> environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on
> asking whether they really should in the first place?
> it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without
All of these criticisms reflect a total naivety to ecosystem dynamics at play, and the motivational landscape that they create. As long as these behaviours continue to create a competitive advantage for the organisms that display them, they will continue to emerge and perpetuate. There is no method of social organization that can overcome the competitive reality of the ecosystem we live in.
You'll also note that environmental destruction, resource hoarding, and interference competition are all widespread behaviours in the natural world. We are part of that world, and are subject to the constraints that it produces.
It's like trying to overcome a bug in the CPU instruction set by writing JavaScript. The "problems" are part of the fundamental substrate and aren't addressable at the proposed layer of abstraction.
When you abstract, you leave things out. You claim to abstract from cave people. How is that the best we can do?
You pretend, humans were cells competing mindlessly. Then you conclude, any other approach than mindless behavior was naive.
You again observe animals and justify your behavior (on a vastly greater scale) by it.
How do you manage not to see the absurdity in that? You're not an animal, you have a conscious mind, capable of rational thought and according foresight.
Because that is, in a very fundamental and immutable way, who we are.
I'm saying that we live in an ecosystem, and that creates emergent properties and behaviours. Resource hoarding and interference competition are among those. No amount of consciousness, rational thought, or foresight, can change that.
As long as (e.g.) hoarding resources today makes it more likely for your offspring to succeed tomorrow, the traits that influence people to hoard resources will continue to perpetuate. It's also why, for example, we have the dark tetrad - it works.
Too high of trust creates opportunities for liars. Too many liars lowers trust to the point that it's not profitable to lie. There exists between these two points a stable equilibrium between zero liars and everyone lying all the time, and it's at neither extreme. The same is true for all other behaviours you moralize.
I'm not justifying anything, I'm simply observing the constraints of the system we live in, and inferring that any mode of social organization that ignores or opposes these constraints is doomed.
Apart from debatable (but real) genetic differences you don't know about, the crucial point is culture. We're not cave people as we don't share their culture and don't have to.
Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.
Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.
You apparently have never heard about ethics. There is a difference between morals and ethics. Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.
Your idea of an "equilibrium of all behaviors" presupposes mindless automata, again.
Human societies are meta-organisms - they modify themselves over time, and compete with each other for finite resources. Any culture which sacrifices competitive advantage for any reason is simply out-competed and absorbed by other societies which make no such sacrifice. There is no escaping this reality. This is referred to as cultural group selection.
> Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.
I'm not saying it predisposes us to capitalism though, I'm saying it predisposes us to maximize resources and engage in competitive behaviour. This is supported by the fact that very nearly every organism in nature also engages in resource maximization and competitive behaviour (r-Selection). There is no altruism (going against genetic self interest) in nature, it's simply not sustainable.
> Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.
I'm making no such claim. I'm simply claiming there are constraints in the system, and ignoring them doesn't make them go away.
> Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.
Any yet, no matter how hard we try, we've not managed to eliminate lying (or even agree what specifically it means). Are you really suggesting that some yet-undiscovered set of rules will create a society in which no one will ever lie? Doesn't that sound a bit.. unrealistic?
When you refer to "private ownership", you unreflectedly endorse things like individuals "owning" land.
The consequence of that negligence are things like environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on. A substantial part of what currently goes wrong on the macro-scale.
"Free exchange" is a misnomer in the same vein. The "freedom" leaves people to willfully avoid asking whether they really should in the first place. More importantly, it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without.
"Due process" isn't tied to capitalism to begin with and all these things don't "span back to the dawn of agriculture".
You put up the straw man of the Soviet Union, prepping it up to the height of serving as the epitome of what humans could conceive of as alternatives (or modifications) of the existing system. That's a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy, not higher insight.