Virtude de prisioneiros II

...Little wonder that environmentalists repeatedly and reflexively call for a change in human nature (or human values, as they prefer to call it). Fondly imagining that our instictive egoisme can be waved aside by persuasive calls to be good - (...) persuasive calls to be good are themselves a powerful human instinct; obeying them is not - they demand a new set of better values to live our lives by. To make this millenial cry more believable they point to how naturally ecological virtue seemed to come to our "savage" ancestors. Like Rousseau they imagine that greed was invented just the other day, along with capitalism and technology. And they call for it to be desinvented as spiritual harmony with nature is reinvented.....

in The Origins of Virtue, Matt Ridley