Are Humans Inherently Evil?

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.

Suffering

I’ve discovered the nature of suffering this year. It’s not as if I’d never suffered myself or that I was somehow naïve to the definition of the word, rather I’ve happened upon the quite discreet philosophical nature of suffering. We’ve all endured some form of suffering, specific to each of us, to our circumstances, in relation to our fears, threatening our livelihood and contentedness in some way. And though we’ve all acquainted ourselves with it and, theoretically speaking, seen its face, my suffering looks nothing like yours. They are, perhaps, kin as they only share the word like a stubbornly everlasting surname, but that’s the extent of their parallels. I was recently discussing, mocking, really, a woman I know that had complained about her life. To place it more modernly and grammatically unappealing, “f my life”, she messaged me. As though she was in some anguish that could neither be removed nor numbed and her life, both up to this point and all she’ll experience after the dramatization of such a sentence, was either moot or inconsequential or bound to only be met with more suffering.

 
Here I rolled my eyes.

 

And I did so because I know this woman personally and, when compared to my woes, it felt as though surely, surely this was a joke. No, it wasn’t. It was merely a woman suffering in her own way, not a woman suffering meekly by comparison, just a woman suffering.

 

It ultimately annoyed me the barbarity of life for some and then others experience such an ease with it — like a gust of wind temporarily disturbing flowers when others have been ripped up by their very roots from a ruthless tornado — that suffering is conceived by such seemingly paltry matters; matters a child in an underdeveloped country, searching for clean water, would certainly scoff at. But that is a skewed perception. Suffering is not only valid upon comparison. There is no unspoken competition. Mine and yours look nothing alike, as I said, and yet they torture us both when they arrive. Suffering is as individual as we are. Shadows, really, taking on our shape and never able to replicate another’s.

I was wrong in my belief that suffering was somehow rationed. And only those  genuinely agonizing, deeply suffering, deserve to acknowledge it. Suffering is in a gross surplus in this world, which is the cruel reality of it. And one suffering does not negate another, as the suffering are two vastly different people merely sharing the same name.

I’m learning, though, that suffering is not necessarily something healthy to acknowledge at all. Perhaps we acknowledge the emotions it pulls into the air, like dust mites from a carpet being beat, but giving it life somehow takes away for our life.

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Smother

I’ve been unfurled a few thousand times, 

and I know just how unattractive my spine must appear snapped and folded in such an inhuman manner. I am the same tenderness as in the womb, encapsulated in a life separate of mine. Both lost and nestled in some known spot, buried down deep with hums of my existence occasionally escaping as bubbles to the surface, so you are aware I’m still here.
“I’m still here“, I leak out and up to the very top.

An Honest Account of a Different Sort of Love Affair, Far, Far Off

What if I said I couldn’t anymore? If my stalky Reeds that swore a kind of forever snapped in some terrible tragedy and you’re the two of us standing, oblivious to my fall? At what point does the throbbing of the wound overwhelm the heart until a collapse and shut down?

 
I’ve required you as water, food and air and you couldn’t be seen, no matter how you willed it. And what if resentment grew as dandelions in those cracks of abandon and they’re much too vital to the entirety of the system to remove; like brain tumor too entwined in the important bits to touch?

 
You know of mercy. You condemn purposeful suffering. I’m suffering. I’m suffering for the years I haven’t been able to live inside of you and you inside of me, not merely beneath the stucco ceilings of man-made matter and within the confines of the gravity from our own 4-walled world.

 
“This is so very rare”, we reassure each other, and we believe it with the blind allegiance of a religion. Even upon a final departure, it’s a doctrine so tightly tangled with my tendons and spine, and every day factual assertions, that I’d carry it to the beginnings of forever. But what if we had begun with a stubborn disposition of brevity? Do we suffer together and apart or would true suffering only surface in a total absence?

 
Does the starving man that smells an apple pie bubbling in the stove before death suffer more than the starving man that smells nothing?