People are inherently good?

I take a very clear position on our natural state- humans are inherently good. We are born oriented toward connection, care and meaning. This is a 180 from the narrative that the popular christian narrative seems to perpetuate about man being born evil. It is so very obvious that evil doesn't rise from a rotten center but from the systems that shape how we survive, belong and make sense of the world.

I mean, watch a child grow up. You would see curiousity, empathy and an impulse to be-among as they begin to calculate their steps. Then life starts to train them into how they could behave. We start to add the reward-follows-compliance and punishment-follows-deviation rules. Suddenly, the child starts to see that scarcity sharpens fear. Over time, their behavior bends and their minds begin to narrow when it comes to the model of behavior. So we over time look at the activities that evolve from our learnings and blame the entire baby and forget the bath water.

The bath water is truly systems

Systems not humans

Systems matter so much because they decide what gets amplified in behavior. A violent system by itself is what rewards domination, a culture that's built on fear rewards silence. People move inside these structures like water in a riverbed. But see it again, the water didnt' choose the shape so why do we blame the water for the shape? It is in fact the channel that influenced the shape of the riverbed.

This is why individual goodness still shines through history's dark moments. I was reflecting again on the life of Anne Frank. She lived under a system that was designed to really break her. It was a system that regulated movement, speech, food etc and yet her position was in faith in people despite her surroundings showing the contrary. Now, she did not try to overthrow any oppressors. Instead she moved goodness forward by refusing to let systems define the limits of her humanity.

We see this pattern everywere, once we can truly pay attention. People behave better in systems that are built on trust. They cooperate more when dignity feels nonnegotiable. They tell the truth when there is safety around. All that to say when the structures change behavior also changes.

So when we judge ourselves or others, we need to look upstream. We need to see what incentives are at work. We need to ask what fear runs the show or who benefits from the current design. Even in that is another system.

The chicken or the egg?

So, at this point you may argue, "well the system is messed up and was designed by evil people". Well, maybe we can accomodate the idea that even the deliberate design of said evil system was a reaction to another system that was broken? So which came first people or systems? Systems, it is- i argue. Into a system was the man born. Let's even look at a simple system like the solar system. The fact that man is born into the system adds adds to his ability to sleep at night and roam in the day.

All in all, we could attempt to look at the individual, group or people who carry the mark of cruelty with a little love, practice observance of what structures or systems created the behavior we don't like.

I would say that when we see systems, we wrestle less against the human.