# Humanity is not that simple — a response to Mitch Trachtenburg
Date: 2024-02-10

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### Humanity is not that simple — a response to Mitch Trachtenburg

In a comment on [How to Quit Capitalism](https://medium.com/@joanwestenberg/how-to-quit-capitalism-5044a7290684) Mitch writes:

> Joan,  
> I agree with much of what you’ve written here.  
> But if you want to cure a disease, it’s important to make an accurate diagnosis. Deciding that it would be unpleasant to contemplate bacteria is not going to be a good foundation from which to cure bacterial-induced diseases. So I will mansplain a bit.  
> “The first layer to peel back is the assumption that greed and selfishness are innate human traits that any system must accommodate.”  
> You look young, and I am old. We will not agree about this, but I feel the need to speak up, hoping to make you more powerful and expecting you won’t believe me. Until, perhaps, later.

Hi Mitch — I’m also old and I also feel the need to speak up. What I’ve learned over the years can be summed up, “**Software is always more complicated than you think it is.**” I don’t expect you to believe me, ever really, but maybe someone else reading this can avoid being mislead by your nonsense.

> Greed and selfishness are part of us, because we are a product of evolution. Often, these aspects of our humanity show themselves in a desire for material things, but they also show themselves in a desire to become famous, or respected, or to not have to work hard, or for our children to do better than others.

The human software that evolution created, the by many orders of magnitude most powerful software known, is of course also complicated. That’s how we get here:

![Map of countries by total fertility rate.](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/assets/humanity-is-not-that-simple-a-response-to-mitch-trachtenburg-d721be6844.png)
*Map of countries by total fertility rate.*

> It’s certainly true that we also have an ability to cooperate with one another, and to love one another, and I suspect most people would like to see us grow our loving sides and control our greed. But if we weren’t naturally greedy, solutions would be easy. They’re not.

“Naturally” it should be impossible for humans to voluntarily fall so far below replacement rates. If “natural”, IE that the software should do the obvious intention, predictions worked then software would be easy. It’s not.

> To the extent we fail to understand our own greed, and the greed which is natural to humanity, I believe all attempts to manage or get beyond capitalism will fail terribly, leading to dictatorships of the right and left in which we are all “equal” except the leaders are “more equal,” living in palaces deemed necessary and appropriate for blah-blah-blah.

On the contrary it’s capitalism and thinkers like you that failed to understand humanity. It’s 2024 and the world is **mostly below replacement level** of fertility.

When faced with rampant inequality humans were supposed to just keep on producing children as that’s what “greed” dictates. But that’s not happening and now, one way or another, capitalism will bend.

> You won’t learn this from economic textbooks, but you might learn it from religions, if you are able to get past their belief in supernatural things and the way they’ve been co-opted by the institutions that assert ownership over them.

Umm capitalism, as you practice it, is a religion. And what you might learn by reviewing the fates of other religions is that they are not guaranteed a lock on human thought forever.

> Mansplaining accomplished. Thanks for sharing your ideas.

Do you even know what mansplaining means?

> the explanation of something by a man, typically to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing.

I mean you’ve certainly nailed the condescending and patronizing explanation to a woman but was that really your intention?