Humans: Mostly good, or mostly bad?

[Mind Maverick]

QUESTION / SURVEY TOPIC:
How do you perceive the world in general? Do you see human nature as mostly good, mostly bad, or perhaps someplace in between? Are they mainly good natured but flawed?

GOOD VS BAD
The definition is subjective and debatable...but use your own subjective definition. It's a survey of perspective, not of truth in reality.

EDIT
To clarify, I am just wanying to gather a general overview of how others see the world rather than discuss human nature or changeability. Are humans generally trustworthy to you, or will they usually betray you somehow if given the opportunity? Do you like them? Whatever else you think of. Overall, collectively, in general, on average.

 

[Red Herring]

I perceive humans on average as flawed but mostly wellmeaning and capable of growth.

"Good" and "evil" are highly problematic terms that make little sense outside of our species. If "good" means "serving the good of mankind" than the question "are humans good?" becomes "are humans good for mankind?". Are they good for the planet? Hell no. Are they good to each other? Mostly, otherwise we wouldn#T have survived and civilization wouldn't be possible. It's been shown over and over again that throughout history humans have generally become more and more cooperative, gentler, less violent and generally more civilized. As a general trend. I take courage from that thought.

A lot of political and ideological conflicts have to do with this question of human nature being good or bad. With how much you can trust other people. The historical trend is towards broadening that circle of trust and cooperation and solidarity. It has been for millenia. A lot of the current culture wars are fought over this widening of the circle. There is movement and resistance. In the long term we'll have to widen the circle in order to face the challenges we've created for ourselves.

The problem I see is not one of good or evil but one of complexity. Thanks to technology we have developed so fast that it becomes harder and harder to process it all. Our individual brains are lagging behind our collective technological and cultural possibilities. Many people seem overstrained with the demands that come with this now highly accelerated process of increased interconnectedness and civilization.




To be honest, the above is a crude mixture of my own gut feeling and some superficial reading of several important 20th and 21st century thinkers.

 

[typologyenthusiast]

The story that My mother told me that when I was four years old, my family had a new maid, I met her in the kitchen and I posed a question whether she was evil. In general, Human can be a good can be bad. They are good when they do a good thing, they are bad when they do a bad thing. My judgement is perhaps too general. I have a sense that I have little or even no knowledge about human that I have to study it from somebody else.

P.S before I studied the Jungian psychology, I may have developed the feeling of somewhat an anxiety of human, that I didn't know or weren't able to explain, that the feeling had influence me to some extent that I wanted to avoid to meet a particular person.

 

[Totenkindly]

Humans: Mostly good, or mostly bad?

Yes.

 

[FemMecha]

Humans are the most bizarre species on the planet and after studying the structure of the brain in a class, I realized it developed like a messy closet. I think the early stage abstract reasoning that humans have capacity for creates a lot of problems. It is like we have legs too long for our body. The ability to abstract away from reality creates a lot of the atrocities and large scale suffering because humans can't process the reality they create. Also, things like Dunbar's number that says humans can process empathetically around 150 individuals, like the number in a natural tribe, shows that we cannot process the reality of our current world. We are incapable of feeling empathy for the number of lives our choices impact in many cases.

There is a deep imbalance in the perceptions of humans that place us at odds with our existence. We can't comprehend the impact of our choices or the nature of the realities we create. It will eventually be cause of our destruction.

 

[Yuurei]

Terrible.
As an anthropology major, I laws taught that humans are amazing creatures, capable of nothing short of the miraculous.

But simply living in this world has taught me otherwise.

It is true that human beings are capable of amazing feats, but you need to throw them into some truly horrific situations to encourage them to get up off the couch.
And even once they do their brains are so simple that no matter the sort of the horrors they've experienced and overcome with others, as soon as it's over it's as if they've completely forgotten and go right back to hating and vilifying everyone else around them over the most insignificant non-issues, and acting as is if the most minor inconvenience is a 'violation of my rights!'.

Most are utterly incapable of using reason, thinking in the long-term or even understanding that their own life experiences and perspective are not the one truly reality. Thus, I refer to them as 'hysteric apes' shrieking flinging shit at one another.

 

[Obfuscate]

Yes.

that was going to be my response...

 

[Jaguar]

I think I'll quote Morgan Freeman's character, Somerset, from the film Se7en.

"Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part."

 

[Norexan]

Humans are good but they are living in the prison of desires for temporal satisfactions.

 

[Maou]

I would say that humans are animals masquerading as an superior species due to their intellect, which generates a bit of arrogance and idealism in terms of morality. Peel away society, and set any human into the wild and you will see just how fast they return to being an animal. Everything else is a side show to distract ourselves from our pointless lives, and use fake substitutes to satiate our primal desires that we cannot escape no matter how smart we become.

 

[I Tonya]

50/50, but that's what makes me dislike them overall. If I can't rely on a response or how they would react, makes me not want to interact. Though, I would like to help humanity, I dislike them individually.

 

[rav3n]

Neither. People exist, finding ways to increase what's beneficial to themselves.

 

[The Cat]

Mostly Harmless.

 

[Cellmold]

Mostly conditional.

 

[Mind Maverick]

I perceive humans on average as flawed but mostly wellmeaning and capable of growth.

"Good" and "evil" are highly problematic terms that make little sense outside of our species. If "good" means "serving the good of mankind" than the question "are humans good?" becomes "are humans good for mankind?". Are they good for the planet? Hell no. Are they good to each other? Mostly, otherwise we wouldn#T have survived and civilization wouldn't be possible. It's been shown over and over again that throughout history humans have generally become more and more cooperative, gentler, less violent and generally more civilized. As a general trend. I take courage from that thought.

A lot of political and ideological conflicts have to do with this question of human nature being good or bad. With how much you can trust other people. The historical trend is towards broadening that circle of trust and cooperation and solidarity. It has been for millenia. A lot of the current culture wars are fought over this widening of the circle. There is movement and resistance. In the long term we'll have to widen the circle in order to face the challenges we've created for ourselves.

The problem I see is not one of good or evil but one of complexity. Thanks to technology we have developed so fast that it becomes harder and harder to process it all. Our individual brains are lagging behind our collective technological and cultural possibilities. Many people seem overstrained with the demands that come with this now highly accelerated process of increased interconnectedness and civilization.




To be honest, the above is a crude mixture of my own gut feeling and some superficial reading of several important 20th and 21st century thinkers.

I think subjectively defining good vs evil is unavoidable, actually. If someone hurts you, and it was a fair reason to be hurt, that's typically considered bad. If they change your life in some positive significant way youll never forget, its seen as good. People are categotized as allies or foes to us based on these things as we live out our lives. Things add up and tip the scale one way or another, how we perceive them. People dont go through life without any views about anything whatsoever, or being entirely neutral, apathetic, indifferent about everything that people do...or if they come close to it, most would call that being a pushover. Without good vs evil there cant even be boundaries. I used to think defining good vs evil was problematic too, until I recognized the hypocrisy or contradiction I had in me by not admitting I do categorize things that way. Rape is evil, psychopaths who prey on others are evil. Damaging someones life because youve been abusing them is evil. The subjective definitions of it are natural. Trying to define it objectively or collectively is where the controversy comes in.

 

[Lark]

Still thinking about this.

 

[Red Herring]

I think subjectively defining good vs evil is unavoidable, actually. If someone hurts you, and it was a fair reason to be hurt, that's typically considered bad. If they change your life in some positive significant way youll never forget, its seen as good. People are categotized as allies or foes to us based on these things as we live out our lives. Things add up and tip the scale one way or another, how we perceive them. People dont go through life without any views about anything whatsoever, or being entirely neutral, apathetic, indifferent about everything that people do...or if they come close to it, most would call that being a pushover. Without good vs evil there cant even be boundaries. I used to think defining good vs evil was problematic too, until I recognized the hypocrisy or contradiction I had in me by not admitting I do categorize things that way. Rape is evil, psychopaths who prey on others are evil. Damaging someones life because youve been abusing them is evil. The subjective definitions of it are natural. Trying to define it objectively or collectively is where the controversy comes in.

That in no way contradicts what I wrote. Maybe you misunderstood or maybe I didn't explain myself well, but I didn't write what you seem to imply I wrote. I just said judging the species from the outside in a neutral way by standards they use to judge interactions among themselves is difficult.

 

[FemMecha]

There is something that falls outside of what happens in nature that I do have to call evil in humans. In nature harm is typically done for individual benefit of securing food, a mate, or territory. In humans this certainly happens, but some of the cruelty is done purely for the sake of cruelty with no tangible benefit to the individual - sometimes only risk for the individual. This is true of a case where a woman, her friend and boyfriend raped and tortured her daughter to death in the town where I used to live. That goes against all of nature, procreation, individual interest, machiavellian thinking, everything. It isn't even self-interest, but just evil and that's what humans are capable of doing, so they are evil freaks of nature in some instances.

 

[cascadeco]

There is something that falls outside of what happens in nature that I do have to call evil in humans. In nature harm is typically done for individual benefit of securing food, a mate, or territory. In humans this certainly happens, but some of the cruelty is done purely for the sake of cruelty with no tangible benefit to the individual - sometimes only risk for the individual. This is true of a case where a woman, her friend and boyfriend raped and tortured her daughter to death in the town where I used to live. That goes against all of nature, procreation, individual interest, machiavellian thinking, everything. It isn't even self-interest, but just evil and that's what humans are capable of doing, so they are evil freaks of nature in some instances.

Yes, I do think this is a good thing to call out. Though ofc maybe studies have been done on certain other species that says otherwise that I'm unaware of, I haven't ever heard mention of psychopathic/sociopathic/sadistic members of other species who kill just to exert maximum suffering without any intent of consumption; whose pleasure receptors are rewarded via these actions. I do think some humans are extremely evil. In early human society these folks would have been culled out / kicked out of the tribe - and rightly so.

But what I was thinking when I fist saw this thread was just the vast difference between human being 1:1 and human being in group. The former, barring sociopathy or other such things, might be very different in solo mode vs how they become in a group. I don't know, groups really bother me - the % of people susceptible to group emotion (fwiw I don't think this has anything to do with Fe/Fi) seems vastly higher than 50%, so, a group can become completely 'evil' or 'good', depending I guess on the cultish leader or propaganda being consumed. Edit: Otoh with 'bad' people, they can and will inflict great harm in a 1:1 context, as it is hidden from the group (if a 'good' group) and thus can get away with it in a 1:1 context. But I guess my point is that really scary stuff is possible on a really large scale with maximum impact on a huge scale when groups come into play, vs it being more contained in a 1:1 context.

 

[Yuurei]

There is something that falls outside of what happens in nature that I do have to call evil in humans. In nature harm is typically done for individual benefit of securing food, a mate, or territory. In humans this certainly happens, but some of the cruelty is done purely for the sake of cruelty with no tangible benefit to the individual - sometimes only risk for the individual. This is true of a case where a woman, her friend and boyfriend raped and tortured her daughter to death in the town where I used to live. That goes against all of nature, procreation, individual interest, machiavellian thinking, everything. It isn't even self-interest, but just evil and that's what humans are capable of doing, so they are evil freaks of nature in some instances.

It does exist in nature; though rarely. Pretty much only in certain species of monkeys. Macaques are especially awful.