Not Evil, Just Underpaid: Why You Think People Suck

By Pluto Rennie (He/They/She)

"Humans are just selfish." You’ll hear it in lectures, see it in comment sections, feel it in flatmate group chats about who left the dishes dirty. It sounds cynical, but also… familiar. Like something we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves. It sparks the kind of calm, detached debate that, without fail, makes my anarchist blood boil. There’s something deeply unsettling about watching people coolly intellectualize whether all humans are doomed to be terrible forever. Plenty of people (especially those in my philosophy and politics courses) genuinely believe that every single person on earth, except themselves of course, is incapable of real kindness. But if selfishness is really our nature, how do you explain the people who help strangers in floods, hold doors open, or share their last cigarette with the unnamed stranger they met outside a bar on Courtney Place? 

There’s a long tradition of Western thinkers arguing that humans are self-interested by nature: from Hobbes, to Rand, to that one guy in your tutorial who likes Reddit a little too much and thinks empathy is a scam. This idea shows up everywhere: in politics, in economics, in conversations about housing, climate, and crime. And while it’s tidy and appealing in its bleakness, it’s also… kind of like really wrong. 

We’re built to care. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen found that our brains are basically built to feel what others feel. We’re naturally wired to care when someone else is upset or in pain. Long before babies can speak or walk, they already show signs of prosocial behaviour. Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale, found that babies as young as six months old are drawn to helping behaviors, and become visibly uncomfortable at the sight of anti-social ones. This isn’t some idealist fantasy, it’s biology. We evolved to live in groups, so the capacity to care helped us survive. 

And yet… here we are. Doomscrolling past suffering, hoarding resources, elbowing our way through the student job market for a $23.15/hour café shift that somehow requires three years’ experience and full availability. What happened? 

I’d say capitalism happened. Under capitalism, kindness doesn’t pay the rent. Individualism and competition is praised, empathy becomes sidelined. You can see it everywhere, from flatmates labelling leftovers, to LinkedIn posts bragging about burnout. We're told that the way to survive is to hustle, win, and stay ahead. It’s not that people are naturally selfish, it’s that the system rewards selfishness and punishes vulnerability. 

In communal, pre-capitalist societies, cooperation and sharing were the norm. Neoliberal systems suppress those instincts. The traits capitalism celebrates—competitiveness, ambition, independence—are exactly the ones that, in different contexts, might be seen as antisocial. 

In my drunken, and deeply philosophical state, I decided to bring this discussion to my friend who studies biomed. We ended up talking about cats. Lions in the wild sleep nearly 20 hours a day. Hunting is often unsuccessful, and it burns a ton of energy, so they need to conserve it. But domestic cats play a lot. They chase leaves, they zoom around at 3am, and, as I’ve learned

from watching my own cat, they can spend literal hours chasing their own tail like it’s the most important mission of their life. Why? Because they don’t need to worry about food. They’re not lazy or energetic by nature, they’re just adapting to their environment. 

I would argue so are we. If you grow up in a system where compassion is seen as a weakness and success means stepping on others, then selfishness isn’t pathology, it’s strategy. 

When I asked Dr Jesse Spafford, one of my previous philosophy lectures here, if people are inherently selfish, he explained that people regularly act in ways that benefit others at personal cost, and trying to redefine those actions as “secretly selfish” just stretches the word to the point of meaninglessness. 

He also floated the idea that people assume everyone else is selfish because they’re projecting their own tendencies. "Many people are, indeed, selfish, and they infer that, because they are selfish, everyone else must be also." These beliefs could also be "false beliefs that help justify people behaving in ways—and structuring society in ways—that advance their own self-interest." 

I think capitalism takes that even further: it makes us feel guilty all the time. I’m not working hard enough, I'm not good enough, that person's achieving more than me. Guilt becomes a constant low hum in the background of student life. To cope, we justify selfishness. I need to put myself first, people suck anyway, kindness is naive. These beliefs don’t just emerge out of nowhere, they’re convenient. They ease the guilt of being in survival mode. They tell us that selfishness isn’t just understandable, but natural. That belief props up capitalism, which keeps making us feel like we’re not enough. It’s a cycle, guilt, justification, reproduction. 

This might sound shallow, but what if people are mostly just trying to be decent? What if we crave kindness and community but ignore that craving because it's too risky? There are glimpses of this everywhere. Students running activism campaigns, strangers handing out sunscreen at the beach, the person who made you tea during your mental breakdown in your first year uni hall. The idea that people are inherently selfish is used to justify all kinds of violence: prisons, bosses, billionaires, borders. If people can’t be trusted, we need control. But if people can be trusted, if we’re wired for care, then maybe those structures aren’t just unnecessary. Maybe they’re harmful. 

No system is neutral. The way we organise society either nurtures our capacity for care, or it suppresses it. We’ve been taught to mistake exhaustion for realism and pessimism for intelligence. We’re not broken, just shaped by systems that punish care. We can unlearn, re-form, and live differently. Maybe the real fantasy isn’t believing in human kindness, it’s believing that capitalism deserves it. Touch some grass, stop being emo, and admit that being emotionally unavailable isn’t edgy: it’s capitalism convincing you that detachment is a personality (oh my god guys, who said that?).