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Discussion Do you think humans are inherently evil/selfish?

Oheao

Oheao

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I see this as a common argument for authoritarianism, or general pessimism against social progress. I am skeptical of the argument myself. For one, the idea that someone is inherently evil is not something I can really accept because evil implies morality and I think you have to have a concept of what morality actually is to be evil. I don't think a baby has the inherent concept of morality to fulfill that criteria.

I guess you can argue in a different term that humans are just inherently selfish/focused on self-preservation. We do obviously have tendencies to want to avoid dying, but I think it's often understated just how reliant humans are on social interaction, and the detrimental effects of social isolation. Humans tend to work together in groups and I think our capacity for sympathy/empathy is very understated. I personally believe that selfishness is often a result of material conditions/the way society is structured as it is, which prioritizes personal profit and alienation. People argue that it society is the way it is because people are the way they are but I think humans are much more malleable and influenced by outside factors than we tend to realize. In any case that's just a random ramble on my part, God my writing skills have lapsed pretty significantly.
 
Honestly? Yes. I do believe humans are innately selfish.

I think it just comes down to one simple thing: usually, a child doesn't have to learn to "lie", or to attempt to cover up something so they don't get in trouble. They can do that just fine on their own, even before other children or other factors come into play.

Overcoming that kind of innate programming takes work, but that's part of the experience when it comes to individual growth. How much that works out, obviously, depends on the person and their environment.
 
I've seen the argument a lot, but personally I don't think humans are inherently Evil or Selfish in the way that argument really lays it out.

There's definitely a sort of innate selfishness and self-preservation that everyone has, but to me there's a big gap between "prioritizing something you want/need" and Being A Selfish Person, if that makes sense? And some people find that gap easier to bridge than others, but I don't think that's especially something inherent moreso than something taught.

Also there's often a lot of paradoxes on the topic, I think. If someone naturally has the urges to be very selfish, but consciously avoids acting on those urges (or goes out of their way to act selfless despite that not coming naturally to them), does that still make them inherently selfish? Or does that make them more selfless than someone for whom selflessness comes more easily? Or something else?

I always wonder how many of ones pushing the argument forwards do so because they are themselves selfish and want to be reassured that everyone else is like that. Because then at that point it stops being a personal flaw and starts being a Human Trait, and, well, you can't do anything about a human trait.

Maybe I'm just an optimist though. And writing word soup.
 
Absolutely no, for all the reasons @Oheao has stated on his post.

For starters because morality is a subjective personal thing you aren't really born with, and it's susceptible to change heavily depending on societal factors and experiences. For seconds because a lot of it is incredibly society and environment dependant. Yes, humans have some sort of self preservation instinct, but that doesn't have to be married to selfishness in 90% of cases.

It is, however, something society sort of drills in our heads from a young age because making everyone feel like they've fucked up from the get go is a great way to control them.
 
No, there's virtually no sociological basis for this idea. "Human nature" is a malleable, undefinable concept and people only deploy its most cynical interpretation to validate their beliefs. People only uncritically regurgitate this idea because of pop science, television/film, and news media about how terrible the world is, all designed to keep us complacent and refuse to work on improving the world around us. Humans are social creatures and we thrive off of social interaction.
 
TreIII said:
Honestly? Yes. I do believe humans are innately selfish.

I think it just comes down to one simple thing: usually, a child doesn't have to learn to "lie", or to attempt to cover up something so they don't get in trouble. They can do that just fine on their own, even before other children or other factors come into play.

Overcoming that kind of innate programming takes work, but that's part of the experience when it comes to individual growth. How much that works out, obviously, depends on the person and their environment.
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Humans relative to a lot of predators are fairly soft, slow, weak, imperceptive, and uncoordinated. Our natural defenses are extremely limited. A lone individual human doesn't last long in the wild, especially unarmed. Humanity only survived and thrived for the last several hundred thousand years because we are highly social and cooperative. I don't know how one can reconcile that with a belief that human nature pre-disposes us towards selfishness. What evidence supports the idea that we have such an innate predisposition?

If anything I'd say the incentive structures in place that funnel us towards hyper-competitive, anti-social individualism is the aberration from our nature. Which is why it takes so much effort, so much propaganda, so much violence to maintain those structures.
 
I think we’re social creatures but our ability to comprehend and empathise and work for the better of a social group rather than the individual expands and contracts depending on the person and the situation. For some people it’s a pretty natural tiered set of concentric/nested circles and Venn diagrams, such as ‘I’ll sacrifice for close family/friends, a bit less for expanded contacts, then a bit less my community etc’, as people struggle with recognising large groups. For some any of those groups may be only a few vital dependents or a tiny support network, for some it might be hundreds or thousands.

The lines can be really hard, soft or blurred. For some they might draw a really hard line at any step, such as ‘if you aren’t immediate family/from around here you don’t count’. For the truly selfish it’s a single, strict circle of one with everyone else outside it. For the sociopath, it’s a strict circle of one but everyone outside it doesn’t even count as human to them. Distance gradually draws soft boundaries too, but for xenophobes or racists or whatever they create really hard lines once those circles reach a boundary of country or any criteria they centre their bigotry around, as it’s less distance and more not even recognising others outside their hard boundaries as people. Ostracising people (like a strict religious community kicking someone out) can be effectively cutting someone out of every established close circle they have at once so is both drastic and cruel when done or used as a threat.

These boundaries are easily exploited by leaders, charisma, politics, media, and visable in terms of what news is seen to matter too. Which is why a disaster like the earthquake in Turkey/Syria has had so little coverage in western media despite 55,000 dead and millions displaced.

I appreciate my amateur thinking probably has a ton of holes in it, it’s more my vague understanding rather than any really considered appraisal of humanity :)
 
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Some are.

Humanity is such a diverse group between the billions of us on the planet that it's a little silly to make such sweeping generalisations assuming people are all innately bad.

If anything, the opposite is true, and almost all people are good by nature and it's only the crushing realities of what is necessary to survive and deliberately placed social pressures that supress it.
 
Interesting question, and great insightful posts!
I've often thought about this too.

In the end I just like to think people are neutral, and that the way they are should be judged on a case by case basis due to their surroundings and other variables.
I also sadly think evil/bad acts and thoughts just weigh more heavy than the good ones.

It almost feels as if people get pulled in more by negativity since it's a strong emotion, heck thats why social media tries to put controversial stuff on your timeline to get more engagement.

It's like people take kindness/goodwill for granted, and negativity gets met with more (negative) pushback, so it might feel like there is more bad in the world than it actually might be. (but this is just what I think I haven't done any research about it so yeah)

I hope I could word my thoughts properly. XD
 
Are humans inherently selfish? Yeah

Are humans inherently a million other things as well? Yeah

It's not really any argument for anything, except raising kids well to bring out our best qualities
 
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Dusa said:
The position of "humans are inherently selfish" is one made to justify not improving society
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It's an argument made by either

1) People who benefit materially from a belief in the complete depravity of humanity

2) Or the people duped by group #1
 
Dusa said:
The position of "humans are inherently selfish" is one made to justify not improving society
Click to expand...
Yep, it’s an idea that is spread rather far so as to enforce the notion that good things that rely on human co-operation aren’t possible. I wonder who benefits from such a belief? (I actually don’t, pretty sure we all know who benefits from that)
 
I've never found "humans are inherently selfish" to be a compelling statement for a variety of reasons, similar to my disdain for "that's just how the world works" to justify not changing anything. But I'm not sure about sharing some of those reasons unprompted, as they are from unpleasant personal experiences.

If humans were inherently selfish we would never have come as far as we have. Are plenty of people selfish and generally terrible? Yes. But that's more to do with the actions they choose to take than any sort of unchangeable law of nature.

I try to believe, generally, in the good of people but I wouldn't say humans are all inherently 'good', either, but more... neutral, at least in the beginning. We're shaped by our circumstances and society as it is tends to be structured to reward the worst among us.

My thoughts are very scattered and I'm not sure if I'm making any sense, so I'll stop here.
 
But "Evil" is a relative term no? How a human being will know what is and what is not "Evil" without any sort of moral/belief system not only to guide him/her, but to also work a a baseline to measure evil acts?

I doubt that the first humans had a 'no killing, no stealing, no fucking your brother's wife' type of rules, just to give one example of many more that could be used.

Right now across (almost) all cultures, killing (for example) is an unjustifiable , punishable crime. But imagine if killing wouldn't be a crime in our society , that would be considered evil? if sadisms and cruelty against your peers/animals was meet with indifference from the law/community , that would still be considered as evil?

Is spoiling your child with over protection considered evil?

If you sold alcohol during the prohibition, that was evil?

I do think the human beings are selfish by nature and mostly relates to the primal instinct to fulfil basic needs and survive.
 
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I think it varies depending on the person, and all humans can’t be generalized as one thing. I think some people are just bad, they have bad intentions/values etc, but other people are good.
 
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We are selfish in the sense that we do things only if they benefit us.
But collaboration benefits us.
Our brain is wired such as you get some of dese cool hormones when you help someone. Technically, helping someone is selfish because we do it cause it makes us feel good. Even if we don't consciously realize it. But in this case, selfishness is not exclusive with kindness.
 
I think we have actually been conditioned by capitalism that "humans are inherently selfish" and that we need control and work to "become adequate and civilized human beings". Many studies have shown how toddlers are more than capable of empathy and compassion.

But growing up in societies where we feel constantly unsafe, anxious and are pitted against each other in a highly competitive, capitalist environment will of course not bring out the best in us.
 
Uhh, yes and no.
Evolutionary wise, screwing over your community is unhelpful to yourself and your survival and propagation, so I assume the average person wishes to be good, but lots of people do not think critically about how what they do can hurt others unintentionally.
But not everyone is like that, and sociopaths amongst a mostly good society can easily abuse it to reach the top.
 
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No, on the contrary, but we are made to believe that by Hobbesian propaganda and religions.

And it all begins with a full trust and acceptance in and of oneself; if you cannot trust yourself you can’t trust anything else.
 
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In general, I don’t think that people are things as much as people do things. People are complex. Do most people do some selfish things in their life? Absolutely. But we also learn to work together and not just do and say whatever we want, provided we’re not sociopaths. We do learn to respect the feelings of those around us, for example.

I definitely side-eye people who try to use the assumed innate selfishness of others as justification for their own selfish acts, which often seems to be where this point of view leads. “We can’t invest in social programs because the poor people will try to scam them or decide to rely solely on them,” etc. Very often the “people are innately selfish” thing feels a bit like projection from the class that benefits from the status quo, or a world where everyone is considered equally selfish and not just the people hoarding resources and ransacking the environment.
 
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