It’s far too easy, with all the evil that festers on this Earth on a daily basis, to make the assumption there is just something not right with the entirety of our species. Perhaps upon our development, something deplorable forms alongside our fingernails and toenails — something rooted in our cognition that propels us towards selfish, monstrous acts.
I don’t believe this to be true. Far from it, actually.
The instinct of the human being is survival. It is our primordial purpose, if you will. And branching off of that, as naturally-occurring subcategories, lay the desire to develop fulfilling relationships, to aid those we hold dear in their survival, and, of course, reproduction as a sort of continuation of that life. If we leave these basic desires untouched, humanity would baffle their fellow humans that deem us all monsters. If our basic right to life wasn’t threatened in the innumerable ways our vast, ever-growing ruthless society threatens it with every day, the human man and woman would be a benevolent, cooperative species. After all that’s the true nature of our species, as well as most others, as it results in the highest possibility of survival.
Humanity has unfortunately placed itself in the overcrowded cage that is society. And as convenient as life appears on the surface, with the basic necessities readily available to us, it is not so simple. Take, for example, financial distress. It is one of the biggest factors in the dissolution of marriages and romantic relationships in general. If not a paper, copper, aluminum, nickle embodiment of the potential to continue to survive, by way of accruing the necessities, what is money? It is almost vital to sustaining life in the modern world. So, naturally, any challenging or threat to that causes us to act in a variety of ways typically negative and destructive.
Place man in a surviving tribe in the jungles of Peru, where the cooperation is required once more and the only threat to his primordial purpose is the most obvious, that of finding food and shelter and water to survive. This man, we can venture, would be a different man than the city-dweller of a developed country. This man would be exponentially closer to a natural form of man, unexposed to the industrious, technological, crowded, stressed-to-near-insanity man. We can venture even further and guess this version, if fed adequately and sheltered, would not be a violent creature. Nothing beyond the basics would be there to irritate his psyche on a near constant basis.
Desmond Morris insisted cities are not a concrete jungle, but a human zoo. It is the polar opposite of a natural setting, and thus the terminology is ironic. It is a place where the everyday human is put under a perpetual strain and risk of cracking.
Humans actually have a tendency to be good and virtuous beings. We see the bad everywhere — in fact we shine light on it with the media — because, as large as the numbers appear, it still remains the minority when it boils down to corrupt and decent people. The decent far exceed the bad. So if man were inherently evil, would it not be the good that had the light shined on them for the absurdity of their ways? Evil would be the majority and it is very evident that just isn’t the case.