What's your opinion of humanity?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Count me with Kyla, Aesiron, and others who look at humanity as just another species of animal on this tiny, insignificant ball of rock and water.

I’m fairly cynical about humanity, but I think it’s a realistic cynicism, if that makes any sense. I don’t think we’re inherently good or inherently bad; I think we simply are. And what we are, on average, is selfish, short-sighted, prone to violence, fearful, defensive, and incurious, with a minority of important exceptions. Basically, we’re exactly the same as the gorillas, baboons, and chimps we’re the closest relatives of, except that on top of piles and piles of territoriality and herd instinct we have this paper-thin layer of cognition of which we are inordinately proud. It’s served us well, but it isn’t all that.

Consider, for example, how people tend to be wired for unhappiness. If you have shelter, you don’t have enough to eat. If you have enough to eat, you’re lonely. If you have companionship, you don’t have enough material goods. If you have enough material goods, you don’t have the best material goods. If you have excellent material goods, you don’t have the best job. Or the best companion. Or your kids aren’t doing as well in school as you’d like. Or you can’t get your hair to behave the way you’d like. Or the sink keeps dripping no matter how many times you change the washer. Or your remote control doesn’t fit perfectly in your hand. Or you’re annoyed because radio reception is spotty at your desk at work. Or your favorite baseball team isn’t doing well. Or you have a hangnail. Whatever.

Point is, we tend to overlook what we have, and focus on what we don’t have. This is common behavior to all of us; we take the good for granted and obsess about what’s inadequate or missing. It’s just human.

Now, on the one hand, this is really irritating. It seems to me that if you’ve got a warm place to sleep and keep your stuff, and if you’re getting enough to eat, and if you’ve got good friends, and if you aren’t at risk of being killed by renegade soldiers or eaten by a dire wolf, hey, you’ve got it pretty damn good, and you have no right to complain so bitterly about your lot in life, especially if the problems are of your own making (“waaah, I got another parking ticket, waaah”). Still, we humans seem to bitch and moan an awful lot, out of proportion to our actual situation.

But on the other hand, this is how we improve our situations. We focus on what’s wrong so we can fix it. We’ve dealt with most of the big issues; seven-eighths of us get plenty to eat, we’ve cured the most common and easiest-to-treat diseases, we have a stable social structure that insulates most of us from the worst dangers, we’re up to our necks in entertainment alternatives, and so on. And we have all of this because we’re never satisfied with how things are, because we’re always grousing and looking for improvements. Trains aren’t fast enough? Here’s an airplane. Postal service slow and unreliable? Here’s email. Doorknob doesn’t latch properly? Here’s a better one. Dishwasher detergent leaves spots on the glassware? New and Improved with Sheeting Action.

We’re surrounded by astonishing luxury and convenience, because we are wired for dissatisfaction and complaint and have created it to make our lives better; but we take it all for granted and keep finding stuff to bellyache about, because we’re wired for dissatisfaction and complaint.

I look at people, overall, the same way. The traits that are our greatest strengths are also our greatest failings. We are simultaneously the most amazingly wonderful thing on this planet, and the worst and most destructive. Neither extreme position, for me, captures the entire truth.

62

Spam acutally speaks well for us as a species, IMO. Think of the complexity of society we’ve managed to develop to make either the meat product or the internet scamming come into place. Talk about getting ourselves up on the heirarchy of needs!

63

M’kay. Not exactly where I was going with what I was trying to say, but I can respect your opinion. I guess. If I have to. Uh, do I have to?

64

It’s not an opinion though, it’s a fact. How many species have climbed so far up the heirarchy of needs that internet advertising is even a blip on the radar? Most other species are still stuck on where the next meal is coming from.

65

Only our species. Which is why I said that we all have the potential to be bigger than we really are. I fail to see how email SPAM makes us better than or superior to other animals. I think it just means that we have more free time. What’s wrong with only having to worry about where your next meal is coming from? No light bill, no mortgage, no cable bill. Doesn’t sound too terribly bad to me.

66

Except that if you screw up you starve to death. Oops.

67

Yeah, but it takes a week or 2.

68

So? You’re still dead.

69

I think we’ve kind of hijacked this thread with our really, really stupid and silly conversation…my fault for keeping it going. I don’t think this is where the OP intended this line of thought to go, so I’m officially stopping now. Thanks for your, uh, insight? I guess. Take care of yourself. Bright blessings on you and yours.

70

See, this is where I get a problem with the whole thing. Successful? Define that. I say sharks and cockroaches and sponges and bacteria are far more successful, because to me success = longevity, as a species. We have a loooong way to go before we can call ourselves successful. Right now we’re the Cabbage Patch Kids of species-- a very hot trend for a millisecond, but will it last?

Probably not. Why? Because we don’t respect other living things very much. We could step outside the food chain, but we often choose not to. I wish humanity as a whole could stop seeing it as Mankind v. The World. We are not superior to the other animals. We no longer need to compete with them. I don’t think we have more of a right to enjoy life, liberty, and happiness than they do. We are capable of compassionately sharing this planet with the other living things, but we rarely choose to do so, and that will be our downfall as a species. Monocultures generally do not do well.

I’m sorry, it’s hard to watch the news and think that we are living up to the potential sketched out by our brain size. I like my cats more than I like most people. That said, I love kids and I think somewhere along the line, we lose something very important. Well, not everyone does, and the people who don’t make the rest of it worthwhile.

71

You see, this is one area where I would disagree, our cognitive capacity over even the smartest animals is of such a difference of magnitude as to be a difference in kind.

It is indeed all that.

72

I’d like to see your reasoning behind this. Want to start another thread?

(personally I believe free will does exist unless we’re using different definitions of the concept)

73

Sounds an awful lot like “inherently bad” (or at least negative) to me… ?

74

Read on, through my “wired for unhappiness” discussion, to see why I don’t regard these traits as inherently good or bad. The same balance I present for that particular item can be applied to the other traits as well. They are simply who we are, for better (sometimes) or worse (sometimes).

75

Yeah, I did. I’ve never replied to a post that I haven’t read completely … I guess I should have elaborated on my reply.

Honestly, I see no balance presented in your post: even our successes stem from negatives. We’re miserable bastards, but our misery results in creature comforts – if the greater good was served along the way, it was by accident. Altruism doesn’t seem to exist in your worldview.

Just to be clear, I’m not questioning your opinion. I disagree with your “wired for unhappiness” postulate, but opinions are opinions and no one is right or wrong. What I’m questioning is your argument: I agree that people simply are what we are, I just don’t agree that you’re supporting that assertion.

76

Evidently I’m not making myself clear, and I apologize.

Maybe another example will help: I don’t regard “greed” as an inherently negative trait. All of us are self-interested, some more than others, some less. Some are more acquisitive than others. Taken too far, it can have negative repercussions. But it can’t be denied, either; communalist economies don’t work because they don’t incentivize their people properly. Greed, simply, is. You can’t give in to it, but you can’t deny it; the best you can do is to recognize it and harness it. And thus, we have regulated capitalism, the most powerful financial and economic engine ever created.

No morality is attached to that formulation. Same for selfishness, short-sightedness, and the other characteristics I listed. I erred by not also mentioning the positive traits people can display, like generosity, love, humor, and unrewarded creativity, but they would have been caveated with negatives just as the negatives are caveated with positives. (It’s admirable when someone runs to the aid of a friend in need. It’s not admirable when a wall of apartment-window looky-loos watches dispassionately as a complete stranger is brutalized. Humans are capable of both, and the reasons lie beneath our so-called rationalism.)

As far as altruism goes, it’s admirable, but it’s also problematic, because it cannot be compulsory. See the constant haggling over our welfare systems, and people who don’t want their tax dollars going to lazy poor people. Some say they would like to abolish the state-operated dole completely, and address the need via private charity, but of course none of them has any intent of actually donating any money to charity. The disconnect between what we say we should do and what we actually do (in a general sense) is quite telling.

One of the things that most interests me about human nature is the dichotomy between the lessons we teach one another in our stories and the actual reality of the world we live in. (I see a lot of movies and read a lot of books, so I spent a lot of time thinking about Story as an abstract psychological construct.) For example, in our stories, we celebrate selflessness and sacrifice. We remind ourselves to lean on our friends, and not to victimize the helpless, and to be good people; and we reinforce these lessons by having this good behavior rewarded and bad behavior punished. And yet, in the real world, Pol Pot dies peacefully in his own bed, and Michael Millken is a rich motherfucker, while the selfless and decent people get victimized and plowed under and are forgotten, except for the one in a thousand who beats the odds and gets a celebratory TV movie made about him.

Another example of strange story conflict: We like to see maverick heroes who buck authority in service to the greater good; look at the recent Stealth (if you’re one of the nine people who went to see it), or Bruce Willis in Tears of the Sun or, well, everything, pretty much. However, in the real world, when a soldier disobeys orders and sets his own priorities, we point horrified, trembling fingers of accusation at him, and strip away his rank and honor.

There are lots of examples like this. Why is it so, do you think?

Clearly, we aspire to be better, but just as clearly, we recognize, if only on a subconscious level, that we are not who we wish we were. We fantasize about idealism, and we fashion narratives that attempt to reinforce these positive qualities, but it must be significant that we continue repeating the same tropes over and over without significant revision, frequently in direct opposition to how things are in reality. And these intentions and aspirations are similarly captured in our religions, too. Jesus and Mohammed both preached peace, and their most ardent followers are some of the most aggressively violent people on the planet. Why?

But here’s the hard part, which I don’t think I was explaining clearly. It may sound like I’m being dark and cynical and negative about humanity by listing the above contradictions, but I don’t feel that way at all. Humans are capable of inflicting great suffering, but we are also capable of creating great beauty. Einstein, a stunningly original thinker who conceived one of the most beautiful intellectual leaps in history, was an utter shit to his wives; and Hitler loved his dog. This deep contradiction is typically bewailed, and people will take sides on the man-is-inherently-good-or-evil debate; I would rather put both on equal footing, take a step back, and say, “Huh, isn’t that interesting.”

Or, again, we are who we are.

Is that clearer?

77

Actually, yes! Misunderstandings are almost never the fault of just one party, so thanks for not giving up on my ability to “get” what you were saying. :slight_smile:

If it helps any, I think part of my problem was that you would use a word like “greed” and mean it neutrally, as representing simple self-interest, while I would see that word as inherently meaning an excess of self-interest. The pedantic writer in me often sees more meaning attached to words than the user intended, so that’s behind at least part of my role in our miscommunication.

I mostly agree with you, by the way. I agree that there are both positive and negative motives at work in all of us, and I agree that we are what we are, but I don’t agree that what we are is balanced: I think that positive outweighs negative. Not by a huge amount, but enough to count. And while you provide several examples of negative motives effecting positive change, and vice-versa, when I say “I think people are inherently good” I’m not talking about the end results; I mean motives. I really do think that most people mean well most of the time (if we knew how to make good motives consistently equal good results, the world would be a much different place!), but I’m far from denying the bad that exists in all of us.

You referred to yourself as a realistic cynic; perhaps I am a realistic optimist. :wink:

78

I see humanity as an animal that matches more patterns in its environment that most.

Delving into the basic driving force of a person, I find it’s really just a desire for survival.

…Let’s say I’m sitting around the cave having just filled up on brontosaurus and Ug has been eaten by the sabertooth tiger, so I’m safe for awhile. My mind wanders and I think “it’s really just a desire for survival”. I reject it and call it pessimistic, simplistic, unevolved thinking. It doesn’t fit my worldview. To adopt it I would have to “die” and be “reborn” as another person that thought it true. Unbeknownst to me, I’m already a different person than the won who never had that thought.
…A minute later, a year later, I think it again and now my subconscious has matched it with my experiences to date. I consider it. I’m dying and being reborn moment by moment but not discerning it. If nothing else changed I would just eat my bronotsaurus and guard my watering hole forever. Finally I have enough experiences matched to that idea and I become the person that believes it.
…Or, I’ve held my ground all this time, survived, and ignored the patterns. I refuse to see another idea, and I fight to the death to hold onto my way of life.

Is this true? Well, does it work for you?

I always think of the TV series Father Knows Best and the episode where the teenager in pre-beatnik philosophy says that she realizes all people are just selfish. Everyone else is shocked. At the end of the episode, the curmudgeonly painter is confronted when he disobeys the Mother and paints the house with the expensive paint. Asked why he says, “Well, I guess I was just being selfish.” Teen is smiling, everyone else is shocked. He continues, “I just couldn’t let myself do a bad job for you.” Everyone is smugly restored to humanity’s goodness and teen is embarrassed, but wiser!

We all celebrate the hero that bucks authority for the greater good because we see the end result in hindsight (or foresight in the movies). The survival of our ideals has triumphed. In the real world, we don’t know the outcome and we have to figure that a person in our command that disobeys is going to get us all killed. It fits the pattern more often than not.

I’m not cynical. In fact all this is quite pleasing to me. I think, ultimately, that people want to understand and that when you get to understand, the world becomes a part of you. I think humanity is going to continue to find the patterns and links and between everything there is, everywhere.

79

Cool.

Part of the difficulty for me in assigning moral judgment to a word like “greed” is that I see no absolute arbiter, no way of stating reliably and objectively that this much is acceptable and reasonable but that much is too much and qualifies as “greed” in your pejorative sense. We all have a general feeling about it, and there’s probably a bell curve of sorts in which most of us would agree that someone at one end is “greedy” while someone at the other end is “generous,” but there’s a big gray area in the middle in which everybody’s specific crossover point will vary wildly. Rather than pick a point of my own and join the debate, I’d rather step back, observe the overall phenomenon, and generalize from there. Hence, my view of greed as a constant of human nature, with no moral judgment attached.

This gets into another very interesting area of human nature, whose summary I will largely borrow from the fascinating book Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer. In his thesis, we as humans implicitly understand that we are always proceeding on the basis of imperfect knowledge. Even if we can see all the pieces on the metaphorical gameboard, we don’t know what our opponent is thinking, and therefore we must make choices and decisions based on hunches and hypotheses. It is no accident that some of our most potent fantasies through the ages have revolved around means of acquiring additional strategic knowledge that simultaneously do not reveal said acquisition to our opponent (e.g., invisibility or mind-reading), thereby conferring on ourselves an advantage in competitive interactions. And further, we tend to invent for ourselves moral agents who possess one or more of these means of acquiring knowledge, and who can serve as our proxies for judging other people’s behavior. The symbolic awareness of the Christian God for the fall of a sparrow is a perfect illustration of the principle.

Not that this has a lot to do with the original subject of the thread, other than providing another angle from which human nature can be considered, but I thought it was very interesting.