Eadelas25 · #24Capitalism is perfect for humans, it's just like survival of the fittest, the strong survive in business. That's the spirit of capitalism, you gotta be ruthless to get to the top and absolutely merciless to stay on top. That's how we are, we take advantage of others to further our own goals. Human nature is defined by greed and greed is good. It makes us strive for goals which may seem impossible like our greed for knowledge led us to send that rover to Mars and send people to the moon.People are gonna be stepped on in a capitalist society, but that's a small price to pay for progress I say.
The issue here is that you seem to think that because your argument applies to evolution it is equally valid for human society as a whole. Unfortunately this is not really the case. Evolution does not deal with humanity or society at all, it deals with dna and how you get the strongest possible dna for a given environment. It achieves this by simple variance testing of mutations over millions of years, one small change and then if it survives enough times it gets to stay and spread enough that we consider ourselves evolved.
How does this relate to human society? Well it doesn't at all. Evolution assumes that either A OR B. It's a boolean where one wins all the time. Society on the other hand is often more nuanced and contain A OR B, A AND B and NULL (neither A nor B). The most famous examples of this being explored intellectually are probably the popular game-theory scenarios called Hawk-Dove and Prisoners Dilemma.
In the prisoners dilemma you have two criminals who have been caught but only have weak evidence against them. They each stand to serve only 2 months in prison for a minor crime, however, if they testify against the other person then they get to walk free and the other person get to spend several years in prison. If they both keep silent they only serve 2 months each, if they both talk they both serve several years. In this case it's obviously in their common interest to keep silent so that they each serve the minimum amount of time, however, it's also in their personal interest to talk - provided the other person doesn't.
The Hawk-Dove game is similar but a bit more complex as it allows for more variables to describe society, however, the gist of it is that in a society with limited resources you sometimes have to share resources. In a population some people are hawks and some people are doves. When two doves meet each other they prefer to co-operate, when a hawk and a dove meet the hawk will kill the dove and take all the resources and when two hawks meet they will fight to the death for the resources. With these game rules you can then try different scenarios depending on how many hawks and doves you add to the game. What's interesting is that the game ends up eventually reaching an equilibrium on the amount of doves and hawks in the game as the hawks will kill each others off.
What this game simulates is a *very* simplified form of society, actual society is of course much more complex but the fact that evolution is binary and these simple games show that society is anything but means that the argument of "Capitalism is good, just look at evolution, the strongest survive!" is logically false. In fact, it's just the opposite, in a game of Hawk-Dove with only hawks society dies out as the hawks kill each other.
What's even more fascinating is that evolution actually supports this implicitly. Imagine that you're playing a game of football and you catch a player cheating. What do you feel? Well you feel that he has wronged you, he's taken an unfair advantage by breaking the rules of the game, thus ensuring his own success at the expense of others. Essentially your brain evolved in a way that it can detect unfairness and make you dislike this. You are wired to co-operate with your fellow humans(*1) because a society that co-operates is more likely to survive and prosper. Evolutionary wise the people who co-operate survived and those who didn't died out more often than not. The gene for non co-operation still exists, though, today we just classify it as a mental disorder called being a sociopath when it's most extreme.
So there you have it, pure capitalism is not what's best for society or the economy. Capitalism is good for the people at the top keeping the rest down. A healthy society that will face a bright future is one that rewards hard work and helping other people grow and prosper. It's one where people work together for the better of the common goal rather than for individual glory. Society is a group of people, not a single individual.
*1: Side note, unfortunately we also evolved with a keen sense of fellowship but lack the ability to be familiar with a lot of people. Thus we evolved methods to not only judge the trustworthiness of other people but also entire groups at an instant. Even more unfortunately we distrust people who are different from ourselves, thus giving rise to racism and xenophobia. Traits we will have to get rid of if we are to ever truly prosper as a genetically diverse human race.
