Understanding Ourselves
Are Humans Innately Selfish?
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
This selection survives only as a fragment: Doug’s opening survey, drawn from Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, of ‘veneer theory’ — the idea that human decency is only skin deep. What followed is unknown; no complete post or additional scan pages have been found. We preserve the surviving text here, clearly identified as incomplete, rather than silently omit one of Kisoon’s selections.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopetul History by Rutger Bregman. "The doctrine that humans are innately selfish has a hallowed tradition in the Hunan canon. Great thinkers like Thucydides, Augustine, Machiaveli, Hobbes, Luther, Calvin, Burke, Benthan, Nietzsche, Freud, and America's Founding Fathers each had their Own version of the veneer theory of civilization. They all assumed we live on Planet B. This cynicalview was already circulating among the ancient Greeks. We read it in the writings of one of the first historians, Thucydides, when he describes a civil war that broke out on the Greek island of Corcyra in 427 BCE. With the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, he wrote, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colors.' That is to say, people behaved like beasts,
A negative outlook also pervaded Christianity in its early days. The Church Father Augustine (354-430) helped popularize the idea that humans are born sinful. 'No one is free from sin,' he wrote, 'not even an infant whose span of earthly life is but a single day.'
This concept of original sin remained popular through the Reformation, when Protestants broke with the Roman Catholic Church. According to theologian and refomer John Calvin, 'our nature is not only destitute and and empty of good, but so fertile and fruitful of every evil that it cannot be idle.' This belief was encoded in key Protestants texts like the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), which informs us that humans are totally unable to do any good and are inclined to do all evil." Weirdiy, not only Christianity, but also the Enlightenment, which placed reason over faith, is rooted in a grim view of human nature. Orthodox faithful were convinced our kind is essentialy depraved and the best we can do is apply a thin gloss of piety. Enlightenment philosophers also thought we were depraved, but described a coating of reason to cover the rot. When it comes to notions about human nature, the continuity throughout Western thought is striking. 'For this can be said of men in general: that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites,' summed up the founder of political science, Nicolo Machiavelli. "Allmen would be tyrants if they could,' agreed John Adams.