[shadowfoxx]

I think the people who volunteer to clean up their community beach, river, stream, city street would disagree with you. There's enough pushback to your current position that I can even think of memes that talk about this very thing

Also, this appeal to nature really doesn't hold up to scrutiny either. We do things that "go against our evolutionary nature" all the time. For example: None of us spread our shit anywhere. Or how, due to current culture and city design, people largely live isolated physically from larger communities. The list goes on.

[solatic]

The dynamics of group volunteering are different. When you get together with people to clean up a beach, the cleanup is the proximate reason you're there, but really you're there to meet up with others and socialize, with attendant interests like virtue-signaling and the like.

Go to any cleanup event like that and ask how many people do it by themselves, whether for fun or from a sense of moral duty, when there is nobody else to see them do it or to do it with them. Certainly there is no storage of places that need to be cleaned up, and would benefit by the efforts of individuals.

[shadowfoxx]

In this thread you've said both that people won't do 'unsavory' work, like cleaning, for social accolades but also that the people who do volunteer to clean up public spaces do it for social accolades (Virtue signaling)

I'm not going to pretend to know the motivations of all people who clean up beaches but it is unlikely that the overwhelming majority do it simply for clout farming. People are more than one thing. Regardless they are just one example of so many examples of good public work that people do right now - in a culture that I would argue does not meaningfully incentivize this behavior. I don't think whether or not people do it when they are alone is relevant here. We're literally arguing about whether people would in a different culture, not the selfish one we currently occupy. I think a society like that is not only possible but necessary.

But anyway, last thing I'll say is that I get the sense that your view is more informed by a pessimism about "how people are" - and that how they are is concrete and unchanging - rather than about data or thinking more holistically.