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).

  • Hegar@fedia.io
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    14 hours ago

    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.