So which is it? Are humans inherently evil or good?
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/202 ... e-is-falseThe Right-Wing Story About Human Nature Is False
Are we naturally violent, power-hungry, and greedy? Rutger Bregman’s book “Humankind” devastates the myth of human selfishness.
Nathan J. Robinson
filed 18 November 2021 in HISTORY
“All men would be tyrants if they could.” — John Adams*
“It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous, as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.” — John von Neumann
“Humankind’s covetousness is boundless… Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn.” — Paul Bahn and John Flenley, Easter Island, Earth Island*
“Tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed?… The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.” — Milton Friedman
“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.” — Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene*
“No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it’s all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.” — Steven Pinker
“For this can be said of men in general: that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites.” — Machiavelli*
“Our nature is not only destitute and empty of good, but so fertile and fruitful of every evil that it cannot be idle.” — John Calvin*
“As a rule men do wrong whenever they can.” — Aristotle
“Remove the elementary staples of organized, civilized life—food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security—and we all go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all.” — Timothy Garton Ash*
“No one likes to think they’re a Nazi, but everyone is one.” “Granted the opportunity, how many of us would not be Hitlers?” — Jordan Peterson1
One common view of human beings is that we are “by nature” selfish, violent, cruel, and untrustworthy, and that, to the extent we manage to restrain these base instincts, it is because we are taught to be generous, and punished if we go around hurting others. Sometimes this view is accompanied by a story about human development: once upon a time, life was nasty, brutish, and short, a war of all against all. Prehistoric human beings were violent barbarians. Fortunately, civilization has gradually brought out the better angels of our nature. Free markets can actually direct humans’ natural selfishness toward socially beneficial ends, and laws backed by the threat of violence are able to ensure that a semblance of order is maintained. But this progress is fragile and depends on maintaining our existing institutions roughly as they are. Civilization could easily be destroyed if you tamper with it, and we could lapse back into barbarism. The primatologist Frans de Waal coined the term “veneer theory” to describe the idea that morality and civilization are essentially a thin veneer that is easily cracked, and that beneath it is a “natural” state in which we are warlike and irrational.
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, in Humankind: A Hopeful History (newly issued in paperback), destroys this story utterly. Bregman, perhaps best known for driving Tucker Carlson nuts by daring to criticize Carlson on his own show, claims this is nothing more than a myth or fable about humanity. It is a dangerous one, too, because believing in it can shape the policy choices we make and the way we treat each other. Alarmingly, most people do seem to hold a cynical or pessimistic view of other people, seeing them as untrustworthy. But Bregman’s remarkable book shows that when we actually look at the real world of human social life, and get past the powerful pessimistic tales about original sin, the state of nature, the darkness in all of our hearts, etc., we find that human beings are, on the whole, far more inclined to be sociable and selfless than “treacherous and knavish.”
