Andy: In only just over a year of activism, I've discovered that the concept of human nature is the last big obstacle. When you've done the hard bit of illuminating how capitalism truly works and also the socialist alternative, people just stumble on "it can't be done, human nature, and so on".
SDF: In the sciences, the advocacy of a concept of "human nature" has come from sociobiologists, scientists who try to understand society by starting with biological concepts of "the human being" in order to prove things that are "innate" about human nature. To a certain extent, things can be said about human nature through an appeal to human DNA. There are thus "innate" differences between human beings and all other animals that can be specified both physically and genotypically.
Broader claims about what is innate about people are harder to make, because of the diversity of human forms of society. I don't see any proof or disproof of concepts that human beings are innately (A) selfish, (B) sharing, (C) aggressive, (D) passive-aggressive, (E) territorial, or (F) nomadic. On the other hand, one can point to different human societies where people are or were HABITUALLY each of these things.
People are far too sophisticated, socially and biologically, to be reducible to such behavior-specific assumptions about "human nature." One can't explain human practices such as aggression and territoriality by avoiding a discussion of human socialization processes within a wide diversity of historical and present-day human societies, and just relying on "biology." People aren't just nature -- they can be nurtured.
So people aren't "innately" Americans, just as they aren't "innately" Chinese -- they aren't "innately" capitalists or communists, either.
