We have all heard the argument that communism sounds good in theory but cannot work in practice because human beings are naturally greedy, corrupt, selfish, and aggressive…

Let me try to debunk this insidious notion.

Our Hunter-Gatherer Heritage

Homo sapiens have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Except for the last 6,000 or so years, we lived and evolved in small hunter-gatherer tribes. This was most likely the social structure of Homo Erectus as well, going back some 2 million years.

The fundamental characteristic of hunter-gatherers (also known as primitive communist societies) was that they had no private property and therefore no economic classes. This in turn translated into a minimal basis for greed, hoarding, and selfish opportunism.

They mostly did not even comprehend concepts such as ownership or greed, as witnessed by the Europeans who tried to buy the land from the Native Americans centuries ago and could not get them to understand how one buys land.

An example of a hunter-gatherer mindset would be if one member tracked and hunted large prey, the whole tribe would have a feast and perhaps share with neighboring tribes. On the other hand, in case of some calamity, they all suffered together. They lived collectively as one unit.

We can infer this since many such hunter-gatherer societies are still in existence today, such as the Bushmen in the Kalahari, the Aboriginal Australians, the Hazda in Tanzania, Tasaday in the Philippines, the Inuit, the Awa, and many more. Surveys identify around 100 or so hunter-gatherer groups with some historical data available on them.

Many of their social structures, economies, and cultures have been studied by anthropologists and described by missionaries and sailors who came in contact with them. They are unmistakably very similar in their social disposition.

It is important to note that the economic organization of any society is the primary influence on its social character and the mindset of its people.

The anthropological studies of living hunter-gatherers suggest that for over 99% of our history, greed, selfishness, corruption, and aggression were not part of the ethos in which we evolved.

Of course, I am painting with a broad brush and simplifying in the interest of staying on point. It is much more nuanced, and there are some exceptions. Nevertheless, the popular image we have of Stone Age people being hyper-aggressive cavemen and murderous brutes who took everything by force is certainly not true of hunter-gatherer societies.

The Shrinking Family Unit

Our collective nature becomes even more evident by simply looking at our own average nuclear family with parents and children. There is division of labor and some hierarchy, but everything the parents do is for the benefit of the family as a whole. They are selfless toward each other, and there is no room for greed. Good parents share everything with their children, and later the adult children care for their elderly parents.

In many parts of the world, this same dynamic includes extended families living under one roof communally. For most of human history, this communal life was the entire tribe. In other words, the way we see our immediate family is the way they saw their whole society. This microcosm of the nuclear family's communal culture contradicts the idea that humans are individualistic and selfish.

We are obviously not selfish when it comes to our own immediate family. We identify them as our tribe.

Only in late-stage capitalism has this collective ethos been reduced to the nuclear family. It is what remains of our primitive communist heritage. Today even that is being torn apart and replaced with complete and utter individualism.

Alienation Of Man And The Birth Of Civilization

The communist essence of human existence began to erode sometime after the last ice age when we discovered agriculture and settled in fertile lands. Inevitably, land ownership and property rights became the basis of the new economy. Private property, inequality, and classes emerged as a result.

Governments were created to protect the economic interest of the Haves from the Have Nots. Money was invented to compel the masses to buy into the system by taxation. Written language and number systems were invented to keep track of who owns, who owes, and how much. Militaries were assembled, and wars were waged for the acquisition of more land.

And so, these were the birth pangs of a new kind of society and the beginning of humanity's class-based history. What we call Civilization.

Under these material conditions, due to the lack of any basic security, where everyone had to fend for themselves, it is no surprise that greed and corruption flourished.

The guardians of any class-based economic system cultivate this. They rewrite history to alienate the masses from their roots and make them more malleable.

Their philosophers create new worldviews that are consistent with their economic goals. This lays the groundwork for the social engineers to inject whatever culture, ethics, rituals, and habits fit the degree of depravity they require in order to dismantle our humanity.

When we have internalized their vision as our own, they will have successfully indoctrinated us to be foot soldiers for their interests. The ruling class can then claim that the ills of society are not caused by their economic system, but are due to our flawed Human Nature, and therefore the people themselves are at fault. Tyrannical solutions will follow, such as eugenics, the war on drugs, and mass surveillance.

In reality, the ills of society are due to our alienation from our nature. Alienation from self, from our fellow humans, from our work, and from nature itself.

A Physiological Take

So, are human beings naturally greedy, corrupt, selfish, and aggressive? This cannot be further from the truth even from a physiological and evolutionary perspective. If it were true, we could not have survived as a species. Children's brain development requires years of nurturing before they can even walk, let alone survive on their own. This means that the next generation's survival depends on a safe and cooperative society that can care for them. Being highly collective social animals is the first pre-condition to evolving large brains with such a long developmental curve. Greed and selfish individualism are antithetical to this evolutionary necessity.

Aggression and violence toward other humans are also in direct contradiction to our true nature. Human beings have an innate aversion to hurting or killing other human beings. Most higher mammals have this aversion. This is why when soldiers come back from war, they are suffering from all kinds of psychological problems and have high rates of suicide. This is also why, to kill an enemy, they need to be properly de-humanized first. Otherwise, the soldier will naturally hesitate.

On the other hand, no one ever gets PTSD for pulling a baby out of a fire even if he gets hurt in the process. These facts speak volumes about our nature.

The Trajectory Of Human Development

The discovery of agriculture has set in motion a technological juggernaut that has taken us on a hard detour from our correct path. We are ever more alienated as human beings, while technology is growing exponentially and is being weaponized against us. This paradigm will continue until we gain the collective wisdom to rein it in and use it correctly for the benefit of humanity.

It's our rite of passage with everything at stake. At the expense of sounding biblical, we sacrificed our humanity at the altar of this knowledge. We will eventually find our path to communism, which I believe is the human state of equilibrium.

The only difference between our primitive communist past and modern communist future will be the merging of technology and knowledge with our true social nature. In other words, it is now taking us 6,000 years to gain the wisdom of properly harnessing our creative and innovative abilities and not losing our humanity. That is if we don't destroy ourselves in the process.

Conclusion

In summary, human beings are social animals. We are inherently communal, collective, and cooperative, with strong social bonds. Greed, corruption, selfishness, and aggression are all anti-social behaviors that are not conducive to the stability of the collective. So they cannot be our default position in the spectrum of behaviors. They are more likely the side effects of alienation from the collective.

Living in the heart of the Empire, we must recognize that we are the most propagandized and perhaps the most alienated people in the world. So much so, that we have unprecedented rates of mental illness, depression, and suicide, all signs of alienation in my opinion.

However, recognizing this fact does not automatically make us immune to the environmental forces that push us to be greedy, selfish, corrupt, or aggressive to varying degrees. We can see these anti-social behaviors all around us, perhaps even in ourselves. And we must resist these tendencies.

It is a mistake to extrapolate outward and conclude that this must be an eternal nature of man. I have made the case that it wasn't true in the past, and I believe it will not be true in the future when the masses take control of this runaway train headed toward the cliff.

We, as human beings, are endowed with an insatiable yearning to be at one with our Collective Humanity. It's our built-in True North and the key to our Redemption.

All systems in the universe are compelled to reach equilibrium. Communism is our innate calling toward this universal balance.