#’humans are not born with any instincts!’ yes yes the nurture vs nature debate that sounds like your personal opinion of it that’s not fact

[cats-in-the-clouds]

i keep getting stuck being forced to take classes i despise and that have no relevance to me so i’m going to go all malicious compliance on every single assignment and subtly insult the class material and/or professor

[tigerjpg]

"debunking the idea that human nature is inherently bad" please can you elaborate sometime if you want? i would love to hear more on the topic!

LET ME START BY STATING THAT I am in no way whatsoever trained in any sort of anthropological field or anything of the sort besides taking one (1) anthropology class and dropping out halfway through. I don’t have any academic authority or credentials or anything fancy to back me up, but I am a human with a chronic case of thinking-too-deeply-about-shit, so that’s where I’m coming from with...whatever this is. So. Good luck. Here we go.

The thing that comes up most when talking to people who think humans are inherently selfish/prone to cruelty is that good ole headache of a debate that is Nature VS. Nurture. They’ll use it as a way to defend their theory by saying that our basest, most primitive selves are hardwired to put our own survival above anything else—which is true enough—and that that is why we are instinctively violent and selfish. That we are self-serving beasts at heart, and nurture/society is what teaches us to respect one another, to keep ourselves in check.

Which is, in my opinion, bullshit.

All living beings are hardwired to put their survival first and foremost, yes, but humans, from a purely scientific/anthropological/historical/objective/etc point of view, are social creatures. More than that, we’re social creatures who have depended entirely on cooperation to survive through the harshest of conditions and ages. We’re not solitary like jaguars or snakes! We are tribal. So if nature has hardwired anything into us, it’s that unity is the way to keep our species alive. 

Read that again. Helping each other is how we’ve survived.

There is archaeological evidence that primitive humans took care of their sick and disabled even though this might have slowed them down. A skeleton with Klippel-Feil syndrome (a bone disorder that fuses joints together) lived another 10 years after becoming paralyzed from the waist down, which would have been impossible were it not for the rest of the tribe caring for him. Another skeleton found in a cave in Iraq tells the story of a remarkably old (for a Neanderthal) man who suffered from multiple trauma-related deformities, hearing loss and partial blindness, and yet he lived years after being healed by his community even though he couldn’t possibly have participated in hunting or gathering. 

This is how humanity acts at its most primitive. With empathy.

That isn’t to say that we aren’t capable of cruelty. I’m not so naive. Pressure makes anything snap. But it’s not natural. It’s not instinctive.

But then, if I’m right and we’re supposedly creatures who want to care for each other, why is the world the trash fire that it is today? If nature states that we be empathic, how do I explain our current state? Well, that’s where nurture comes in.

Nurture is a pretty word. It makes you think of sweet things like nurseries and parenthood and childhood. But all it really means is the fostering and development of something. Training, basically. And just like you can train a dog to heel and override its wild nature, you can do the same to people.

The reason why there’s so much cruelty and despair in recent history, I think, is because the social structures we have been existing in go directly AGAINST our nature. War didn’t even exist until agricultural settlements. It’s not innate. But capitalism and past social systems have rewritten our understanding of what survival is: they have nurtured us into believing that we are each other’s enemies instead of the reason we’re alive at all. And it feels wrong. Everything feels wrong because of it. 

Humans are not meant to live in cities of millions dictated by only a handful of corrupted men in a system designated to keep someone at the bottom at all times. We are not meant to put self-destructive social constructs above lives. Greed, hatred and flawed rules are taught, trained into us, from the moment we’re born, in such a thoughtless way that we mistake it for nature. We’re nurtured into fearing for our survival and told that empathy will lead to our own individual defeat, and we’re nurtured into putting individualism above community.

I’m not going to delve into what I think should be done about it, because that’s not the point of this text, but I do believe it bears keeping in mind things like Dunbar’s number, primitive communities, and how much of what we believe to be self-evident is actually taught.

And when I get really pessimistic about the future and how twisted up we’ve become, I think about strangers singing with one voice in subways, I think about poets like Mary Oliver and Danusha Laméris, I think about the overflowing love of reunions at the Arrivals doors of any given airport in the world. All of it is nature—our nature—peeking through the cracks, stubbornly making its way through lifeless concrete and empty nuclear buildings like weeds or ivy, wrapping themselves around ancient bones, healed bones, bones of primitive ancestors who could not yet speak but still knew better than anyone how to say: I love you. Let me take care of you.