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Whether "human nature" is good, bad or a completely bogus concept, it does not follow that profit-run institutions will bring out the best that our species can offer. Most of humyn history of more than one million years has been "primitive communist" or close to it. Today there are still tribes found with no experience of war or property, and there were even more such First Nations at the time when Columbus first arrived in North America. The Indians of North America didn't have a concept of private property, and that's why there were conflicts with the Pilgrims. (For sources that agree with this point, including the U.S. Government propaganda agency that had the usual job of countering communism, see: http://www.salsem.ac.at/csacl/progs/AS_Modules/native.htm http://www.wvlc.wvnet.edu/im/history/indland.html ) Hence, it is the capitalist system making people "greedy," not a permanent biological "human nature." Here is a story about the !Kung who still live the same way today. "In his 1961 book, The Heart of the Hunter, Laurens van der Post, a South African explorer and writer, "tells of coming across a small !Kung tribe of about a dozen adults and children as they crossed a particularly hot and barren part of the desert. "Van der post and his fellow explorers started hunting some game so the Bushmen could have extra food to carry on their journey 'toward the lightning on the horizon' where the seasonal rains were beginning. The explorers spent an entire day hunting with their Land Rovers and provisioned the Bushmen well for their trip. "As the little tribe was leaving, van der Post and his group stood to wave good-bye, but the Bushmen simply walked off with many smiles. No thank-you's were ever given. One of van der Post's assistants, a hunter who'd never encountered the Bushmen before, commented that they seemed ungrateful and uncaring. Ben, one of the other men in the group who understood Bushmen culture, responded that to give another human food and water is only good manners and is routine behavior among the Bushmen. If the white men had been starving on a long trek and the Bushmen had found them, they would immediately share their food and water, even if it endangered their own survival. And they wouldn't expect thanks in response. In fact, in San Bushmen culture, to eat in front of another person who is with out food is an immoral act, every bit as horrific as in our culture if a person were to walk out onto a busy city side-walk, pull down their pants, and defecate. Everybody would be shocked and horrified. "For those of us who grew up in modern civilization, it's difficult to imagine a life and culture where such fundamental things are simply taken for granted . When we stop behind a car at a red light, we don't open the door and run up to the car in front of us to thank them for following for being so considerate as to follow the basic rules of the road and stop for the red light—it's simply a given that everybody does that. No thanks required. Thanking people for doing something implies that they had a choice to do otherwise, and did it out of a desire to be nice. But imagine a world where feeding another person is as much an automatic response as stopping for a red light; a world where a person who fails to feed or care for another is ostracized or punished, the way we give people tickets if they run red lights; where the care of others is more important then even the care of yourself; where the teaching, 'All things that you would want to do to you, do ye even so to them,' is actually practiced—not out of effort but as part of the daily routine, as the normal way things are, as a basic assumption of society. That is...the way of an Older Culture." http://www.openmindopenheart.org/UnityArden/Earth2