Human Nature

[Belacqua]

There's maniacs, people who just don't agree with you and annoying people everywhere but surely you established that earlier on in life, you said you're old i don't know how old. I'm 40 and I'm pretty jaded.

I'm 69.  While I have known about the problems with human nature for most of my adult life, until just a few years ago I still believed such problems could be transcended.  Now I no longer believe that.  I think at best we can only minimize our human nature, and it now seems that will not be enough to deal with climate change, Trump, or any of a range of pressing problems.  After all, our human nature led to these problems.

However, as I mentioned I am unsure about this uncomfortable conclusion.  It seems from what I have read that most atheists are also rather despairing.

Yeah, I also think that things stay about equally horrible. At a local level things may get a little better or a little worse, but overall the amount of evil stays about the same. 

Like we can be proud of ourselves that America finished up its genocide on the native Americans. Maybe we think we know better now and wouldn't do it again. But now our taxes are paying for a different genocide, and this one's particularly grisly and unforgivable. And bipartisan, it's not just Trump. 

And we don't even talk about what's happening in the Sahel region. Like the unimaginable horror there isn't even on our radar. 

More locally (and perhaps superficially) I do think some things have gotten worse. There's been a polarization of views, so that we don't have respectful discussions anymore. Each side sees the other as not only incorrect but undeserving of basic courtesy. 

And I don't think this is Trump's doing. In fact I think it's the opposite -- I think that a large part of Trump's popularity comes from the fact that he talks the way the rest of us do. He's "direct" and "tells it like it is." He doesn't bother with courtesy, he just says what he thinks. And even anti-Trump people see those things as good. Vulgarity is seen as a sign of sincerity. If we disagree, we get nasty. Nastiness is encouraged, as long as the target is someone who falls outside of our locally approved ideology. 

So I don't think human nature changes, but I do think that societal changes can cause it to manifest differently. When your culture encourages people to hate, more people will hate. And more people will say more hateful things. 

Unfortunately in my experience the atheists are no better than the Christians in this respect. At least on the Internet, I have encountered some wildly hate-filled atheists. (Granted, life on line may not be representative. In my neighborhood nearly everyone is nominally Pure Land Buddhist, and practically speaking atheist, and we all get along really well.)