Like the just world hypothesis or victim blaming. The reality that bad things happen to good people is too much to bear so we create a mythos that the world cares about our morality.
It seems humans need delusion to a degree to stay sane. The world needs to feel safer, more ordered, easier to control than it really is. We need to believe we are more important than we really are.
I’m sure the list is long: disease and famine are caused by sins; poverty is due to bad decisions; we are under the watchful eye of a caring diety; seeing a doctor will cure all your ills; love conquers all etc.
Humans are generally good people.
We’re only good because we can afford to be. Take away law and order, and take away an economic infrastructure and you’ll soon see just how “good” people really are.
All true. But that all evolved over thousands of years. If you were to suddenly take all that away by some catastrophic event, we wouldn’t be the benevolent people we are today.
The driver of the car coming toward me is paying attention what he is doing.
Someone, God, the government, karma or maybe our parents, is watching over us and will one day correct the wrongs we see, or think we see. I think we all need this in some form just to get through the day.
astorian is right, though. The fact that we’ve spontaneously organized ourselves into mutually beneficial and reasonably compassionate collectives, especially in the modern western world, says a lot more about us than how we might act in the throes of desperation. There’s been both great good and terrible evil in human history, and our present civilization is pretty much the net balance of it all.
You already mentioned most of them. That you don’t really die when you die, and that personal wealth is created by hard work rather than good fortune are two that I’d add.
Yes, we’d collectivize into tribes :). We’re social, pack-oriented animals* and will seek each other out for our own social comfort and support. However the downside to that is that we are also predatory and packs are territorial. The Other will always be a problem in human society to one degree or another.
*ETA: I guess I don’t need to tell you, of all people, that :D.
This is true, but to a large extent even tribal rivalries in many respects seem to be becoming more civilized, at least among the major factions. Only 75 years ago most of Europe was in the grip of the kind of unbridled imperialist expansionism that I don’t think could happen anywhere today. (Some are concerned about Russia today, but I’d argue it’s a very different scenario for many reasons.) And in the 50s and 60s we were furiously building fallout shelters against the almost-inevitable nuclear war, and we seem to have got a handle on that. We’re even engaging in foreign monetary aid, humanitarian aid, and even useful peacekeeping sometimes. Oh, some of it is far from altruistic, some of it is a sham, but I’m ever the optimist!
I am an extraordinarily civil and domesticated wolf, more inclined to poetry than predation.
That sounds like the Joker’s philosophy on human nature in the Dark Knight. I think humans are about as nice to others as people are to them, they are about as considerate of the wants/needs of others as their own needs and wants get met. If people’s needs are met they are more likely to meet the needs of others. I don’t think it is a coincidence that most of our cultural, social, political and human rights reforms occurred after we started to develop the technology to live wealthier lives where our needs were getting met.
If you take that away, people will become assholes but it is our default position to try to get our own needs met. Plus since we already had that with 21st century society we will know what we are missing. This will create a large motivation to get it back, which will bring us back to where we are now.
