Is humanity inherently good or evil?

TinyBubbles

TinyBubbles

anarchist
MBTI
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Do you believe humanity is inherently good or evil? or neither? or both?
 
Neither/both, but the proclivity towards selfishness, inspired by material shortages, is irritating to deal with.
 
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If we're to generalize, I believe humanity is a messy mass of existential orphans that will never quite be comfortable with itself. I guess that puts me in the "neither" category.
 
Inherently neither. More evil by design, though perhaps moreover just narcissistic. There is however a general tacit agreement that "goodness" (in this case "goodness" meaning tranquility) is the general desire.
 
There are different aspects to humans

If a person walks away from other humans after a while they will likely feel very unsettled....'FEEL' unsettled.....their heart is telling them that they need human contact

If however there is someone who they admire and that person tells them to go away from people for a while then they are listening to their HEAD because they think they should go away for a while...'THINK' they should go away

If what our heart and our head tells us are not in alignment then we experience COGNITIVE DISSONANCE and we become unbalanced and experience anxiety....too much anxiety leads to mania

This is why ghandi said: ''Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.''

What he is talking about here is aligning your heart and your head with your outside world

If you can get those three things aligned you will find peace

How many humans have aligned those things? Not many and here's why...

Humans are being TOLD things by other humans all the time. This leads to people THINKING things all the time and doing what they THINK they should do instead of listening to their heart

This then causes anxiety which then leads to confusion and conflicts and imbalanced behaviours

As Leary said: ''to do good people need to feel good''

So you can't ask the question ''are humans inherently good or bad'' without looking at their current culture because culture is the stuff that is being put into their head...its what they are being told or taught to THINK and it affects how people FEEL and therefore it affects how they behave towards each other (if they feel better they behave nicer and visa versa)

So if their culture is out of alignment with their heart but their head is trying to keep them in alignment with the culture then the head and the heart will not be in alignment and the person will experience anxiety

Our current system deals with this by medicating people to alleviate that anxiety. The system does NOT encourage people to align their heart and their head because if people were to live more in alignment with their hearts as social animals then the current culture of competition would end and the people who rule our society do not want that game to end

So people i'd say are capable of competition and cooperation but they are being taught to THINK in terms only of competition within a culture (a manmade mode of thinking) that throws many people out of alignment with their own human nature which is more about cooperation

Humans are inherently social creatures or they would have become extinct...but now they are being conditioned to compete with each other whether for jobs, mates, sports or on the large scale in wars for resources and land etc....this is destructive and is causing unhappiness and untold damage
 
it's a subjective construct, good and evil that is.
 
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What is good and what is evil are concluded by the society as a whole. Depends on your coordinates I guess. International waters are where the lines are blurred.
 
Neither. Our first programing is survival. Everything else takes a back seat.

Is a wolf evil for killing a deer?
 
Evil is the opposition to life. Good is the promoter of life. It becomes confusing though when you understand that with everything trying to eat everything else to survive, good and evil become byproducts to survival.
 
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Good insofar as it is/exists; evil insofar as it falls away from what it is/could be.
 
I don't think inherent good or evil exist in its most general sense, and certainly not in the more specific sense that most religions do. This is because we are social animals and as such we have created codes of conduct that labels anything that is beneficial to society good and anything not can be deemed bad, or evil.

edit: There is no absolute good or evil, but there are things that we feel are because we can imagine the negative or positive effects of our behavior, on ourselves or others. Also, most of us are quite empathetic, a trait also found in many primates, and we can imagine what it would feel like to have something deemed bad happen to us.
 
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TinyBubbles said:
Do you believe humanity is inherently good or evil? or neither? or both?
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The more a conscious a person is; higher the probability of following a "good" path. People who are "unconscious" and lives accordingly are susceptible to follow a path that is harmful or deemed "evil". Instead of good and evil contrasts; it makes sense when viewed from unconscious/conscious perspectives of humanity. Then it can be argued that a highly conscious person is totally capable of doing evil deeds; in such a case the original consciousness was not trully a higher consciousness; but more of the ego self parading around as consciousness. Consciousness takes the totality of the collective and is not selfish.
 
muir said:
There are different aspects to humans

If a person walks away from other humans after a while they will likely feel very unsettled....'FEEL' unsettled.....their heart is telling them that they need human contact

If however there is someone who they admire and that person tells them to go away from people for a while then they are listening to their HEAD because they think they should go away for a while...'THINK' they should go away

If what our heart and our head tells us are not in alignment then we experience COGNITIVE DISSONANCE and we become unbalanced and experience anxiety....too much anxiety leads to mania

This is why ghandi said: ''Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.''

What he is talking about here is aligning your heart and your head with your outside world

If you can get those three things aligned you will find peace

How many humans have aligned those things? Not many and here's why...

Humans are being TOLD things by other humans all the time. This leads to people THINKING things all the time and doing what they THINK they should do instead of listening to their heart

This then causes anxiety which then leads to confusion and conflicts and imbalanced behaviours

As Leary said: ''to do good people need to feel good''

So you can't ask the question ''are humans inherently good or bad'' without looking at their current culture because culture is the stuff that is being put into their head...its what they are being told or taught to THINK and it affects how people FEEL and therefore it affects how they behave towards each other (if they feel better they behave nicer and visa versa)

So if their culture is out of alignment with their heart but their head is trying to keep them in alignment with the culture then the head and the heart will not be in alignment and the person will experience anxiety

Our current system deals with this by medicating people to alleviate that anxiety. The system does NOT encourage people to align their heart and their head because if people were to live more in alignment with their hearts as social animals then the current culture of competition would end and the people who rule our society do not want that game to end

So people i'd say are capable of competition and cooperation but they are being taught to THINK in terms only of competition within a culture (a manmade mode of thinking) that throws many people out of alignment with their own human nature which is more about cooperation

Humans are inherently social creatures or they would have become extinct...but now they are being conditioned to compete with each other whether for jobs, mates, sports or on the large scale in wars for resources and land etc....this is destructive and is causing unhappiness and untold damage
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This is a most excellent answer!

There is research out there demonstrating how cooperation results in better outcome for ALL systems as compared with competition. So obviously we USED to be cooperative and by default - compassionate. Otherwise we wouldn't have survived through all of the cataclysms which have happened on this Earth.

No....something else happened to change us from a cooperative society to a competitive society resulting in all of these alleged "selfish" behaviors.

Oh...and I agree with [MENTION=4361]Elis[/MENTION].... the idea of good and evil is a construct of relatively recent societies....say in the last 2 thousand years or so.
 
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Humanity is inherently human.

It will always fall short of the divine which is good but its not naturally diabolical which is bad.

To be honest the more I've understood this question the more I have come to believe that most badness is a consequence of the abscence of goodness and only develops as a trait where the natural intrinsic and innate goodness is prevented from growing, when it is blocked, fundamentally and completely the growth continues but is perverted somehow.

If a cabbage fails to grow properly you dont usually blame the cabbage, you blame the earth, environment and gardener.
 
Lark said:
Humanity is inherently human.

It will always fall short of the divine which is good but its not naturally diabolical which is bad.

To be honest the more I've understood this question the more I have come to believe that most badness is a consequence of the abscence of goodness and only develops as a trait where the natural intrinsic and innate goodness is prevented from growing, when it is blocked, fundamentally and completely the growth continues but is perverted somehow.

If a cabbage fails to grow properly you dont usually blame the cabbage, you blame the earth, environment and gardener.
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No, I blame the cabbage.
 
solongotgon said:
The more a conscious a person is; higher the probability of following a "good" path. People who are "unconscious" and lives accordingly are susceptible to follow a path that is harmful or deemed "evil". Instead of good and evil contrasts; it makes sense when viewed from unconscious/conscious perspectives of humanity. Then it can be argued that a highly conscious person is totally capable of doing evil deeds; in such a case the original consciousness was not trully a higher consciousness; but more of the ego self parading around as consciousness. Consciousness takes the totality of the collective and is not selfish.
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So counsciousness is good or bad?
 
Eventhorizon said:
Neither. Our first programing is survival. Everything else takes a back seat.

Is a wolf evil for killing a deer?
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But wolfs don't make threads like "Is wolfanity inherently good or bad?"...do they? If wolfs would do that, your question, in that context, would make somehow sense. But since wolfs don't do that and I don't think they ever will be, I think its best to make analogies within the "human" sphere.

And neither deers don't make threads like "Is deeranity inherently dumb or smart, for letting themselfs be killed by wolfs?".

Edit:
its good that you used the word "kills", insead of "murders"...let's say.
 
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