On Human Nature

(Regarding the idea that humanity is violent by nature, and conflict is inseparable from humanity)

You're making a lot of logical mistakes here if your goal is to try and prove a point about human nature.

For one, you're talking about protecting yourselves from muggers and thieves, but think about yourself and your immediate friends, family, and co-workers. Think about all of the people you know well. How many of them do you see going out and randomly thieving and mugging other people? How many people seek out conflict? I'm going to take a wild guess and say that at least 90% of you and the people you know don't go out and seek out conflict. Sure, you may be ready to defend yourself against threats to yourself and your loved ones, but that is an external force pushing you into conflict.

If you're trying to argue that conflict is just a part of human nature that the natural state of human beings is to constantly be at one another's throats, then that means that either you and almost all of your immediate friends and family just happen to be inhumane by your definition, you what's more likely is that you are being intellectually lazy and using "human nature" as a rhetorical dodge to avoid having to develop a through socio-political understanding of conflict and the conditions necessary for conflict to manifest.
You are correct in noting that conflict has been present throughout all of human history, but you make a mistake in assuming conflict is therefore universal and ever-present. Human history also has extended periods of peace and prosperity. Our greatest evolutionary strength is the ability to work together, and it's how we've survived as a species in a wilderness filled with beasts who were more physically dominant and powerful than humans were.

War and conflict, on the other hand, are something that we tend to avoid. War is brutal, bloody, arduous, and deadly. Human beings have to be pushed into going to war. Throughout our tribal history, the conditions that thrust tribes into war with one another were scarcity, starvation, drought, famine, ect. We went to war with one another because we were pushed to the brink of survival, put in a situation where it's either "us or them."

The material conditions of tribal conflicts has no resemblance to modern material conditions. We live in a time of highly advanced economic development and abundance of food and luxuries to the point where we produce enough food to feed 10 billion people a year, and just end up throwing 30% of that food away. And yet despite this over-production, we still have millions of people going hungry and starving to death every year.

To substitute for the natural scarcity of our past that drove humans into inevitable conflict, we now have economic structures which create artificial scarcity in order to drive conflict that benefits the people who have the most influence on the levers of the economy.

I would bet you that if you went around and asked Americans if they were willing to be shipped over to the middle east so that they could fight and die in order to help multi-national oil conglomerates install a regime that gave them better trade deals on crude oil, almost no one would take that offer. It's not in human nature to go overseas to fight and die in order to help boost an oil conglomerate's earnings report. What drives this conflict is public policy that keeps people poor an restricts their economic opportunities so that enlisting in the army becomes a way for those in poverty to secure an economic future. You even have military advocates come out in opposition to programs like universal college (something that the rest of the developed world provides to its citizens) because they argue that it would hurt military recruitment if people didn't have to go through the military to help subsidize their education costs:

https://warontherocks.com/2016/09/does-free-college-threaten-our-all-volunteer-military/

To illustrate just how artificial the scarcity is that is imposed on us, if you add up all of the jobs in our economy used to provide for the essentials of survival, if you add up all of the construction jobs, utilities, agriculture, textiles, infrastructure, they only represent 5% of all of the work that we do. Yet for nearly all of us, we end up having to pay 50% or more of the wages from our labor in order to keep a roof over our head and food on our plates. There's no reason for this huge disconnect between the labor required to provide for your needs, and the labor you need to put back into the system in order to receive the means of your survival.
The only thing that this arrangement enables is an economy where every year 90% of the wealth created by our labor goes directly into the pockets of the top 1%.

None of this is a result of "human nature." It's not in my nature or yours to submit to a system where roughly 90% of the value my labor creates gets taken out of my pocket and becomes profits for my boss. This is an arrangement that can only arise out of coercion, and is a consequence not of human nature but of the principles we've organized our economic development around.

Capitalism is a system where economic activity is organized around satisfying the profit motive of private owners. As a consequence of this organizing principle, the way to "win" at capitalism is to ruthlessly maximize profits in whatever methods are available to you, and the more capital you own the more power you hold over people to use to extract profits. Combine this with the fact that capitalism is a system where society's means of survival are considered the private property of this ownership class, and you have the basis for exploitation. If you aren't a member of this ownership class (and most of us are not a part of this class), then you must deal with one of the members of this class in order to get access to your means of survival. And the capitalist class knows that this arrangement benefits them, so when they are negotiating conditions of things like terms of employment, wages, cost of living, ect with you they do everything in their power to make sure that the terms of that negotiation is as close to "accept what I'm willing to offer or risk homelessness and starvation," as possible. Again, this isn't a result of "human nature," this is a consequence of organizing an economic system where it is game theory optimal to be the worst kind of human being possible. These people are not representative of human nature, they are the consequence of a system that is organized to reward the absolute worst aspects of humanity.

This is the material basis for modern conflict, and it is class conflict. You should be willing to fight in that conflict, because the status quo only exists to exploit people like me and you. The capitalist class is already fighting in this conflict, but they don't have the numbers on their side. There are far more of us than there are of them, and if the working class ever realizes this truth and organizes around their common class interests against the capitalist class then our victory is inevitable. It wouldn't even need to be a bloody conflict. A mass strike would simply render the capitalist class irrelevant, because their wealth is worthless without labor to bring it to life. A warehouse full of lumber is worthless without woodworkers to turn it into chairs, tables, and desks. An amazon warehouse full of products is worthless without the warehouse staff and delivery drivers that move them around.

The way the capitalist class fights this battle, then, where they are hopelessly outnumbered, is to do everything in their power to stop us from realizing that we have all of the power, and to keep us in conflict with one another so that we don't organize with one another against them. They use their propaganda outlets and government channels to get people to buy into hyper-nationalism and partisan politics, they create false enemies out of countries overseas and scare people with the false threat of attack, they own every corporate media outlet and stoke hatred and division using identity politics, and use these outlets to stoke religious bigotry, racism, sexism, and whatever other focus tested hot-button issues they can create a culture war around. And when that doesn't work and working people start organizing across racial lines, across class lines, across religious lines, ect and start organizing explicitly against the capitalist class, then our government violently disrupts those organizations, and either murders or jails their leaders. This is what happened with COINTELPRO, and is also what happened with "The Business Plot" where corporate America tried to stage a military coup against FDR because he was acting too far in the interests of the working class.

Overseas they wage their war by using the military might of the US government to coup any socialist leader that tries to break away from the exploitation of global capitalism, or by using their economic might and political influence to embargo and sanction those countries to try and starve their country until they cave to corporate america's demands.

I'm not a peace loving hippie. I believe in the Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution. I understand the material conditions that drive modern conflict, and that the only way to address those material conditions and lay the groundwork for real, meaningful, and lasting peace and prosperity is to radically transform the way we organize our economy, switch to prioritizing development to satisfy the needs of the people doing the work instead of organizing around satisfying the profit motive of private owners. We need to guarantee the necessities for survival as human rights, which means housing, food, clothing, healthcare, must all be provided as a right of citizenship, thereby removing the foundation of exploitation that allows the capitalist class to coerce wealth from your labor by withholding your means of survival.

The people who drive us to war are the minority. They will still exist, but they will have no power if they can't exploit poverty in order to get people to enlist in the army to fight for causes they don't believe in. We will still need an army for national defense, but being motivated to protect your home and your loved ones is a part of human nature and doesn't require the coercion of trapping people in poverty and enforcing an artificial scarcity and then offering impoverished communities military service as a way to escape poverty.

Ideologues exploit anxiety, fears, tension, and hardship in order to drive conflict in dangerous directions. Fascism rose to power in Europe under Hitler and Mussolini because they were facing incredible economic hardship, and they were able to channel the resentment caused by that hardship into fear and hatred against marginalized groups. The fascists told the "true" Germans and the "true" Italians were a great and powerful people, and that their society was being brought to ruin by the Bolsheviks and the immigrants and the disabled and the mentally ill and the Romani and the Jews, and that in order to reclaim their glory they had to purge all of the weak and unworthy.

Socialism, on the other hand, works towards removing the material basis for that kind of conflict. If your needs are provided for and Hitler walks into your town and says the Jews are destroying your country and that you have to take up arms to save the nation, even if you're an unrepentant racist you're probably going to tell him, "nah, I'm good. I like what you're saying about us being the master race and all, but I've got a comfy life and I'm not gonna go to war for you." Very few people can be driven toward the extreme of engaging in violence for purely ideological reasons, because real conflict is brutal and arduous and painful.

Socialism is the only path forward if humanity is going to progress past the predatory stage of development.