All canned truisms, no understanding.
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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If you claim to be greedy, why do you give most of the value you create to your boss?
power corrupts absolutely
Of all the garbage im14andthisisdeep truisms out there, this is the most infuriating. Zero material analysis, zero historical examinations of what actually led to the policies under the regimes they consider absolutist. Taking that trope seriously is a sign of someone whose understanding of political leadership comes entirely from Hollywood action films.
I gotta say that this was one that I believed until like last year when I was doing some "deprogramming". Unfortunately, this idea is based into the United States Society, probably because it makes for an interesting cudgeal against AES
It also serves a dual purpose in convincing people not to expect too much of their leadership in the west as well. "Of course they do nothing to help us despite campaigning on that, power corrupts."
That’s part of it, although the trope is also used with regards to right wing despots and generic “power-hungry leaders.” I think the bigger purpose is to give credence to the liberal “great man” theory; systems don’t live or die based on theirs merits and/or the events surrounding them, but rather on the character of the leaders behind them.
Hence why American propaganda absolutely glazes the shit out of George Washington for not making the continental army his own personal one after defeating the British and voluntarily declining to run for a third term. American hegemony derives from the moral fiber of the leaders.
greed and selfishness are natural impulses, sure, which is why we probably shouldn't structure society top-to-bottom to reward those impulses like we're doing right fucking now 
greed and selfishness are natural impulses
they very much are not. Hundreds of years of anthropology, sociology, and history show that in pre- and non-capitalistic societies, the impulse to screw people over is way more rare, and even if it exists, it is controlled and discouraged, instead of rewarded. Cooperation has a much longer history and has lead to longer periods of stability and abundance.
Thinking that everyone is greedy and selfish all the time is nothing but european colonial brainworms and capitalist realism.
It's worth calling the concept of greed and its capitalist conceptualisation into question as well.
We all want better things, better food, better sex, better looks, better means to self actualization. This is natural, we all want to improve things for ourselves and, if we're decent, for others as well, if for nothing else than the social capital it affords us, at its basest. The question is "what are we willing to do to get them?"
Are we willing to exploit others to get them? Kill? Self-harm? If greed had a consistent definition, I'd say that that is it, and that is the foundation of capitalism.
To be honest, you're both right. It is a natural impulse to be greedy and selfish sometimes.
But it is not natural to anywhere near the levels that we exhibit (and are taught / encouraged / forced to exhibit) now.
also a matter of magnitude
it's fairly normal to "screw someone else over" in small, inconsequential ways like cutting in line, or taking the last muffin or something
it's extremely abnormal to do it in ways that are seriously harmful but capitalism requires it to "win"
Human greed causes minor inconveniences for other humans, capitalist greed turns millions of humans into paste.
Sure being greedy and selfish are natural. Just because some behaviors are natural doesn’t mean that others aren’t. The Valsalva maneuver is natural, but you don’t see me shitting at every moment of every day. Some times a brother has to pee too.
it's an argument i've made since before i was a communist, intended specifically for the "greed is human nature" debate, not really meant to be 100% precise and all that
still, it'd make sense if it contains some lingering brainworm particles 
Sometimes I drop this on people who have such a bad case of Stockholm syndrome that they can't imagine outside of the bounds of capitalism. It's really hard to argue against a living historical precedent.
On the contrary, I think those impulses are abused but not rewarded for the majority of the population. If people are so self-interested, why not give them a system where they can pursue self-interest on a stable basis by receiving fair compensation for their work and have a greater ability to take risks professionally because they have a safety net?
selflessness and altruism are also natural impulses, but we should only encourage those impulses when acted upon in an individual case, not when structured into society!
They always say "I don't want the government to have all the power" but the thing is, yes a government can be corrupt, but the private sector is literally fundamentally corrupt. A government official is corrupt when they prioritize personal benefit over the public's, which is literally what everyone in the private sector does and is expected to do. Private corporations don't even have to be pretend to be on your side, they will always enrich themselves at your cost when given the opportunity and we're supposed to applaud them for it. This isn't a case of dividing power so one can keep the other in check, there have been no instances ever where the private sector has prevented a government overreach for the public's benefit or anything like that. It's not supposed to do that.
The government's mission is to serve the public and when a government's main priority becomes to enrich itself, we call it corrupt. The private sector's one and only mission is to enrich itself but that's somehow preferable.
no, they'll say "the state" instead of "the government" not realizing that under capitalism the private sector like amazon, and walmart are part of the state
Which proves that capitalism is just fascism in a somewhat dormant state. Until it needs or wants something another has.
If communistic societies always fail, why do non communistic societies find them so much of a threat that an entire globe spanning military apparatus and clandestine intelligence operation has to be a significant drain on their society's resources to fight them? 
Decline, poverty and deaths in post-communist countries are a really bad look.
psudointellectual dribble, so standard for 
“Humans are naturally evil, therefore we MUST embrace our evil nature!”
Do you know what a law is?
"The only possible thing we can do is to reward the most excessive examples of a harmful human trait with the most resources, prestige, and political power in society. If there's a vice in human psychology, not only must we fuel it but we must center our entire political economy around various ways of amplifying it."
I swear these people are just looking for any escape hatch to avoid addressing the gross immorality of capitalism or the possibility that things don't have to be this way. First time and only time I'm gonna praise SocDems but at least those guys believe that we should do something to address the problems in society caused by motivating forces like greed.
Wayyyyy too many people seem to think that people are just naturally pieces of shit and also think they're smart as hell for saying so. Seems like a bad way to go through life
The core message of liberal civics education, at least as it was given to me, is that humanity is disgusting and sinful and the only way to even partly clean yourself of it is by standing apart from the "mob" that would compel you by your own inherent nature into savagery.
People with the mindset of extracting transactional value out of everything more than certainly aren't living happy lives and need to project their misery onto everyone else.
I'm not religious but greed is a sin 🤓
lets design a system that rewards the ravenous jackals of avarice
The fact that corruption is bad is like the most popular taught ever, yet people don't seem to be capable of coming to the conclusion that we could like... remove the corrupt from seats of power?
That's like literally what democracy is supposed to be used for.
Im so sick of these chuds. If selfishness and deceit were basic human nature then I dont think society would be one of our emergent properties. That only.comes from social cooperation
I was on reddit recently to look at that post where they stole a pic from an Iraq video and said it was happening in Iran, saw a comment saying 'the government is going to execute people because they see protest as an insult against Allah', nearly snapped my keyboard from the not ZERO understanding, but BELOW ZERO AND IN THE NEGATIVES understanding of Iran and decided to stay away yet again (until curiosity bites me hard enough in about another year and a half).
Reddit will literally just rot people's brains until they have the real world literacy of an actual marvel character.
Democracy was never in itself "about" compromise, it was offered in a diminished form as a compromise to the working class, but democracy in itself is about majoritarian rule and nothing else, which may result in compromises to produce majorities but does not necessarily need to.
When the owner of a copper wire factory owner wants to dump industrial waste in a river and the people downstream do not want to die, what reason do those people have to compromise with a sicko who treats their lives as a way to socially offload manufacturing costs? But then if the representative of those people gets money from the factory owner and merely puts a cap on the amount of waste that can be dumped in the river but still lets it happen, "pushover" is too kind a word for what he is, and what has transpired has nothing to do with democracy except in the sense that knives have something to do with a stabbing victim.
When you dump a can of alphabet soup into a bowl it is more coherent than this
Nobody should nail a bunch of history books to a baseball bat and use it as a teaching aid.
If we all really believed in the law of the jungle and killing thy neighbour... why don't we just kill the people in power?
Oh yeah, because we are the portion of society with morals. With great compassion for others. I don't have the urge to dominate everything around me. Sounds like a portion of society is just sick.
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