Was it any better as a hunter gatherer (I bet if most hunter gatherers experienced modern life, they’d switch places with you in a heartbeat)? Also, what’s wrong with nihilism … or are you confusing nihilism with apathy?
I dunno, I read Kropotkin, and yeah, under conditions of abundance animals can be very egalitarian, but I’m not sure how that’s a newsflash or why anyone would think it says very much about human nature. Maybe it was a newsflash in Kropotkin’s time, and I do credit him for giving us evolutionary psychology. But I’m far more interested in how we behave under pressure. That’s when it’s every man for himself, when we panic like a cornered animal, when we devolve towards superstition, when xenophobia begins to rear its ugly head, etc. etc. And isn’t that our real nature? After all, if you gave a criminal millions of dollars and he decided to quit his life of crime and retire to a tropical island, does that mean he’s a changed man? Did his narcissistic/sociopathic nature magically disappear? No of course not, its just that his greed has been satiated for the moment. Likewise, saying animals behave themselves when they have easy access to everything they need is to say nothing about our true nature. So I don’t find much value in the Kropotkin’s or Rousseau’s of the world (even though they were right in many things they said, it’s just that IMO they didn’t say anything very interesting), although maybe Hobbes exaggerated (and I’m quite sure that we could do better than social contract theory)?
So okay, western civilization sucks, we’re nothing more than slavish sheep, cogs in the capitalist wheel, etc. etc. Yup … you’re probably right. But then, to paraphrase Machiavelli, changing an ingrained system is maybe with hardest thing on earth to try and accomplish, and your chances of success are so tiny, you have to ask yourself … are prepared to accept lifelong misery in exchange for staying true to your values (since that is the likely outcome)?
And is it capitalism or is it something deeper? Was ancient Egypt under the Pharaoh’s better than modernity (I would say probably not, and ancient Egypt long predates modern capitalism)? Or maybe Nietzsche had it right, its really a “will to power” that drives our impulse to subjugate. Or maybe its something even deeper (or something much more simplistic)? Maybe our need for social acceptance, love, sex, etc. (something like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) is the driving force behind our will to power. If that’s true, then it would stand to reason that maybe we could design a more egalitarian socioeconomic system (although, I’m not sure if Marx’s communism is it). Honestly, Marx made plenty of predictions that were flat out wrong (even modern communist philosophers, like Zizek, concede as much), and I’m not a big fan of historicism (unless we’re talking about the sometimes interesting sometimes absurd ways Sartre looked at history, and I do admit that Popper may be gone too far in the other direction). So what is it (that elusive “perfect system”)? I wish I had the answer my friend.
But I do have one thing in common with Kropotkin, I became a biologist (so maybe I subconsciously admire his work)