“In 2014, a team of scientists based at Harvard and Yale published a remarkable study on how people make decisions about the natural world. They were interested in whether people will choose to share finite resources with future generations. Future generations pose a problem because they cannot reciprocate with you. If you choose to forgo immediate monetary gain in order to preserve ecology for your grandchildren, they can’t offer the favour back – so you gain little from sharing. In light of this, economists expect that people will make a ‘rational’ choice to exhaust resources in the present and leave future generations with nothing. But it turns out that people don’t actually behave this way. The Harvard-Yale team put people in groups and gave them each a share of common resources to be managed across generations. They found that, on average, a full 68% of individuals chose to use their share sustainably, taking only as much as the pool could regenerate, sacrificing possible profits so that future generations could thrive. In other words, the majority of people behave exactly the opposite to how economic theory predicts. The problem is that the other 32% chose to liquidate their share of the resources for the sake of quick profits. Over time, this selfish minority ended up depleting the collective pool, leaving each successive generation with a smaller and smaller supply of resources to work with. The losses compounded quickly over time: by the fourth generation the resources were completely exhausted, leaving future generations with nothing – a striking pattern of decline that looks very similar to what’s happening to our planet today. Yet when the groups were asked to make decisions collectively, with direct democracy, something remarkable happened. The 68% were able to overrule the selfish minority and keep their destructive impulses in check. In fact, democratic decision-making encouraged the selfish types to vote for more sustainable decisions, because they realised they were all in it together. Over and over again, the scientists found that under democratic conditions, resources were sustained for future generations, at 100% capacity, indefinitely. The scientists ran the experiments for up to twelve generations, and they kept getting the same results: no net depletion. None. What’s so fascinating about this is that it shows widespread and intuitive support for what ecological economists call a ‘steady-state’ economy. A steady-state economy follows two key principles in order to stay in balance with the living world: 1) Never extract more than ecosystems can regenerate. 2) Never waste or pollute more than ecosystems can safely absorb. To get to a steady-state economy, we need to have clear caps on resource use and waste. For decades, economists have told us that such caps are impossible, because people will see them as irrational. It turns out they’re wrong. If given the chance, this is exactly the kind of policy that people want. This helps us see our ecological crisis in a new light. It’s not ‘human nature’ that’s the problem here. It’s that we have a political system that allows a few people to sabotage our collective future for their own private gain.” (from the book “Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World” by Jason Hickel)

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“Ownership of things in common was so universal throughout the American continent when the Europeans arrived that even the cooking pot, Columbus noted, was available to anyone who wanted to take from it, and this even in times of starvation. Two centuries later, Thomas Morton could also say of the Five Nations inhabiting New England that “although every proprietor knows his own . . . yet all things, so long as they will last, are used in common amongst them.” The idea of ownership of land was so alien among Native Americans that individuals made no effort to secure for themselves the lands they occupied, frequently moving grounds, and readily sharing them with newcomers. As Kirkpatrick Sale writes, “Owning the land, selling the land, seemed ideas as foreign as owning and selling the clouds or the wind.” William Cronon too comments, “This relaxed attitude towards personal possession was typical throughout New England.” […] No effort was made to set permanent boundaries around a field that a family used, and fields were abandoned after some years and allowed to return to bushes. What people possessed was the use of the land and the crops; this is what was traded, and this usufruct right could not prevent trespassing. In fact, different groups of people could have claims on the same land, depending on the use they made of it, which might not be the same. Several villages could fish in the same rivers recognizing their mutual rights. And when one left the clan they left everything they had possessed. Yet, these unattached, nomadic tribes had a far deeper communion with the land and agriculture than the privatizing Europeans and so much respect for it that though “they had taken their livelihood from the land for eons, hunting, foraging, planting, fishing, building, trekking,” at the time of the Europeans’ arrival “the land of North America was still by every account without exception a lush and fertile wilderness teeming with abundant wildlife in water, woods, and air.” The result of this lack of attachment to private property among the Native peoples of America was a communal outlook that valued cooperation, group identity, and culture. […] The dislike for individual accumulation was so strong that they invented the ritual of the potlatch, that is, a periodic redistribution of wealth, to free themselves from it.” (from the book “Re-enchanting The World: Feminism And The Politics Of The Commons” by Silvia Federici & Peter Linebaugh)

We aren’t programmed by nature, we were programmed by economic interests.

Adding a relevant quote (also see an additional quote in a separate reply to this one in regards to how people can protect/conserve nature if given the chance/freedom to do so)

“There was a day when the prevailing American culture was the mass marketer’s worst nightmare. Frugality and thrift were central to the famed “Puritan ethic” that the early settlers brought with them to America. The Puritans believed in hard work, participation in community, temperate living, and devotion to a spiritual life. Their basic rule of living was that one should not desire more material things than could be used effectively. They taught their children, “Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without.” The Quakers also had a strong influence on early America and, although more tolerant and egalitarian, shared with the Puritans the values of hard work and frugality as important to one’s spiritual development. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both important early American writers, viewed simplicity as a path to experiencing the divine. The consumer culture emerged largely as a consequence of concerted efforts by the retailing giants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to create an ever-growing demand for the goods they offered for sale. The American historian William Leach has documented in Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture how they successfully turned a spiritually oriented culture of frugality and thrift into a material culture of self-indulgence. Leach finds the claim that the market simply responds to consumer desires to be nothing more than a self-serving fabrication of those who make their living manipulating reality to persuade consumers to buy what corporations find it profitable to sell: Indeed, the culture of consumer capitalism may have been among the most nonconsensual public cultures ever created, and it was nonconsensual for two reasons. First, it was not produced by “the people” but by commercial groups in cooperation with other elites comfortable with and committed to making profits and to accumulating capital on an ever-ascending scale. Second, it was nonconsensual because, in its mere day-to-day conduct (but not in any conspiratorial way), it raised to the fore only one vision of the good life and pushed out all others. In this way, it diminished American public life, denying the American people access to insight into other ways of organizing and conceiving life, insight that might have endowed their consent to the dominant culture (if such consent were to be given at all) with real democracy. The populist cultures that grew out of the hearts and aspirations of ordinary people in America stressed the democratization of property and the virtues of a republic based on independent families owning their own land and tools, producing for themselves much of what they consumed, and participating in communities of sharing. Theirs was the model of a strong social economy, supplemented by involvement in the money economy at the margin of their lives.” / “Gradually, the individual was surrounded by messages reinforcing the culture of desire. Advertisements, department store show windows, electric signs, fashion shows, the sumptuous environments of the leading hotels, and billboards all conveyed artfully crafted images of the good life.” (from the book “When Corporations Rule The World [20th anniversary edition]” by David C. Korten)

[Onesti Hill] and other teens asked D.C. to provide more youth programming rather than simply ban group gatherings.

Yes instead of “cracking down” maybe try creating (or allowing) a non-alienating and empathic society for young people (and people in general) to participate in, with joyful and meaningful ways to spend time and energy, working together for the benefit of the community and answering people’s shared needs

From the little I know he did seem relatively chill but did he actually promote peace between groups? Didn’t he say he was not bringing peace but a sword?

edit: it seems that the context and interpretation of the sword (and division)/not peace thing is less bad than it first seems, but still, why would he even say anything like that which can be taken to the extreme.

edit: I forgot that he does say “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek”, though I don’t know how that fits with the sword thing and all the hell stuff which says that everybody who doesn’t follow god’s commands exactly will go to hell, and might intentionally or unintentionally cause your loved ones to sin and stray from god and suffer for eternity for that. You are basically forced morally to be a missionary or a crusader to make sure that everyone around you and the rest of the world turns to christ to save them and your loved ones from eternal torture. Not a great condition for peaceful coexistence and having empathy and acceptance of others.

Which god is that? I’ve read parts of god’s purported works and calming tensions is not one of the abilities I ran across.