Quote Originally Posted by frodly View Post
I really don't even know what that means actually!! In my experience, I have never witnessed much of a nature shared universally by humans. I mean of course most people of the basic biological imperatives to eat, procreate, find shelter, survive, etc. However, that isn't universally true. As there are anorexic people, suicidal people, people who don't want children, etc. Now those people are a minority of the population, so even accepting those things make up something called "human nature," what insight does that term offer? How is referencing that supposed nature mean society is unchanged? We may still share some basic biological imperatives with our ancestors, but out basic natures are not the same. We now live in a consumerist capitalist society, that is so radically different from anything we experienced before, that we cannot help but change. On top of that, we have mechanisms of selection. People who have skills that would have been useful to society many years ago(like say a big strong guy who is good at and enjoys fighting), that person would have been celebrated 1000 years ago. Now they are incarcerated and separated out from society. Those were the sorts of people society privileged, them and people born into privilege. Now we privilege people with an entirely different skill set, who likely would have been ignored/marginalized at any other point in human history. So while we may share some basic characteristics that you describe as a nature, I don't think those characteristics are determinative of behavior to that large an extent, for that to matter.
We are fundamentally no different than we were at any point in time.

All of us are self-owning and self-determining.

All of us desire or strive to live according to our own will.

All of us are capable of employing reason.

These are the fundamental aspects of human nature that have not changed one bit over time. We must recognize that there are some constants as it regards our humanity, and we must seek to accommodate those constants as best as possible via our social organization. This idea that things are SOOOOO different than they were just because we're banging away on computers and flying around in jet-planes is just contemporary hubris. Fundamentally speaking, you aren't ANY different than the Roman gladiator or the American slave. We are all human and humans, no matter what time period they may live in, share the same fundamental nature or striving. That is what BINDS us.