>A few of those will be very ethical and unselfish and operate completely within the rules and the spirit of the system. A few others will be total assholes and just exploit every weakness they can find to advance their own interests, regardless of the damage inflicted on others
This seems far from the general consensus in social psychology, which is that the context we exist in determines the majority of our actions. The Milgram and Asche lines of research are the most prototypical, but Zimbardo has spent his whole career on basically this question.
True sociopaths are incredibly rare (less than 1% of the population). People find it very difficult to betray or hurt other people, and this comes from genetics, not context, and we know this because it is a human universal.
In similar experiments measuring trusting behaviors and betrayal vs. reward responses to those behaviors, 90% of people engage in a trust behavior (giving money to another research participant, over a computer game, never seeing this other person), and 95% of people who are trusted reward, rather than betray, their partner.
This sort of human-naturism is just defeatist propaganda meant to maintain the existing system of total hierarchical dominance of elites (the capitalist class, men, whites, cisgenderds) over the oppressed. You can choose to stop being a shitty person, and your doing that will create a context where other people are pressured to do the same, and will likely concede to that pressure.
(It's not surprising that this didn't exactly take on in an environment like the Soviet Union, where trust was intentionally minimized by the state, which itself didn't trust its citizenry because it was the active target of an espionage and proxy war for its entire existence. It's also not surprising that people in an environment that values capital accumulation over all else are quick to betray each other. However, there are a lot of examples of libertarian socialist territories, brief though they may have been, that contradict the notion that communism (which is the same thing as socialism, there is no difference at all) inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Since these societies were attacked both by capitalists and authoritarian communists, it's not surprising that they didn't last very long either.)
This seems far from the general consensus in social psychology, which is that the context we exist in determines the majority of our actions. The Milgram and Asche lines of research are the most prototypical, but Zimbardo has spent his whole career on basically this question.
True sociopaths are incredibly rare (less than 1% of the population). People find it very difficult to betray or hurt other people, and this comes from genetics, not context, and we know this because it is a human universal.
In similar experiments measuring trusting behaviors and betrayal vs. reward responses to those behaviors, 90% of people engage in a trust behavior (giving money to another research participant, over a computer game, never seeing this other person), and 95% of people who are trusted reward, rather than betray, their partner.
This sort of human-naturism is just defeatist propaganda meant to maintain the existing system of total hierarchical dominance of elites (the capitalist class, men, whites, cisgenderds) over the oppressed. You can choose to stop being a shitty person, and your doing that will create a context where other people are pressured to do the same, and will likely concede to that pressure.
(It's not surprising that this didn't exactly take on in an environment like the Soviet Union, where trust was intentionally minimized by the state, which itself didn't trust its citizenry because it was the active target of an espionage and proxy war for its entire existence. It's also not surprising that people in an environment that values capital accumulation over all else are quick to betray each other. However, there are a lot of examples of libertarian socialist territories, brief though they may have been, that contradict the notion that communism (which is the same thing as socialism, there is no difference at all) inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Since these societies were attacked both by capitalists and authoritarian communists, it's not surprising that they didn't last very long either.)