To claim selfishness is our affliction ignores the conditions of a system that prioritises greed above all other virtues
~ Sourdough ~
A common refrain posed to anarchists and all those who dream of a better future is that we can not create a better society because of ‘human nature’: we are not good enough for it, do not have the capacity to sustain it. Given the meteoric rise of the far right around the globe, and the prospect of Reform UK out-doing its imitation by Labour, the question increasingly turns to whether this is simply the consciousness and consensus of our nature.
After all, by whatever manner, these historic gains in popularity have all been made for the most part electorally. To the extent the dying system of liberal democracy uses voting to legitimate the interests of the ruling class, the electorate has increasingly chosen to legitimate the darkest aspects of themselves to represent them. Does this represents a deeper failing of humanity as a whole? We have an immense appetite for violence. Are we all not barbarous, ready to destroy each other at the drop of a hat? Greedy, selfish, cruel? It is true we may possess all these traits. The story of much of humanity so far has been one of incontrovertible darkness. But to say this is the only story we are capable of telling is wholly false.
To claim human nature is our affliction ignores the conditions under which we exist today. In the modern world, we live under a system that prioritises greed above all other virtues. When the highest value is selfishness to the detriment of all others, it can be no wonder that the humanity we see today is a desperate miserable thing. In simply surviving it, capitalism makes monsters of us all. Forced to be beasts of profit, we have lost faith in ourselves, allowing the most corrupt among us to preach their vice and their systematic crime as universal urge.
Directing the blame away from this systematised cruelty onto the deep and hidden natures of people only serves to ensure that in their own minds, people think themselves the barrier to equality and freedom. If it was truly the masses standing in the way of a free society, the despotic measures of force rigorously applied to keep the system intact would not have to be utilised as often they are. All around the globe every day people are struggling against their oppressors, autonomous of any instruction, striving to be free. All the armies and police, all the bombs, have never once stopped that urge. The universe tends towards entropy and the human being towards freedom, rendering futile and unnatural the rigid boot of control. The universe and indeed the human being can never be fully controlled. The entropy of life expresses the yearning to be free, the aberrant futility of the oppressor in the face of the vast potentials of humanity.
If anything can truly be said about our nature it is that we are cooperative. It speaks to our very coming into existence in this world. We are born from another and a product of social relations. Our most important adaptation is our ability to collaborate, to socialise. We have little besides this. The very existence of everyday solidarity within hierarchical civilisation, cruel as it may be, provides the best evidence that we are not incapable of kindness, that we are not selfish monsters. In moments far more vulnerable than we are now in the past, people reached towards each other in the cold, without the state and without the world we recognise now. The urge to reach towards one another, to find solidarity with one another in our shared death sentence we call life persists across time, the eternal fire in that cold. Whatever selfishness, whatever barbarities, whatever sadness and defeat we have inflicted upon ourselves, it persists, and we have not yet fully ever succeeded in alienating ourselves completely from one another.
Perhaps it is those who espouse belief in a selfish human nature that are the most misinformed as to what its full contents may be. We contain both the urges to love and destroy. Human nature is not a prison but a prism, our imagination morphing to reflect and take the shape of the material systems and structures that we exist within. It is difficult to imagine a better future within the dire conditions in which we exist today, our creativity and hope burdened by the gloom of our current society. What our true nature may be waits to be revealed until we see it reflected in the free organisation of a new society. Until that time, we must find strength in one another, struggle, and most importantly cooperate against the fatalism of human nature to build a future worth living in. Humanity has yet to fully blossom, and it is the work of
revolutionaries to provide the fertile soil in which it may grow.
Image: Climate Strike and march in Pittsburgh, September 2021. Photo: Mark Dixon, Wikimedia Commons CC BY 2.0
