Human nature intrinsically good, or only a product of circumstance?

Who We Really Are... When Everything Goes Wrong - YouTube

Solnit Offers a Framework for Living During Disaster and Beyond (altaonline.com)

"As Solnit puts it, utopia is in trouble these days. Many people no longer believe that a better world is possible, and that the best thing they can achieve is a better life for themselves, and themselves alone."


related thread: The Paradox of Poverty


There was a Star Trek episode that tried to draw attention to this subject too, The Cloud Minders.

 

Generally speaking I think it comes down to psychology vs biology. From a psychological standpoint, 'normal' people (having been adequately introduced to the concept of empathy, which is today a medically recognized condition of psychological normality) recognize that its wrong to harm others because we ourselves don't want to be harmed. This is the basis for the concept of fairness. However, there are biological limits. Extreme hunger, for example, tends to override empathy. Most people will kill and eat a stranger before they will starve to death, as the need for sustenance eventually takes priority over the need for the world to be fair. In such a circumstance, I'm not sure a judgement of 'good' vs 'bad' really applies, given that its mere thousands of years of moral development vs millions of years of instinctual development.

 

I think everyone has a “spiritual” moral compass. As people identify more with the physical world, and pay more attention to the ego rather than the higher self, it gets easier and easier to either ignore or simply not be able to perceive that moral compass. Love, compassion, empathy, and the like come easier to those more attuned to their spiritual higher self, whether or not they call it that. They may simply call themselves a “good person”, but it amounts to the same thing. It all comes down to “love”, and “lack of love”.

 

We are no better or worse than Pavlov's dog. We are just more deeply conditioned.

 

this is certainly true of the ego. Unfortunately, in this day and age where most people identify more with the material world than the spiritual world, they are listening only to that ego, and completely ignoring the higher self. They are stuck in routines that get them their rewards that let them get more stuff… and they are stuck there.

 

The mindless Solnut has little to no understanding of anything.

He isn't intelligent enough to see the relationship between economic development and culture/society.

In the Negative or Pre-Economy, everything is communal, not individual. Are you gonna go on the Big Hunt by yourself? No, because you ain't got what you need to do that. You have to hunt in groups. And you communally share the proceeds from the Big Hunt.

The ZERO Level Economy is Agrarian. It isn't communal, but it is community based. You don't need pre-school or kindergarten to push a plow through dirt or herd goats and sheep.

As you advance through the First, Second, Third and Fourth Level Economies, you need more and more education. Not only that, but people move toward specialization and so there's a shift from the group/community to the individual.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Heinlein makes fun of that, because it wasn't too long ago in the US and elsewhere in the world, that people really did all those things.

Well, okay, they didn't program computers, but that's only because computers didn't exist.

Higher economic levels also generate lots of leisure time.

Go back 200 years to 1821, and you wouldn't have time to play on the internet. There were so many things you had to do as part of your daily life that you never had a free minute.

You don't have running water, so someone in your household spends an hour a day just getting water to drink, cook and clean. You don't have all the technology that makes everything convenient and generates free-time for you.

Solnut also doesn't understand that Utopia is diametrically opposed to Individualism, since Utopia is community-based, not individual-based.

And, why shouldn't people focus on themselves?

This is your only trip to Earth. There ain't no do-overs.

Whatever you want dreams or goals you want to accomplish in this life, you need to do it now, 'cause you ain't coming back.

So, if you don't get to reach your goals and make your dreams come true because you're spending all of your time, energy and resources so everyone else can realize their dreams, that's not very satisfying.

That's the inherent contradiction in Liberalism.