Guys, you’re not getting it.
This “it’s complicated” version of human nature, this “capacities for evil and for good” business isn’t helping anything. People can still do evil and say “Meh, human nature,” as they always have, you have changed nothing, proved nothing for all your research, the Bible had that much.
I don’t understand the point of this status quo chatter. If you went on a treasure hunt and didn’t find the treasure, why are we buying your book about it? What other rags to rags stories about wasted lives finding nothing litter the bookstore shelves?
Like all abuse, it serves another function, there is no information in “it is what it is and it could be anything,” nothing to learn in this lesson. All there is in that is pain, sadness, and . . . antisocialization. First it tells you we don’t know what you are, but “good” is definitely not it, and then it says if you do evil, we’ll understand. Worse than useless, all this neutered verbiage.
Good people telling this story, from the likes of Sapolsky on down, good people who want good things for people – good people failing at finding the good human nature, as they no doubt knew they would, as I also assumed I would, because we all know about all the previous folks who tried and failed also, and also because we all have the evolved bias to think bad things about ourselves, because that enables us to do bad things to one another.
“It’s complicated” is no different, brings the same results, and why not, it includes bad old human nature, confirms it and only hopes to add a little something good. That’s not good enough. The only thing that will be good enough is some consciousness of the matter of what ideas about human nature do. If you think “it’s complicated” is qualitatively different from “it’s bad,” you must not be thinking about what such ideas bring to the world, and that’s what they are for, to bring their problem and our solution for them into the world. Therefore, to bring good things into the world, we must concoct a good human nature to believe in.
And surprise, that is an easy matter! Turns out it was convincing a creature that it’s bad that’s the trick, the impossible trick evolution has managed with us, talking us out of simple self-preference which is part of most creature’s survival instinct/bias. In fact, I have already concocted it for you. Here it is: we are good, because we break ourselves to make ourselves bad and we wouldn’t have to do that if we already were.
You have an attitude or a bias.
I have logic.
Jeff
Sept. 6th., 2020
Abuse with an Excuse 