QUORA: ‘How natural is capitalism to human nature?’
Capitalism is 100% consistent with human nature.
Some say Capitalism is not “natural” because it liberates man to alter nature to man’s benefit. The natural world, they claim, is a planet unimpacted by human intelligence, productive work, and ingenuity.
But this is bogus and contradictory—i e, a logical fallacy. There is nothing intrinsically valuable about unaltered nature. Nature “created” man. And like all life forms, man has a nature, an identity, and means of survival.
Man’s unique means of survival is his reasoning mind, which he can apply to his physical efforts to alter his environment to suit his needs. It is this attribute, which no other known living species possesses, that Naturalists hate and resent.
The social condition that man needs to successfully apply his means of survival is individual freedom governed by individual rights. The only social system that systematically establishes these conditions is Capitalism. Hence, the Naturalists, driven by hatred of the vastly improved-upon world they see all around, absurdly claim Capitalism is not natural.
Naturalists look around with horror and see roads, buildings, farms, and every other product of human productiveness we take for granted, and see something unnatural. They fantasize about the time when man will return to the state of nature of animals and, like their hunter-gatherer ancestors, live in “harmony” with nature, with the misery, poverty, short, and brutal stone-age existence that that implies.
The question is: How can an entity that arose in nature, by natural processes, be unnatural? It can’t. How can the social system most consistent with man’s fundamental nature as a being of reason and freedom be unnatural? How can the resulting advanced industrial civilization we see and live in be unnatural?
Of course Capitalism is natural—that is, consistent—with human nature. No other answer to the above question makes a shred of logical sense.
Related Reading:
Why Capitalism is Selfish--and Why That’s Good
Books to Aid in Understanding Rational Selfishness
Capitalism and the Moral High Ground by Craig Biddle
Why Capitalism Needs a Moral Sanction
Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights
What is Capitalism? by Ayn Rand
2 comments:
Capitalism is so natural to human nature that it is congruent to it. It's the very expression of human nature. Other forms or conditions of human relations are not at all expressions of human nature, even though they come about by the faculty of volition, which is the essence of human nature. We can just as well choose against our human nature as for it, as evidenced by the way things are now. But, if we choose FOR our human nature, we'll choose capitalism.
Well put, Mike.
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