable of living in peace and brotherhood on our own, we would've been doing it already for thousands of years. Almost all attempts at such idealized communities invariably collapse due to human shortcomings. The free love movement imploded because human beings are jealous lovers. They do not like to share. The drug subculture of the Haight-Ashbury was destroyed by greedy drug dealers, gangsters and pimps who took advantage of the young people moving out there on their own. The best we're ever gonna get is temporary. Carnivals and festivals do well as kind of temporary utopias, but few people would want to live in that atmosphere permanently unless they're getting paid for it, like Disneyland employees.

Science is not on your side, because there is no scientifically verifiable evidence that humans' negative qualities being ascendant over their positive qualities are genetically pre-determined. That is all conservative ideology--not to mention Social Darwinism--used to justify the continuation of a system based on power and privilege for the few, and the need for powerful state intervention in our personal lives, not to mention an attempt to deter people from achieving a better society. Empirical evidence seems to indicate that the human species is adaptable, and that which of our qualities are ascendant depends upon what the demands of the system we live under impose upon us. In a capitalist system where greed is practically worshipped and ruthless competition is demanded, it should be no wonder that people behave so negatively under this system. That should not be taken as an indication that these negative qualities are naturally ascendant, because people tend to behave much more cooperatively when the circumstances--or the system itself--call for it. You also fail to take into consideration the honorable and charitable behavior often employed by many people under the current system despite how much this system discourages and fails to reward such positive behavior, which makes it clear that people are capable of as much good as they are bad, and are not slaves to some sort of gentic compulsion to always commit negative acts.

Just because we're capable of those things doesn't imply that these are inherent qualities to us and that they'll triumph in the end.

I never said that was the case. What I did say that it's clear we are capable of positive qualities in addition to negative qualities, and there is no reason to assume that the negative qualitis are anymore genetically inherent than the positive ones, or that the negative qualities will inevitably come up ascendant. That is not science, it's misanthropy and pessimism. People's behavior is greatly affected by what their specific type of environment demands of them.

There must be some underlying motivation to make people behave, whether it's love for their spouse and children, state enforcement, monetary compensation or whatever. Usually it's a combination of these.

A system where people were rewarded for cooperation and working for the betterment of all humanity as opposed for personal enrichment would be such a motivation, and it wouldn't require state enforcement or monetary compensation.

Obviously not. People want to strike it rich somehow. Lotteries are popular because they rely on the fact that humans are greedy. They want to live like kings and they want to do it now, without having to time time and energy into it.

Um, and the desire to strike it rich, the existence of lotteries, and rampant greed are all part and parcel of a capitalist system. In a system where money didn't exist, and everyone was free from base material want, obviously "striking it rich"--i.e., personal enrichment--wouldn't be part of the "American Dream" people under such a system had, because the notion of success and primary motivating factor of our existence would no longer be to acquire as much material wealth as possible. Becoming the best they can be and improving the system and human existence further than before would instead become the primary motivation.

It doesn't matter what kind of system you have.

Yes it does, and you just provided strong evidence up above for this by pointing out how the "American Dream" is obviously very much influenced by the type of socio-economic system that we currently live under. A moneyless economy based on cooperation rather than competition wouldn't create the exact same motivating factors for people that a class-divided system does. Arguing that humanity is incapable of achieving a better world and a better system is indeed defeatism because it plays right into the hands of the decadant ruling class that profits from the present system at the expense of the majority.

Like I said, the hippie communes stressed the values you're talking about and far too many of them either turned into cults or self-destructed. It's our nature, and nothing we do--leastwise reducing gov't interference in our lives--is going to overturn millions of years of evolutionary programming.

Human history--and the various economic systems that have existed during it--occurred due to specific material factors that existed within those time periods, including how difficult the level of production was at the time. It had nothing to do with evolutionary biology; our behavior adapted to these systems, which is precisely why certain types of behavior we engaged in in the past are no longer acceptable today. If we were primarily ruled by genetic programming then our behavior would always be exactly the same throughout history, and no conflicting qualities would exist. Yet social progress does and has occurred. Further, even within the current system that glorifies and rewards greed and war-like behavior, we still have numerous decent, anti-war, honorable, and non-greedy people who aspire to improve the human race rather than simply work for their own personal enrichment. These people are not forced to behave in such positive ways, nor are they rewarded for it monetarily. Such behavior goes against the imperatives of our present system, not in harmony with its demands. If we are indeed slaves to our genetic programming as you say, then this positive behavior seems to indicate that there is great genetic variance in the human species, and that these possibly recessive qualities can indeed become the ascendant qualities in a future system that has different imperatives and requirements than the class-divided systems that existed throughout recorded history. It simply stands to reason that human adaptability may include a "social progress" gene in addition to a "greed" gene, and that the human species may be capable of evolving further now that technological progress and productive capacity have advanced to the point that it has.

That being said, social democracy in those European nations is a progressive step upward from the type of capitalism we have in America, and this I agree with. I prefer social democracy over unregulated capitalism any day of the week. But I do not believe it represents the zenith of what human beings can accomplish. We may not be able to create a perfect system, but modern technology following the Industrial Revolution does give us the capacity to remove human want and eliminate numerous problems that currently plague us, and as soon as enough people get over their lack of faith in what the human species is capable of and stop playing into the hands of the ruling class that directly benefits from the present system at everyone else's expense, we can indeed create a new system with different imperatives that will bring the positive qualities of humanity to the fore. A moneyless economy based on cooperation will indeed serve to bring these positive qualities of humanity into ascendancy, and the conservatives will be proven wrong that humanity is only capable of very limited progress.