We humans actually are fundamentally good
2023-06-25
When you take a look around music, movies, books and all media in general, you really quickly get to know that the human is fundamentally bad. That's the believe at core of most western societies and therefore has major impacts on all our lifes, but is it right? I'm not convinced and want to argue for a fundamentally good view on human nature in this article...
Before we actually start, I have to stress the unbelievably deep influences of our conception of man. When we believe humans to be generally bad, we are always suspicious, have no trust and ultimately will put as many controls in place as possible to make sure these bad actors at least behave well. This limits not only our room for self-fulfilment, but also our productivity and wastes a lot of resources that could better be used elsewhere. When we believe humans to be generally good however, we can have trust in everyone, don't have any motives to establish wasteful and contra-productive control systems and in the long run will reach higher productivity while ensuring better mental health and maximizing the effectiveness of our resource usage.
From an evolutionary standpoint, inherently being bad really doesn't make any sense, since the number 1 priority of every species is making sure it survives. By being social, helping each other and sharing knowledge (→ being good), we not only embrace the development of culture and technology, but drastically increase the likelihood of survival for everyone in the social group. We generally only do bad things, when they excel at masking themselves as being something good. In these pre-historic ages, actual egoists were generally excluded due to their contraproductive behaviour, which also reduced their genetic influence on the population since they were less likely to produce offspring and therefore strengthened the human's good nature.
But some will always make their way through and after gaining access to the first weapons, later armies, police and ultimately economic sanctions, this practice wasn't easily applicable anymore. Fast forward to today, most politicians, dictators and generally people in charge of something big are fundamtentally bad, egoistic and hungry for even more power. I can't fully explain why this is the way it is, but it's likely due to the upper-society staying in its influental position over generations and especially the socio-economic system we built over the last 200 year or so, even though we should also acknowledge that this drove innovation forward at an unprecented pace. Like anyone else, these people believe the average citizens to be mostly like them, which has huge implications and established the contraproductive self-image everyone grows up with today.
One example of this (besides the trust-productivity problem mentioned in the beginning) is the welfare system in most countries (if it exists). To get even the most basic necessities like housing, food and clothes, you have to work your way through a jumble of forms, unnecessary bureaucracy and dehumanizing exposure, although it is long proven that just giving money directly to the poor without any requirements is the most effective measure. As it turns out, almost everyone poor isn't in this situation because they can't handle money, but because they just don't have the finances to work out of this situation on their own. In the long rung, this will even safe multiple times the investment (just like in education), since most will reintegrate into the working class (possibly even in a higher position). But the political leaders still believe in the bad, unthoughtful nature of not only poor people, but everyone and therefore created this bureaucratic monster of welfare and other government programs.
Most of you will already have noticed that this is a textbook case of self-fulfilling promises , where the suspicions and bad conception of man from the goverment lead to more control, which intern makes the citizens more suspicious and forces them into this view on human nature, ultimately creating a self-strenthening loop. Luckily, this also means that we can break it by living based on the believe that humans actually are fundamentally good, trusting others, being open and last but certainly not least letting politics know about it...
PS: A huge shout-out to Rutger Bregman for providing the world with his revolutionary, hope-inspiring thoughts in his books "Utopia for Realists" and "Humankind: A Hopeful History".