There is a kind of political necromancy afoot in modern discourse—a dreary chant murmured by pundits, CEOs, and power-drunk bureaucrats alike: “It’s just human nature.” As if this incantation explains, excuses, and absolves all manner of violent absurdities. As if, by invoking the mystic forces of evolution or primal instinct, one can justify the grotesque state of things. Income inequality? Human nature. War? Human nature. Corporate psychopathy? Oh, sweetie, it’s just how we’re wired.
What a convenient mythology.
If “human nature” is inherently brutish and selfish, then resistance is not only futile, it is unnatural. The doctrine of dominance gets sanctified, the lust to rule painted as destiny rather than deviance. Meanwhile, the quiet, unglamorous yearning of most people—to live undisturbed, to coöperate rather than conquer—is dismissed as naĂŻve, childish, and unrealistic. How curious that the preferences of the vast majority are always sacrificed at the altar of some aggressive minority’s ambitions.
Let us dispense with this dogma. The desire to dominate is not a feature of human nature writ large; it is a glitch exploited by systems that reward pathological ambition. Most of us would rather not be ruled, and certainly not managed by glorified algorithms in meat suits. The real human inclination, buried beneath centuries of conquest and control, is to live in peace, tend to our gardens, and perhaps be left the hell alone.
And yet, we are not. Because there exists a virulent cohort—call them oligarchs, executives, generals, kings—whose raison d’ĂŞtre is the acquisition and consolidation of power. Not content to build a life, they must build empires. Not content to share, they must extract. They regard the rest of us as livestock: occasionally troublesome, but ultimately manageable.
To pacify us, they offer the Social Contract™—a sort of ideological bribe that says, “Give us your freedom, and we promise not to let the wolves in.” But what if the wolves are already inside the gates, wearing suits and passing legislation? What if the protection racket is the threat itself?
So no, it is not “human nature” that is the problem. Cancer is natural, too, but we don’t celebrate its tenacity. We treat it, research it, and fight like hell to survive it. Likewise, we must treat pathological power-lust not as an inevitability to be managed but as a disease to be diagnosed and dismantled.
The real scandal isn’t that humans sometimes fail to coöperate. It’s that we’re constantly told we’re incapable of it by those whose power depends on keeping it that way.
Let the ruling classes peddle their myths. The rest of us might just choose to write new ones.
Philosophics 