Exploitative individuals may well be a part of human nature, but cooperating with other humans to build communities that are greater than the sum of its parts is human nature too.

I don't believe that it's possible to necessarily reverse the toxic dynamic you describe, but I do believe that it is possible to move forward in a way that is more productive for wellness. Maybe I just believe this because it's what I need to believe in order to not go mad and top myself, but I'll take the free hope.

And when the primates with the money and the power exploit their 'lessers' so much that we start dying from it, it's perfectly natural and normal to rise up and rip them into little bits and leave their dismembered corpses out for the buzzards.

The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin was written in 1892 and argued then that we labour far more than is actually necessary. Lots of work is work for the sake of work, not necessarily for the necessity of life and society.

Think now on how much technological improvement there has been since then. The industrial revolution continued, flight, computers and automation, even the factory line system didn't take off until Ford in the early 1900s.

We have so many machines, computers, and processes that never existed a hundred years ago.

The point isn't that we have no need for work, the point is we don't need to work anywhere near as much as we do.

A modern book that argues something similar is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquest_of_Bread

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs

Yeah, not working shouldn't even be a goal here. What we should strive for is to build a society where work is empowering for the workers rather than alienating, where it benefits the whole society rather than just creating value for a select few

Upcycling is not communism.