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Comment by iamleppert | Hacker News Reader

The fact is the true nature of humanity revolves around the concept of survival. Survival of the fittest. Having largely defeated and subjugated nature on this world, we are no longer in competition with the natural world. Rather, we are in competition with one another. The strong, be it physically or mentally, will always overpower the weak. Our role on this world is not to live in peace with one another, it is to conquer and conquest over our fellow man.

Anyone who disputes this is lying to themselves about the true and ruthless nature of humanity, and disrespects the mechanisms that have allowed themselves to exist and ask that very question.

This is your permission to do whatever you can get away with in the quest to amass as much of whatever is the current measurement of conquest. Be it money, fame, or power. It will never be enough, but that's not your place to ask why. Only how you will conquest.

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I once read a book on primatology (can't remember the title, wish I could) that observed that over 8 million people live together in NYC. For the most part peacefully. But if you put 8 million chimpanzees together in the same space they would rip each other apart. It would be a bloodbath.

Which is to say that one of the unique things about humans is our ability to get along with each other. To form ever-larger stable communities. So I question your declaration that the "true nature of humanity" is to be in competition with one another. I'd say we're the dominant species on the planet precisely because we have an ability to put aside competition and cooperate with each other. Not always, of course, but the majority of the time.

What a dismal view of the world that is! Such a life would not be worth the trouble of living, so I'll simply discard your argument and assume that you must be wrong. Call it an inversion of the anthropic principle, perhaps.

This is what I call the Randian paradox in a nutshell.

It is, when you actually think about it, quite selfless to tell people to be selfish and to take care of and control their own affairs, as the least likely person to receive any benefit by following the speaker's advice is the actual speaker.

On the other hand, it is exceptionally selfish to tell others to place others' well-being ahead of their own for the opposite reason, that following the speaker's advice is absolutely more likely to benefit the speaker (and everyone else) at the expense of the listener.

Accordingly, it's utterly incoherent for anyone acting upon this self-centered philosophy to tell anyone else to do it, because the first principle of being a wolf among sheep is don't let other wolves into the fold.

> the Randian paradox ... It is ... quite selfless to tell people to be selfish

Unlike most paradoxes, this "Randian paradox" has an easy resolution: it's utter bullshit parroted by asshole psychopaths who have been wishing desperately their whole lives for justification that their utter disregard for the wellbeing of their fellow humans is actually a good thing. It's not.

> the first principle of being a wolf among sheep

and one way to spot an asshole psychopath is that they divide the world into "wolves" and "sheep" and, of course, put themselves in the "wolves" category.

Illiteracy and throwing a tantrum is not a resolution.

The fittest humans are those who cooperate with and who can be at peace with their neighbors.

The only thing that conquest brings is death, suffering, and broken men.

Prosperity increases in areas and populations that are peaceful and decreases in populations and areas that are not peaceful.

I understand the people who fail to see this, and I pity them.

A diet too rich in documentaries on WWII and the Roman Empire leads to intellectual malnutrition.

Where, when, and what exactly are you speaking of when you speak of increasing prosperity?

If you are asking for examples: everywhere on Earth, for all of human history.

If you are questioning whether or not prosperity is increasing, especially in peaceful areas, I cannot help you. Not being able to tell that we are currently in the most prosperous and peaceful era of human history, and it isn't even close, is like not being able to tell if it is raining or not whilst standing in the middle of a downpour. I would first have to explain what water is, the water cycle, what the sensation of wetness is, other sensory perceptions of rainfall, and a basic understanding of what objective facts are and I don't have time for that.

That's a lot of rhetoric to dodge a question. Peace doesn't fall out of a coconut tree.

I wonder what it would look like to go back in history and compile a bunch statements of the form "The fact is X and anyone who disputes this is wrong." What gems might we find? "The fact is that the Sun obviously revolves around the Earth and anyone who disputes this is lying to themselves." "The fact is that man will never fly and anyone who disputes this is wrong." I'll leave an exercise to the reader to imagine a white plantation owner stating "obvious facts" about another race. I'd like to say "the Earth is flat" but you're more likely to hear that now than thousands of years ago.

And of course we have entire disciplines of study that are basically devoted to finding a justification for being a greedy asshole. I'm guessing you're a fan of those lines of study?

The fact is that the world is complicated, and we're here now and it's our turn to say what it means to be human.

Yeah but we could just not do it that way is the issue. We actually can build systems that affect and restrain human behavior in ways positive for people. Murder is a part of human nature, but we put a lot of work into preventing it to a large degree of success.

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