Sunderland Haverner says that alliances between contestants in his Follow the Leader competition will be unstable and adds, to one of them:
"'...you have studied psychology yourself, have worked among professionals. You should be able to estimate the personality factors and project how hatred will arise to add its dynamic to the original greed.'" (p. 111)
Sorry, old chap, but fomenting greed and hate is downright evil.
Haverner has a million dollars to give away and has located some people who want it, including at least one who needs it. Just give it to her, you old bastard!
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But Haverner had no interest in being an Andrew Carnegie and spending millions in philanthropy. What interested him was in testing human beings and seeing how they would react to extreme stress.
Ad astra! Sean
Indeed.
You don't have to work very hard to arouse hate and greed in human beings; they're just part of us, like love and altruism. All of them are explicable by evolutionary psychology.
Trying to abolish any of these is like trying to outrun your own sweat. Certain circumstances bring up one, other circumstances have different consequences.
I'm an ethical nihilist -sensu strictu-, and it makes thinking about this sort of thing much simpler... 8-).
Human beings evolved in an environment in which essential resources were periodically lethally scarce.
We're also social animals who cooperate to secure those resources, often competing in groups against other groups.
And we're social animals (2), which means we evolved in a system of internal competition -within- groups for status and power, which were reproductive advantages -- judging by the genetic analysis they're doing these days, -very serious- advantages even in the hunter-gatherer stage, and more so later.
Consciousness and culture complicate the -expression- of these traits immensely, but they don't eliminate them, even potentially.
(2) to explicate a little more, we're social predators and territorial ones.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I mostly agree with you. With me adding that I believe hatred and greed being among the consequences of mankind being a FALLEN race.
Ad astra! Sean
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