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Almost every creature that lives in a harsh environment understands about looking out for your buddies. The next day, it might be you snapped into the trap. Allies are a precious thing. A lot of people prominent in our society have forgotten, but the rats have not, nor many of the people, either.
Remember this when they start deporting your neighbors next year.
Today you, tomorrow me.
You made me a little nostalgic, reminding me of when reddit was good. Right around that timeframe was the last days of when it was a human place.
https://aroundincircles.net/tales-from-a-dishonest-used-car-dealership-stories/
I'm always mildly concerned about how shocked people are about animals being conscious beings with feelings. Do people really think we are mentally that different from other animals with brains?
I'm more concerned that people believe it's rare, in both humans and the animal kingdom
Predators will share territory if there's enough to go around, even forming close relationships across species, sometimes even raising their young together
Empathy is the natural state, unless there's enough scarcity. Humans are naturally generous, unless we're raised in an environment of eternal artificial scarcity...
All those rich bastards that are not generous at all must have been raised in a lot of artificial scarcity then. Really artificial since most of them grew up well to do as well.
They spend all their damn lives not even fully comprehending they're not living in scarcity, because the only resources they've ever been taught to focus on are those which are inherently scarce - competing for attention, fame, social status, etc.
To be fair, with academic types running experiments like this, the question is usually more along the lines of "At what point does instinct become empathy as we would recognize it?", and depending on how high the criteria is set for empathy there, the level of premeditation may be geniunely surprising in some animals.
Rats are more compassionate than insurance companies CEOs.
Cordyceps is more compassionate than insurance company CEOs.
The rats don’t live in a system that exacerbates and encourages the worst excesses of the worst people. The rats that don’t help are our billionaires.
Yeah, pick any two humans and put them in a similar situation, and I truly believe that you'll see similar empathy 99.9% of time time. But that fucking 0.1%, they're ruthless and they're rewarded handsomely for that behavior.
they’re rewarded handsomely for that behavior
It's more just that they aren't punished for it. They don't have the empathy to give a shit, and thus will do things regular people won't. If society doesn't punish them for being a piece of shit, then there's no downside to being a piece of shit for them, only upsides from taking advantage of situations others won't.
A lot harder to punish when you can start making the laws as well. Society won’t just reward them sometimes they will let them write what everyone else should do as well.
Capitalism wants us to believe that it's the only stable solution, because it comes close to the natural order, and that in nature there is only selfish behaviour, eat or get eaten, homo homini lupus and so on. The truth is, this supposed natural state is completely made up and animals and human beings naturally behave much more selflessly than what is expected from us under capitalism.
Thing is, even the phrase homo homini lupus predates capitalism significantly, and the sentiment dates back to before even the phrase. 'Naturally behave' is a very questionable phrase.
We have the ability to be better and build better societies than we currently have under capitalism. I just don't think an appeal to a state of nature is useful or accurate.
The owners use their captured public education and for profit media to turn us on one another and make us monsters.
They tell us avarice/greed, a well known character deficit and social blight for thousands of years is instead virtuous rational self-interest.
They force us to compete against one another rather than cooperate with one another as the basis of our economy, when an economy is meant to be a lowly tool of society for the explicit use of maximizing the efficient, equitable distribution of goods and services for the benefit of the citizens of the society. Our tail wags the dog. We are slaves to economic growth/metastasis we as a society do not benefit from.
The problem is that the sociopaths, mentally ill people literally incapable of empathy, something most humans have a strong need to exercise, that are among us quickly game society using their mental deficit as an advantage to take more than they need and manipulate others into elevating them, then manipulate those below them into fighting one another perpetually to stay on top.
Humans are social creatures. We've been conditioned to act as monsters, condemning our fellow humans literally dying in our streets of exposure and capital defense force brutality as "lowering our property values."
This isn't natural. It's why our nation's mental health is basically its own apocalypse of mass depression, anxiety, and never ending trauma. We are strongly discouraged from supporting one another, as we're supposed to do the impossible, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, then claim we did it alone. That's the American delusion. 🇺🇸
This really resonates with me. You are an excellent writer.
The part about empathy is so real. A lack of empathy is a real advantage in today's world, unfortunately. I think empathy should be one of the most important values a society should strive for, and we decided to make a society that rewards sociopathy instead.
After observing all of the animals I've ever lived with, I've come to the opinion (unsupported, I suppose, by any real evidence) that empathy is an important part of being alive. I think every living being has empathy, and humans just got quite good at beating it out of other humans to the point where displaying psychopathic traits became something culturally celebrated.
We've been trained to be this way, and we need to reverse that trend.
Altrusim is a good trait to ensure the survival of a species, while being a selfish bastard is a good trait to ensure the survival of the individual. It all depends on the situation.
Meanwhile humans, when put thru the same experiment, realize they can make the human in the unpleasant box pay $ if it wants out. They then learn to create more boxes for more profit.
I dont believe this is inherent. It's not human nature. Its social conditioning as a result of living in a capitalist society.
In a capitalist society, yes. Absolutely a lot of people would do this. But even then, its not everyone.
I live in capitalism but i would certainly not force someone to pay me to let them out of a trap. Especially if they were suffering. And i would never befriend someone that would.
I would think they were a cunt.
you must suck at capitalism then and would literally never be able to chair a publicly traded company maximizing profits, no matter the cost, for shareholders then. (i say lovingly)
If I'm ever told that I belong on a board of directors at a company, I'm going to Luigi myself. I would have deserved it
Ok, but let's say they is a toy train and it splits into two tracks and put the rat at the lever.
now make the rats comprehend fascism.
Would be an interesting study if that was possible.
The Washington Post still has the article up:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-new-model-of-empathy-the-rat/2011/12/08/gIQAAx0jfO_story.html
And here's the science article that prompted it:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1210789
and here's an old archive.org copy of it before the Washington Post started blocking the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140114012833/http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-new-model-of-empathy-the-rat/2011/12/08/gIQAAx0jfO_story.html
Rats. Can't use the term as an insult anymore considering they're more human than we are.
Seems that's an insult to the rat.
Don't think there has ever been much dispute of a rat's intellect
I don't think this was about the intellect either, just about empathy. Sure, the free rat could learn to open it quicker, but the point is that it did. It didn't eventually figure "eh, nothing in it for me", it repeatedly went and freed the other to the point of routine.
I like the one where they gave rats a lot of food and space (rat paradise) and let them breed till they were crawling over eachother till there wasnt enough food for them all. When most of them died and food was available once more, the remainders stopped eating and all the rats died.
Rats are interesting but I think the guy that programmed them left in some bugs.
I wonder about this in animals all the time. Like, many animals seem to really enjoy being loved on and getting scritches, have a relationship with their owner or caregiver, are happy to see them and snuggle up… but in the wild they might be mostly solitary, only interacting with their own kind for mating and maybe raising young. Yet they’re often very different from the (eat sleep reproduce survive) basic wild animal when given the opportunity. They have personalities, happiness, etc.
It's called domestication. In the Soviet Union a scientist domesticated foxes by selecting for "niceness". It only took a couple of generations for the typical domestication signs to appear: longer childhood, friendlier face, smartness etc
That sounds eerily similar to a situation in Secret of NIMH (the book, not the movie), when the rats
Tap for spoiler
being taught how to read discover how to open their cages at night and decide to free the caged mice next to them out of empathy, who then aid in their escape.
A lot of animals are better at solving "prisoners dilemma" situations than us. Most animals would rather work together for the greater good but I guess they haven't heard of capitalism.
Couldn't this be explained by the "tit-for-tat" hypothesis? That selfless behaviour is learned in communal animals, and that its implied it will be you who need help next time?
There is a bat species that I think feeds on blood, and they share the food they managed to get in a night, if a bat refuses to share one night then the next time they get left out of the sharing.
I think we shouldn't underestimate human empathy. The problem is just that we build structures to avoid it. Rich people choose to not see poor people too much or they would feel empathy and be inclined to help them. If the poor are far away, merely an abstraction that is said to exist, then their existence is not felt strongly enough to trigger an empathy response. Surely there are exceptions to some degree, but I think humans are very empathetic and that's one of our great powers.
... which isn't news to me.
For a time it seemed that everybody wanted to shit on animals as being way inferior to humans in every way, including lacking empathy emotion feelings and stuff.
But that was always wrong. Who has ever worked with animals be it horses dogs or farm animals knows they have a soul. Well, but also a lot of them are just evil bastards.
Which is why rats never built empires and conquered the world
In many cities, there are more rats than human. And yet, who feeds who?