Love this post. I hope I will have time to read more of them. I’ll make the suggestion that some paragraph breaks would really help it feel a bit less intimidating. I’m more than open to critique of my own.

I do have some thoughts here. I also have strong feeling towards this archaic notion of human-nature essentialism. I think of it in terms of having roots in classic religious authoritarian styled so-called “morality”. Think along the lines of “the fallen nature of man”. It certainly does belong in a puddle of bathwater somewhere.

As an aside, one might note how this kind of essentialism is, by design, always about the “other” rather than the “self” when in public discourse. Any outward mention of personal fallibility is typically lip service. The only genuinely inward criticism is in the fearful, “self-talk” torment of managing one’s perpetually frail ego and appearances, these torments being natural byproducts of this kind of “morality”. I think of it more like network of social behaviours and reactions, than the actual system of ethical ideology that it pretends to be.

Like “god”, they insist that our depravity is inescapable, yet demand that YOU overcome it. Mostly likely without help, and most CERTAINLY without THEIR help. They will argue that anyone can do anything if they just try hard enough. However, this stance to which they conveniently flip-flop is just as untrue. I see this too as intrinsically part of that morality paradigm.

As in so many ways, we desire to see ourselves as above and apart from nature, which is our undoing. The fact is that if you take a very large group of people from various demographics (ALL BEING CONTROLLED FOR), and put them in a particular ethical situation, with a particular set of social and logistical conditions, and 60% of people are found to cheat: then THAT is our collection nature for those conditions! In that situation, with these conditions, this many people will behave this way. It’s meaningless to argue that 100% of people “could” do the “right” thing, that those people were “free” to choose.

If reiterating the the rules doesn’t work, if punishment doesn’t work, if isolation doesn’t work, THEN THEY DON’T WORK! They fail as causal influences, and you need to try something else! In the broadest understanding of things, they have not failed the system, the system has failed to understand their nature. In statistics this is called sampling error. You’re externalizing unwanted data to uphold your pet theory. You fail!

So no, I don’t think we have a fixed “evil” nature, but we do have natures. We can be politically free, or free from particular coercion, but we are not entirely causally free, not entirely free from certain human bounds. We have malleability withing these bounds, but there are bounds. The semantics get very stick here, because having another person tell us that we are to make choices (either in the present moment or implanted in our youth) can itself act as a causal influence that modifies our nature.

This is pretty rambley and rushed, but I hope it made sense. 😉