Language acts like a virus, especially once we enter the level of abstraction. While we might learn from General Semantics, or Rene Magrittes famous painting 'Ceci n'es pas une pipe', that even words describing tangible objects fail to capture the suchness of the worded item, abstractions lead us to a dive in truly murky waters.
We pave the road to misunderstandings elegantly when talking about all sort of -isms, as no-one can define those terms with authority and accuracy, albeit many claim to do exactly that. In most real life situations, people insist that 'everyone knows' what communism, socialism, capitalism, feudalism etc. means, and whether or not one abstract category fits into another.
Unless we become aware of the inherent inability of using language to describe our individual and shared experience, we are held captive in Plato's cave, and might easily get angry at those who have seen the light of day. That doesn't stop us from attempting to communicate verbally, and luckily in a majority of cases that still works out sufficiently for survival and even enjoyment.
Since Occupy Wall Street happened, the term 'human nature' became a highly popular confusing term to argue either for or against specific ways to organise society. Although all of us have our very own way of perceiving the world around us, and although language with its multiple levels of abstractions makes it challenging to pinpoint some agreeable ideas about 'human nature', I want to give it a shot.
The black-and-white perspective on human nature seems most popular, describing humans as inherently 'good' or inherently 'evil'. I guess most peoples experience rather shows them that some people act without the intent of harming others, and other do. Of course, even 'bad' people do some 'good', and vice versa. Using the black-and-white approach fails from the start to provide a framework that could be backed up by experience, no matter how much one wishes for people to fit into this worldview.
Modern psychology uses the Bell curve as a tool to describe the distribution of human traits. This approach seems much more appropriate to approach 'human nature' than the moralistic ideas lingering around in the dualistic approach of either 'good' or 'evil'.
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| Bell curve (normal distribution) |
A lot of the categories we use in language compare to boxes, especially if we think in mutually exclusive categories (good/evil). Let's put the thinking in boxes aside for a while, and take the above image as a better representation of human nature, with potentially 'good' and 'evil' on the flat ends of the curve. If an axis 'willingness to do harm' exists in human nature, only a few percent fall into the extremes of psychopathy or saints, the rest will simply do whatever they perceive as 'normal'.
The origin of the idea of government, however, links back to the idea that humans can't be trusted, and need protection from each other. This meme spread first via religion (born in original sin), and was then happily reinforced by more secular forms of government which basically acted like parents for entire populations. The expressions 'fatherland' and 'motherland' remind us of the generally parental character of nationhood.
As humans, we are individual expressions of consciousness, sui generis, and as such share some elementary needs. Besides that, we are pretty unpredictable most of the time, which makes life so interesting. A minority of humans lacks the ability of empathise, and therefor feels no remorse when harming others. How we can we deal with those individuals?
Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer. In tribal societies, shamans held the responsibility to identify those individuals, and prevent them from harming the rest of the group. People with psychopathic predisposition don't turn automatically into monsters, and can still fulfil useful functions within their community. You might have noticed the absence of shamans in modern society, which happened unlikely just coincidentally.
Without anyone in the position to identify and keep psychopaths in check, they can basically do whatever they like. After killing or removing shamans as safe guards for communities, they could spread fear with impunity. And they used the fear they spread to demand even more power and less control for themselves.
Has anyone ever wondered why an individual murderer bears the full brunt of punishment society can offer, while president Obama signs off kill list as regular routine task? We live in a world run by psychopaths, which used violence to implement systems of government that create heaven on Earth for themselves and other psychopaths. Being only a minority, this means hell for the rest of us.
As a majority of humanity can be described as relative gullible, they perpetuate this mad system that harms the rest of humanity, many other forms of life on this planet and the planet itself. This has several motivations. (hey, we're all individuals), which potentially collapse into the erratic believe that human nature is inherently 'good' or 'evil'. As long as we believe in the validity of this construct, psychopath will maintain control over the rest of the population.
If ones believe that we're inherently 'good', then she/he will fall for any intentional lie. If government harms the environment or other people, it is 'for the greater good'. If one believes that we're inherently 'evil', their fear will ask for protection, even from themselves. Just when one understands that we cannot generalise this aspect of human nature, the opportunity arises to reign in the psychopathic elements in society without converting it into a prison for all but the psychopaths.
Humans can adapt probably better than any other species to their environment. Humanity survived much longer without the illusion of government than with it. Well, maybe we managed to get to this historical water shed moment before, and just wiped out the memory of it by nearly extinguishing our species. We have seemingly unlimited learning potential, as individuals and as community. We can create a world that shares the resources of this planet, and allows 100% of humanity to survive and prosper.
If we don't do it, the cosmos might giggle in schadenfreude about the failed human experiment, or feel sad about its end, or remain equanimous as the universe continues to exist.
