The Nature Of Human Beings - Are
We Inherently Flawed?

When the people of our culture, the takers, examine the nature of human beings they certainly believe us to be fundamentally flawed.

They look around at all the wonderful things civilization has brought us but they also see destruction and misery. They see that we have the ability and the resources to create a healthy society but somehow we just keep on stuffing it up. Because no matter how hard we try we can never seem to get it right our culture assumes that the nature of human beings is flawed.

"It is human greed, ignorance, lust for power and selfishness that prevent us from creating the paradise that we were supposed to create," they say. "We just can't help it."

We have been told this story everywhere. The Bible tells us that the nature of human beings is inherently flawed because we have committed original sin. Our lawmakers tell us that the nature of human beings is inherently flawed so they must write laws and build prisons for those who will inevitably step out of line.

How Should Man Live?

We know an awful lot about medicine, about nuclear physics and about space exploration but our culture knows nothing about how man should live in a way that works. Such knowledge we are told does not exist. "The nature of human beings is wicked," whispers Mother Culture, "so we will never know how to create a fair and just society. Of course we will try endlessly but inevitably we will fail due to our inescapable weaknesses."

image by venetia jourbert

Hence whenever we are faced with a dilemma we either turn to the prophets or to the law makers. When ordinary men don't know how to live a prophet will guide them. When society does not know how to deal with a problem they take a vote and write a law in an attempt to make the problem go away.

All of this because we believe that human nature is somehow inherently flawed and doomed to create a flawed society. That's how we explain the wars, the famine, the environmental degradation and the inequality. 

We know that we should have the ability to make it work but our inescapable flaws mean we keep screwing it up. It's just our evil human nature. It's a convenient way of shifting the blame. How can it be our fault that we have wreaked havoc on the earth when we were created bad from the start?

We Are Not Humanity

But we are not humanity. Our culture, our way of life is but one in many thousands of human cultures that have existed on this planet. Yet we have forgotten this. As we ventured forth with our experiment of civilization we came to think of ourselves as humanity itself. So when we look at the flaws in our society and our way of life we think humanity is at fault.

Humanity doesn't need changing, just us.

In truth there is nothing inherently bad about humankind. But there is something inherently bad about our culture and it is little surprise that this myth of inherent flaws has appeared to explain our problems away.

What we need to do is to become aware of the flaws of our culture and the problems that our cultural mythology causes and come up with something new. We can't continue destroying the world and use the excuse that we can't help it. We can help it, as long as we recognize that humanity isn't the problem - our way of life is the problem.

Human nature doesn't need to be eradicated, enhanced, more evolved or more suppressed. Humanity doesn't need changing, just us.

Related Articles From Deep Ecology Hub:

• Nobody Wants To Destroy The World
• The Great Forgetting
• The Global Vision Of Deep Ecology