Human Suffering: Why We Care (Or Don't)

LiveScience.com:

The dire situations in cyclone-battered Myanmar and quake-tossed southwestern China and the impulse of many to offer relief have a lot to do with human nature. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors likely did it, and non-human primates do it.

We are hard-wired to help others, to drop everything in crisis situations, scientists say.

"People do really respond in these crisis situations where it's really a short-term matter of life or death," said Daniel Kruger at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. The motivation to give dates back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, he said. Some non-human primates also have been shown to step in during a crisis to help their kin or even humans.

Read the whole story: LiveScience.com

Comments

[Badbone]

"We are hard-wired to help others". Who's we? I don't see many African nations offering their help. Nor too many Asian countries. And those in the middle east? Where are they?

What I see is western countries, and only the western countries, trying to help. Maybe that hard wiring isn’t so universal after all?

[Blutus]

This is such a bizarre article it is difficult to even find a place to start.

Isn't is strange that every religion in the world posits that human kind is in a fallen condition and that we need some kind of redemption because if left to our own devices, we would just slaughter each other.

How then do we all of sudden start to examine so-called altruism among us primates??

Prone to help? Yes, and also prone to over-charge for water, fuel, food, batteries, etc. in such
crises. Where does that fit in to this scheme? Where do those Burma generals fit in this scheme,
condemning millions of their OWN countrymen to dath?

This article is garbage and the religions have it right.

We are the apes who survived because we learned how best to kill our enemies.

We help each other only because we one day may need help, may need someone to have our back, someone to join us on the firing line. This is what all those sworn "troths" are about, knights agreeing to fight with each other, etc..

We are murdering apes. And once this fact soaks in, it will be of tremendous help to the world's future.

I would advise everyone to read James Hillman's book from 2004 A Terrible Love of War
and understand just what kind of creatures we are.
The entire human enterprise is about war.

[BadCompany]

It's just a reality TV show.
Like Survivor.