this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
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[–] miguel@fedia.io 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Humans are inherently evil. Communism is a beautiful thought experiment that works really well in small select groups, but fails to tolerate the inherent evils that befall it when it begins to scale.

I love it as an idea. I'd love for it to work. Unfortunately, it's just yet another experiment that falls victim to the "imagine a spherical cow" kind of thinking.

It's inspired many good ideas, though, that do work. Marx had many good points.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Don't be daft. Humans aren't evil, we simply didn't evolve to care about anyone outside our Monkeysphere. Give that a read, what do you think? I've never read anything that gives such solid explanations for so much of human behavior.

[–] miguel@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago

The study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.12730 for those not interested in a cracked pop-sci article.

Table 5, I think, is what the pop-sci takeaway is coming from, which is quite an oversimplification. The idea that "150 people" is what humans can understand is, IMO, a misinterpretation of the study. The study refers to multi-tiered groups ranging from 'Band' (~45.5) to 'Tribe' (~1350.4) based on the degrees of intelligence, cooperation, etc of the members.

If it's even relevant, it supports the points I raised that communism is a theory that works well only in small select groups, though I would argue it's probably correlation and not causation in this case. At least until we have evidence of other primates practicing political theory.