this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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Tacos. (lemmy.world)
submitted 6 months ago by Nooodel@lemmy.world to c/atheism@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15573986

Tacos.

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[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 6 months ago

Morality, the thing we mythically got from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, is how we negotiate cooperation, specifically in holding back the predators, parasites, famine, disease and the elements (hot, cold, wet, dry) that are all glad to kill us. With enough cooperation we can survive the -40° poles and the big white bears. With too little cooperation, we're homeless in own society and are rounded up in concentration camps.

But also we're not great at this. In fact, we only are good for migratory bands of hunter gatherers, and while we have developed a robust list of egalitarian ethics by which we might maintain a community of tens of millions, generally, those fall to exploitation by those in power (parasitism is the most effective and most common survival strategy), but even our industrialists can't help themselves and exploit us just enough to stay rich. They are driven to take more and more, and regard their workforce less until the situation becomes untennable. Often an industrial disaster results in discontent and unrest (if not civil war) but if not that, they are gladly polluting our world uninhabitable, dooming even their own legacies and future generations, all for number-go-up.

So, we can see that not only are we instictually driven to cooperate to survive, but those instincts only carry us so far, and even as we see what the rational choice would be to preserve a functional equilibrium, we are driven by feelings not to make that choice. Hence how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and even Christian bulwarks like Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas (whose jobs are to engage in pure rational thought) can't help themselves but be total assholes.