Humans can not “move on” from human nature no matter how much people try to will it

It's as much "human nature" as being a slave was once the nature of some (chosen) peoples.

Being a slave isn't human nature, but wanting to be a slave owner is. "Human nature" is, more often than not, a shorthand for "the parts of game theory that evolution distilled into humans"

In game theory, cooperation is a dominant strategy and evolves consistently. Slave owners and other injustice committing humans often invoke "human nature" out of trying to cope with their knowledge that it is wrong but whatever trauma or other thing makes them do it anyway, to absolve themselves of agency.

(To be clear, not targeting you personally here, but targeting the rhetoric and fallacy)

Cooperation is an unstable strategy. If everyone else is cooperating and not punishing defectors much, defecting is vastly better for you.

If everyone else is defecting and you can cooperate with a few people, that's slightly better for you. Hence we have high-trust and low-trust societies, gatekeeping, etc.

Sure, and now compare polities which manage to keep defection to a minimum or structure the process of "defecting" to serve the polities purpose instead of being truly adversarial. Bruce Bueno de Mesquitas "the logic of political survival" and various works by daron acemogolu have the data on how much better these polities do.

If there's no pure play dominant strategy, you will always get a fraction of defectors willing to try their luck. But coopération still emerges, and the polities that manage to cooperate more still tend to survive and thrive more.

Many kinds of defecting aren't punished much. For example we don't refuse to buy things made with slave labor. Some people do, but they're an extreme minority. So being a slave owner is rewarding.

Conflict between humans is much much more nature than slavery was. Just look at animals. Flock animals often have conflicts which others. But none of them have ”slaves” (at least no how humans understand it)

There is a different between a conflict and a war. Humans are uniquely violent and cruel to each other, there is nothing even close in the animal world

You should learn about chimpanzee wars and how dolphins treat tortoises, and about the enslaving ants

> how dolphins treat tortoises

Do you mean porpoises?

Dolphins are not known for mistreating tortoises but porpoises.

Yes, I messed that up based on phonetic recall I think. Thanks for correcting

It's a fundamental attribute of reality. Take it up with mother nature, because power struggles exist everywhere, even in dumb systems with no intelligence. Weak things go away, strong things stay around. Weak things need to become stronger than strong things to displace them.

Not really, kindness also exists. It is the escape hatch from the evolutionary zero sum game and let's you pick a better equilibrium (bargaining vs pure Nash).

We can just not fight. There is enough room and resources,we can get more of them and build more efficient tech, and we are all more alike than different.

Kindness is an unstable equilibrium unfortunately. Mother nature is totally uninterested in it. Otherwise we would still all be protolife quasi-cells, because consuming other cells and not sharing resources isn't kind.

Maybe you argue that we are human and intelligent, so we can override this inconvenience with a system of our own design. My response would be "Sure, put your guns down and burn them, I won't stop you."

Again, it's an unstable equilibrium. Power on the other hand is dramatically more stable.

Thats your take, I tend to not agree. Nature, with all its balance by destruction, has one approach but we humans can and do things differently in some cases, for our greater benefit.

We don't kill weak links in our population just like mother nature intended and keeps doing left and right everywhere all the time, a good chunk of this forum would not pass those harsh and often random tests yet its/ours added value is non-trivial and surpasses any additional effort by society (at least I like to think that).

'Everything good in this world is kindness'. I have yet to meet a person, situation or story where this would not apply.

Are humans without agency then?

There's more ways of neutralizing power than meeting it with equivalent threat. You can also make it not worth exerting the power, or introduce enough friction to let it evaporate itself.

And so far, the highest historical power concentrations have always been un-stable, while the polities that put checks on that power and embed themselves in cooperative trade networks lasted for much longer

Meh, that "empathy is weakness" is just an ideology, not the historical thing. Nazi lost the war after all. Fascists in general tend to start wars and then loose them, precisely because their arrogance and lack of empathy makes them unable win long term.

The constant war of all against all with no kindness kind of societies don't do all that well, actually. Human societies do best when the kind people assert themselves against sociopaths. And human societies do worst when the sociopaths get free reign.

There's more than enough energy and resources to go around for humans to peacefully coexist "forever", albeit in lesser numbers than today. The civilization meta game is what ruins it, despite our best attempts to regulate that. And a global self destruct button helps massively... until it does not.

Like I replied to the other commenter, it's an unstable equilibrium. Lots of things can stay perfect forever if nothing throws off the delicate balance.

We can focus effort on maintaining this balance...but doing that requires power to be used. And just like that we are back at step one.

We can communally build up trust to such a high level that everyone can act independently to maintain balance, but this naturally creates a situation where the more trust there is, the bigger the payoff for the one who breaks it. Essentially the prisoners dilemma.