People are greedy, selfish, cruel and fundamentally evil. People keep believing such nonsense even though those very beliefs cause those very ills. How can people admire the view when they have their head firmly lodged up their ass? I guess it’s just human nature.
Generosity, helpfulness, and cooperativeness are also ‘human nature’ but rarely recognized as such in our society, and psychologists have only recently begun studying them. Recent experiments show that most people, seeing someone in difficulty, will go out of their way to help. Being helpful is also correlated with assertiveness and high self-esteem, contrary to popular beliefs.
Thomas Hobbes proclaimed that life in the “state of nature” was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. But what we know of hunter-gatherer societies suggests that while life may have been short, and lacking many of what we have come to feel are necessities–it was anything but solitary. People depended on each other for survival. A solitary individual was soon a dead one. Humans are social animals, by instinct and by necessity. The question is not how cultures got them to cooperate, but how they got them to stop.
