I don't think taking the plane to go to cheap generic touristic destinations, driving 2000kg of steel to move 1 human being, eating fruits and veggies shipped from the other side of the world or eating meat 2 times a day, everyday is intrinsically part of the human nature.

And if it is let's continue and end it all because it's just plain sad. What a way to go !

What human nature? If the last few centuries have thought us anything is that "human nature" doesn't really mean anything. It's way more arbitrary than people trying to find truths in lobster hierarchies would let you believe.

If this were true we couldn't read Machiavelli, Baltasar Gracian, Francis Bacon, Dale Carnegie. Even Shakespeare.

Superficial customs have changed. Not how underlying perceptions of interests are governed.

Those works were chosen for you to read because they are relevant to our underlying cultural preceptions. Other possibilities for perception exist.

Our "underlying perceptions" for most things concerned with society are nigh completely incompatible with that of Shakespare and most certainly Machiavelli.

Sure we can still understand thinkers of old in a limited capacity, but that's not due to us thinking like them or even experiencing the world like them as our experience is coloured by the concepts we use. We can understand them because of the continuity of society, the constant translation of the old into the new.

Capitalism can only exist now because of how much those underlying assumptions have changed.

Uh... have you actually read Machiavelli? What in The Prince, exactly, does not fully apply to people today? (As long as you don't get literal minded and say we don't live in a monarchy or something.)

Don't go by the dictionary definition of machiavellian. He really wasn't saying things that are hard to believe. He was really just pointing out the sorts of manifestations of human nature that surround us if we don't blind ourselves and refuse to see it.

You misunderstood. I was saying people can and do use the first four as practical guides.

As for Shakespeare, his plays still speak to fundamental, understandable human drama.

I don't understand how I misunderstood? That's exactly what I was replying to.

Oh. Well your original post was saying that human nature had changed radically over the past few centuries. I mentioned the authors as evidence that the stuff they taught about human nature still applies.

When you said when we only understand them in a limited way I took that to mean you disagreed with me that the books have practical value still, and thus were not a good marker of an unchanging human nature. But that's mere contradiction of a claim, you didn’t argue anything directly to show that old authors are in fact hard to understand etc.

I don’t think it’s merely cultural continuation. We can likewise read Sun Tzu and recognize ourselves and our psyches in his stories. There is no cultural continuity with European authors there.

Perhaps I missed something?

> Oh. Well your original post was saying that human nature had changed radically over the past few centuries.

I dispute the very concept of "human nature", it implies a platonic "human", a base which we can only uncover the details of. While in reality there doesn't appear to be such a thing.

> I mentioned the authors as evidence that the stuff they taught about human nature still applies.

It kind of does, changes in the "public consciousness" are more often subversive than radical, a lot of concepts Shakespeare popularised or came up with are still in common use, however it's not because he's unlayering the onion of "the human" concept, but because these concepts are useful and haven't been subverted or forgotten.

> When you said when we only understand them in a limited way I took that to mean you disagreed with me that the books have practical value still, and thus were not a good marker of an unchanging human nature. But that's mere contradiction of a claim, you didn’t argue anything directly to show that old authors are in fact hard to understand etc.

They of course still have practical value, when I say "in a limited capacity" I mean it in a more "glass-half full" way, a lot of context for these works has been lost forever and how a person reading a text understands a word relies more on his entire lifetime of experience than it does on the authors intent, good authors can generally bridge the gap easily, dead authors can't. So information is lost.

> We can likewise read Sun Tzu and recognize ourselves and our psyches in his stories. There is no cultural continuity with European authors there.

Unless you've brushed up on your ancient Chinese that's not really true, the cultural continuity here is the translator.

I suspect the cultural continuity is there but it is taken for granted and not noticed as oppossed to the "exotic". Like how most people don't see themselves as speaking with an accent.

Communists thought the exactly same thing and see how it turned out.

Greed and lazyness are so innate that you could probably trace them back to lobsters.

Being able to overcome greed and laziness is human nature.

Lobsters are a slave to their instincts, humans are not.

Lobsters thing was a joke. And communism was based exactlyu on the idea that people will be able to overcome greed and laziness for common good.

They are but just occasionally and briefly.

This whole debate is like a doc telling a lung cancer patient who has recently started coughing blood to cut out smoking, but he's saying "but I need to smoke!"...

Based on the expectation that humans can't possibly, at this scale, organize themselves around good ideas like reducing consumption and fossil fuel use, we have no options at all and we're on a trajectory to extinction. If that seems extreme to say, just look at the evidence. Believing some other solution will appear is blind faith bordering on delusion.

Well we had a good run.

> we're on a trajectory to extinction

Let them carry on. Perhaps our exction will be exactly what saves the planet! Our archeological records will serve only as a warning for whatever "intelligent" life evolves in the future ;-)

Not sure why this was voted down, it's true, extinction (or mass population reduction) of humans will go a long way towards letting the planet restore its biodiversity.

It seems like a flippant attitude, but it seems to be the way many people are treating climate change (probably because the worst effects won't hit for decades, when many of the people responsible (i.e. voters) will be dead.)

We're leaving an unsustainable mess for our children, I'd like to see some action in their lawsuit:

https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/juliana-v-us

Since they are the ones that will be paying the full price of climate change.

Society already has many conventions and laws that regulate human nature -- why is transportation off limits?

I think that’s the point - simply asking people to fly less and drive less and eat les meat will never ever ever work.

We need big carrots and big sticks in order to achieve things like less flying - that means government regulation, huge material incentives for not flying/driving/etc.

I'm sure when half of africa and south america will migrate north to avoid dying the carrot will be big enough. But it'll be too little too late.

If only a politician could get elected by saying "more green stuff, then there'll be less refugees!". The populace would not bother to understand the relationship.

Also, yeah, maybe it's too late now. If only one could reload from a savegame and learn from experience next time around.

Amazingly now a lot of the "Western world" would prefer those other human beings die rather than suffer a downgrade of their comfortable lives...

The incentive model is simple -- just tax carbon sources, the markets will figure out the rest themselves.

Of course, it would have been better to phase in the taxes decades ago since some solutions (mass transit, for example) can take a decade or more to build.

Let's say someone comes to you and says that if you don't change certain behaviors then they will cook your children. Like, literally cook them to death. And you (maybe not at first, but eventually) believe the threat is real. Then I would say that it is wholly compatible with human nature for you to change your behavior even with no other benefit to yourself, even if you are very attached to that behavior.

At the same time, you're right -- the 2 missing pieces are believing the threat is real, and thinking that you can get by if lots of other people change their behavior instead. Which they won't any more than you will, but that leads us back to human nature again.

Your political beliefs and culture are not inherent to human nature. Plenty of historical cultures have lived sustainably.