People constantly say that humans are terrible by default, selfish, and violent, but BY DEFAULT, if you ARE a well adjusted human being with empathy, you will ALWAYS feel conflicted about committing violence towards another human, even if they 100% deserve it. In fact, if you kill or severely maim someone, you’ll always feel conflicted about it if you are a good human, and doing it several times (or hell, even ONCE if it’s traumatizing enough) will give you severe PTSD. The problem of humans being terrible to each other is always created by indocrination, propaganda, and the fact that being a selfish idiot is rewarded in capitalist society. This is one of the reasons why I think humanity is inherently good, and that evil people are the ACTUAL deviants, who just happen to be rewarded by the way society has been structured for a very long time (even before capitalism).
Bullshit. Fucking look around you. Get out of the shower and open your fucking eyes. What, is it aliens responsible for all the violence in the world? It’s us. We do it. We are built to do it. Violence is VERY OBVIOUSLY inherent to our psychology.
Also, that’s not how trauma works.
People are conditioned that way by society, though.
More violent society conditions more violent individuals who just see it as the way things are.
Feral humans (e.g. feral children who grew up) are not peaceful.
The claim that humans are always terrible by default is false, but claiming the polar opposite is also false.
Many people have empathy, but not all, and it varies in strength/quality from one person to another.
Many well adjusted people do not feel empathy. Many people are depresssed/over-stressed and not well adjusted because they have empathy.
As for PTSD, the ability (or inability) to adjust to or move on from traumatic experiences is not directly correlated to empathy.
Furthermore the ability to kill those who wish you (or those you care about) harm is evolutionarily advantageous. Anger and violence in response to stress and pain allows you to fight off predators/enemies/sources-of-pain. The majority of humanity feels these emotions.
When in a state of anger and pain it is harder for us to think about our actions. Your claim that someone with empathy will always feel conflicted about hurting others is therefore false.
Now most people with empathy might feel remorse but if their mind doesn’t put enough weight on that moment to remember it, there’s nothing for them to feel sorry for later. Does that mean they don’t feel empathy? Nope, they can still empathize with friends and family and characters on TV shows, they just don’t have a mind that catalogues their guilt. (There are unfortunately many people like this)
I do think many people cause significant pain to others. But out of ignorance not malice. And there in lies a major problem with empathy. If you don’t think someone is actually hurting you won’t feel empathy for them even if you feel empathy for others. So if you aren’t aware of the pain others might feel around you, you won’t experience empathic responses even if you might for other kinds of pain.
People might not be generally good or generally bad but we are typically stupid.
If you can convince someone that some person is “just faking it for attention” they won’t feel empathy. Now the reverse is also typically true: if you can convince a person with empathy that that someone else’s pain is real they’ll feel empathy. Unfortunately people don’t like being told they’re wrong or having to change viewpoint or listen to evidence rationally so there are many people you cannot convince to feel bad for certain other people.
Another thing to note is that many of the terms you’ve used are indefinite. What does well-adjusted mean? Psychopathy is prevalent in many fields and psychopaths can live healthy/stable lives. (Sadism and psychopathy are different btw) Are they well adjusted?
What does good mean? The greater good or empathy? Because those two do not agree on everything. How far does empathy need to go for someone to be good in your opinion? Are people who eat meat evil because they lack empathy for animals?
If there was a trolley problem-esque situation where you could save five lives but only if you killed a child with your bare hands, would your idea of a good person commit murder or let five people die because they couldn’t overcome their empathy?
Lastly—and slightly unrelated—I’d like to note that I just had an odd thought: if you tried to logically dichotomize all actions into good or bad, you would need arithmetic to deal with the idea of a greater-good / utilitarianism. However by Gödel’s theorems, in any logical system in which arithmetic can be performed, there will be things that cannot be proven good or bad no matter how many axioms you add to the system. In other words it is actually by definition impossible to dichotomize actions into good or bad. Adding a third category won’t even fix it. Right? Any mathematician/logician/philosopher that can back me up or tell me I’m wrong?
That’s one of the biggest flaws in utilitarianism, there isn’t really an objective measure of goodness, therefore aspiring to maximize goodness is always flawed.
The alternative moral framework, the categorical imperative postulated by Kant is also flawed, as it’s presupposes a rational human, and most humans don’t act like rational beings.
In the end people are all personally responsible for their actions, and no higher power is keeping score.
If you want a good read on mortality and free will and how the dichotomy between right and wrong is flawed I would suggest this dialog by logician and philosopher Raymund Smullyan who brilliantly catches the flaws in the western boolean approach to morality. It’s a long read, but quite worth it.
People (that aren’t psychopaths or sociopaths) are very good at individually being empathetic to other members of their in group, that haven’t broken their ideological rules. However, even normal, empathetic people can shut off their empathy when people of a certain group belong to another out group, or are dehumanised (eg ‘well dark skinned people aren’t really human like light skinned people are, so it’s fine to enslave them’) or if they break your moral code (eg ‘well they’re gay, so it’s morally justifiable to kill them’)
TBH I think this is more of a conditioning thing. Like, very young toddlers (up to like, 5-6 years old) literally cannot understand racism. This is actually lampshaded in Wolfenstein II, when BJ just talks to a black girl and tells her about all the shit his father says about her race but he straight up says he doesn’t understand his reasons at all.
Again, I do not think people are evil by default. Hate is something that is taught, not inherent.
(I’m replying to you and the post you’re replying to, if that makes sense.)
Racism is a single aspect of in and out groups. We didn’t evolve to work in groups of more than 150, maybe 200 individuals max. People of any skin tone can be in my Monkeysphere, but if they’re outside of it, they’re somewhat less than human, less real. No one is above this.
I’m sure I’ll get comments from people who think they are above it. “Fuck you, you inhuman monster! I value ALL human life equally!” Nah, no one does.
It’s like this: which would upset you more, your best friend dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees? Which would hit you harder, your Mom dying, or seeing on the news that 15,000 people died in an earthquake in Iran?
https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
Plenty of research out there, aside from what’s included in the article. The author is mostly explaining Dunbar’s Number.
You make valid points, but I feel the truth lies somewhere in between your comment and the people in the chain that you are responding to.
If the truth is in between, it’s because we’re arguing different things. I think everyone in this chain gets “it”, but we’re meandering a bit. Great conversation!
If the truth is in between, it’s because we’re arguing different things.
Not necessarily! Sometimes the truth or a greater understanding can emerge even from two or more seemingly paradoxical or conflicting statements or ideas.
Thesis + antithesis = synthesis (which is likely still an inkling of the total truth, but nonetheless)
This video does a good job breaking down the core of the truth of why and how altruism arises, and why not everyone is altruistic:
The reality is that evolution and the natural world does not care about individuals, or groups, or species. It is selecting for genes and genes dont give one flying fuck about anything other than whether they help more copies of themselves exist in the world. Sometimes that’s altruistic, sometimes it’s not.
Out of time for a video than long, but you can bet I saved it! Love examining how we hominids came to be, how we came to behave. So many arguments as to how we “should” act clash with how we “evolved” to act. Untangling “should” vs. “is” would take us farther than arguing about ideal behavior.
Aim for a better world keeping in mind as it is, not how it should be. Am drunk. Making sense?
deleted by creator
Some hate, at least reactionary hate to circumstances, is inherent in humans, otherwise it wouldn’t be here.
Who taught us hate if not us?
Recharacterize hate and anger as fear, human behavior makes more sense.
Yeah, racism is taught, as OP’s talking about, but fear of the other, the other outside our tribe, is genetic.
People take that opinion to mean racism is natural. Nope. It’s not skin color, it’s “other”. It’s a big world now, too big for us to easily parse, so we try to break each other into manageable chunks we can understand, skin color is an easy shortcut.
For example; I’m a middle-aged, American white guy. I understand, and am far closer, to my black friend down the street than I could be to any European, even one who looks exactly like me. My friend is in my tribe, my Monkeysphere, the European is not. Despite wildly different backgrounds, I share more in common with my friend than a random Spaniard. And if nothing else, he’s close, literally and figuratively, part of my tribe. Does that make sense?
Yup. Prison experiment that went awry.
I forget the name. Basic textbook shit.
That experiment has been pretty thoroughly discredited.
Stanford
Ya. Thanks!
I think the name is America. We became the dumping ground when Australia told England to get fucked.
Yeah well by default my car doesn’t go anywhere
In fact, if you kill or severely maim someone, you’ll always feel conflicted about it if you are a good human
If someone you thought was a good person killed someone else - in self defence let’s say - and didn’t feel bad about it at all, would you then categorise that person as a bad person?
Eh, depends if they take the fact they did that seriously or not.
PTSD would not exist
I don’t think you know what PTSD is then
Who says humans are evil BY DEFAULT?
I think humans are shit. I think a very few are strongly evil. I mean someone came up with the idea and others actually boiled people alive. That ain’t good. The ones doing the boiling would probably not have done so without the ones who thought it up, but does that make them good by default? Also I think given the opportunity to take a million of someone else’s dollars there is a much larger portion of the population that would do it than thinking up tortures. So what’s the definition? How far do you have to go to be evil? How much do you have to resist to be good?
NOTE: I’m using good and evil as a catch-all term for what you said.
In war, most soldiers don’t want to kill the enemy. And, many don’t, they won’t fire their weapon, they miss on purpose, etc.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/hope_on_the_battlefield
Empathy is a trait that almost all individuals of many mammal species possess. Lethal intra-species violence is also a behaviour observed in many (all, i’d guess) of those same species.
Individuals, their peers, their social networks, their identities, institutions and the specific situation all influence behaviour. When those line up one way, we do a murder. A different configuration and we do a cuddle.
It makes no sense to suggest that humans are either inherently good or bad - those are artificial concepts that don’t even have a fixed meaning within a single human identity group. At the end of the day we’re just organisms exhibit behaviours to meet needs.
It’s a powerful urge to say “the instincts I feel are not only universally felt by other ‘good’ humans, but also an indicator for truth” like some other ape believing something else won’t make the same claim. It’s an appeal to nature but nature does not give a shit about us. Morally, ethically, our survival. Nature does not define us anymore.
Violence is natural.
Exhibit A: when my parents were busy, and we didn’t have school (like during breaks or between school years, for example), they would leave me at home with my older brother, he constantly wanna fight me. (I mean, to be very clear, we are both real biological children of our parents, so this is not even some weird “othering” by biological vs adopted) One time, he got so mad that he just used zip ties to tie me up, and I was basically restrained until my parents got home. Another time my brother chased me out of the apartment, I felt so scared, I basically just ran from home, because I was not old enough to make rational decisions so “home = danger” was all I could think of… That left me traumatized and I still think about it now.
HE NEVER APOLOGIZED. I confronted him years later and he still blamed me for it. I WAS NO OLDER THAN 7, he’s 5 years older than me. Even my mother would blame me for that incident.
And even after that, he still fights me every so often. Zero remorse.
I just cannot trust anyone after that incident. Blood relatives betraying me. Unthinkable.
Oh is it surprising why I have depression and have nightmares about that place, a literal ocean away and nearly 2 decades later, still traumatized, and the perpetrator probably doesn’t even remember what he did that day. Literally incapable of empathy.
I’m sorry that happened. I’m inclined to disagree with that first phrase, tho. The fact he has no empathy makes him not normal.
If you define “not normal” as “not having empathy” then your argument is vacuously true. Like “I’m a good person because I say I am”
If you define normal as the average of everyone then statistically you’re wrong about empathy. The Stanford Prison Experiment or basically any other social experiment that is now banned proves you wrong (hence they had to ban them because people do shitty things to each other just because).
A good one (which was banned for causing stress to the participants via some amount of empathy) I could name would be the [Milgram Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment. Most people will question their actions if they can directly see they are harming a stranger… unfortunately most people will also apparently hurt others even while hearing the victim scream and beg them to stop just because an authority figure tells them to keep going and that it’s all part of the plan.
I don’t think that people are sadistic or malicious by nature, but they sure as hell do not have strong empathy by default mate, and the prison experiment alone proves sadism is much more prevalent than you seem to think. As is the existence of the holocaust, the genocide in Gaza, all the other genocides, the existence of Guantanamo bay, the existence of capitalism in the first place, the need for a list of what is a war crime, war itself, etc.
The reason any of these happen is because people care more about the status quo or themselves than certain other people. Soldiers kill soldiers because their desire to live and not be shamed as a defector outweighs any pain they’ll cause others. Ergo, there is seemingly an endless supply of people who will choose themselves/self-interest over others, in contrast to your hope that universal empathy is the default.
You can feel bad for others and do shitty things just like you can be a psychopath and do kind things. Empathy doesn’t necessarily make someone good and the lack of it doesn’t make someone bad. Unless you define good and evil to mean that in which case there’s no shower thought just another definition of good and evil.
I disagree. Someone doesn’t return their shopping cart…? No remorse. No hesitation.
Apes together strong
I really recommend this documentary: The Act of Killing
