Russia had to fail for the rest of the world to rise.

Thank you for your service Russia, you won't be missed.

At the end of the day, they're just two sides of the same coin. Getting what we want.

Reason and rationality is the slow long term view of getting what we want, while emotion is the fast hot immediate view of what we want. The latter informs the former - when we step back, we consider the potential gain and loss through all possible emotional outcomes, not just the active one.

But they don't exist independently of emotion - that is still the thing that gives you a desire or drive for anything at all, and keenly relates to helping achieve your homeostatic and reproductive outcomes (i.e. surviving).

Play... otherwise known as figuring out the boundaries, the affective actions, and required behaviours to maximize gain within that limited field of engagement.

In other words, games allow us to deconstruct a complex environment with limitless variables into one that can be easily comprehended and navigated, which would provide significant evolutionary advantages!

The trick of life is to perceiving and choosing which games to play.

Yep.

Thing is, as we progress, we'll find the previous idea of the 'perfect world' wanting - either we'll have progressed enough to see how the concept was unattainable (i.e. we didn't factor in the issues that the solutions would create), or our values will have shifted such that previous ideation no longer seems like as great an idea as it did before - or we'll have additional requirements for 'perfecting' things.

And so we iterate and improve - thus a vector, not a point.

Because things get better by moving in that direction.

It's simply an idea - that we can aspire for society to be much better than what it is now; and we can imagine it, then deconstruct it, assess it, then see what we can actually do within the limits of our reality to move in that direction.

The alternative is having no direction, no guide post. Society lurches from one direction to another, without clear progress. Society moving on the whims of chance, as the games of luck and opportunity play out at high levels, and the rest of us deal with the fallout.

Yeah, I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing - it's just part and parcel of our genetic psychological makeup.

Anticipation, motivation, comparison (resulting in greater wants) are core mechanisms of our cognitive makeup that emerges from our genetic biology.

Sorry you expected a pedantic multipage exceptions list out for an off the cuff example, when some charitable interpretation would suffice.

If you time travel and teleport into a battlefield in any era, yeah it's not going to leave a particularly positive impression.

But I shouldn't have to say any of that; assuming that the reader has the ability to understand reasonable context.

There are all forms of outliers among humans, along all sorts of dimensions.

I think we might casually toss around the term inhuman as hyperbole while still recognizing that they're literally still humans.

Ah. Carry on then!

Sure. It's a term that's used broadly in many ways depending on context, but it generally relates to the perceived unique conditions of been the biological human.

Anyway, what's the point of this line of questioning?

Typically defined biologically, as a creature of the human species, with relevant genetics that beget various physical and mental traits, with acceptable variance to accommodate for genetic variance (i.e. a human missing arms or legs at birth is still human).

Anyway; back to I guess the point you're making? Objecting to the phrase: "Human nature will always want"?

It's a pretty accurate generalization of human behaviour and motivation systems. Exceptions allowed. But on a population scale would be so improbable as to not be worth considering (i.e. in a large complex society, we will not eliminate the human capacity to want more and to create tension and conflict. In an ideal society, the tensions and conflicts are mild and don't result in much harm).

Only if you define humans by whether or not they exist, and whether or not they have social contact.

Which in both cases isn't typically how people define 'human'.

So, not sure why such an imaginary human would stop being human in that imaginary scenario.

It's a vector, not a point.

You strive for utopia - you don't reach it.

Human nature is such that it will always want.

Bring a caveman into 21st century society and he'll think it's utopia for a while.

Bring a 21st century man into Star Trek society and he'll think its utopia too... at least for a while.

As individuals jostle for more individual freedoms, it'll rub against the freedoms of others, so tension and conflict will always exist in some form.