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Capitalism is an unrealistic death cult.
(lemmy.today)
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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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Evolution only cares about passing on genes. It's rare in the animal kingdom for menopause to exist. For the most part there's no point in an animal living if it's unable to mate. Scientists have the "grandmother hypothesis" for why this happens in a few whales, humans and some chimps: in a species where the grandmother might help care for a baby that has some of her genes, the grandmother can be useful to the mechanism of passing on genes even if she's no longer able to pass on her own.
That means that a creature might care about how the world looks maybe 25 years past the point where it can have offspring. Caring about environmental degradation that takes place on a multi-century scale is just not something that evolution prepared us for. Why would it? No creature in history has ever been able to modify its environment the way humans can.
Viruses are actually a good analogy. A virus depends on a living host. But, viruses often kill their hosts. Like humans, it can actually modify its environment in a way that that environment becomes toxic to the virus's existence. That seems bad. For any individual virus though, its "life" is so short compared to the life of the host that any mechanism that made it try to avoid killing the host would just be a useless genetic trait that would not be optimal.
Humans have these immense brains, and they allow us to do things that aren't simply the result of evolutionary drives. But, we're still animals. Those drives really structure everything we do.
Altruism can actually be evolutionarily advantageous. For example, vampire bats share food with hungry individuals, and this can be reciprocated later. Insects like ants and bees have workers that give up their own reproduction to help raise relatives, thereby still passing on shared genes. Even among unrelated animals, repeated cooperation can favour altruistic behaviour.
I don't know why you need to go farther than humanity itself to clearly demonstrate the benefits of an altruistic survival model.
Modern human health care is predicated on individuals dedicating decades of their lives to education and research before dedicating decades more to the grueling physical labor of providing health care. And yet, our 8 billion person population size is wholely predicated on the massive bump in the human survival rate where professional medical services exist.
Yes, there's some advantage to the survival of the community, not just the genes. But, it's sort of an expensive gamble. Not just sharing with an individual that might out-compete you later, but also the energy / effort / "programming" etc. required to act in an altruistic way. That's why you sometimes see altruism in nature, but it's not the rule.