Human nature

All these quotation marks remind me of Dr. Evil's “tractor beam”.

First of all, a dandelion sprouting up on your lawn or your pet cat chasing birds in the yard do not fall in the scope of morality. That's just silly people. Jesus says: Get that shit outta here. Morality is exclusively a human issue. That said, I believe people are born altruistic. We have a natural tendency for moral goodness. It's easy to recognize how society benefits with acts of kindness and generosity. We know the value of promise keeping. For example, if no one had the intention of keeping their promise then no one would bother believing them and this would be self defeating. Goodness is something not taught by our parents but instead is something passed on through evolution. Parents teach survival methods, ie., fire will consume your hand if you hold it in the flames. Parents also teach their children to understand right from wrong but this is different from morality and moral goodness. Children are capable of moral goodness however they lack the higher function of reason and tend to make mistakes because they are not able see the outcome of their actions.

When answering why evil exits or why people do bad things, I feel at least part of the problem lies in the political spectrum of western democracy. Democracy leads society to become selfish. It's emphasis is on the individual. Your rights. Your freedoms. Materialism compounds the problem. We've been programmed with this selfish desire for material goods and live isolated lives. This individualism inevitably leads to conflict because it undermines the shared moral framework that holds society together.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I only said democracy was part of the reason which can explain the moral decay of society. I could easily add religion to the fray. How many people have been murdered in the name of God? How many free thinking women were burned during the witch hunt? Evil has been around since the beginning, but then again democracy didn't just pop up last week either. And I still stand quite firm in my belief that democracy contains the seed of it's own destruction because as I said it puts the individual above society. People ultimately see their well being as more important than that of society's which places us in a primeval survival "my life or theirs" state of mind.

Materialism is of course especially dangerous and America was well quick in exploiting its seductive powers. "Lets control the masses by making them believe they need shit they don't really need". This had a very negative side affect to those who were suddenly driven by materialism but didn't have the means of acquiring the material good in question. A current example of the negative impacts of materialism would be the poor sods standing in line on PS3 launch day only to have some crazy fucker point a pistol in their face demanding their “PS3 money”.

There's probably a million and one theories which try to explain why that happened. Maybe my democracy and materialism theory don't work well in that specific case, however, I do believe they help explain the roots of why people go astray and do evil. Religion, of course, is another reason.

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There's certainly no easy answer to this. Philosophers have been debating about morality and goodness since Aristotle. The most important question to ask is, does good even exist? Can you find goodness in the external world or is "good" simply a word that happens to have a meaning attached to it? If we can discover absolute moral truths then at least we have a tool to measure the actions of humans. Otherwise how can anyone truly decide what is to be considered good? Immanuel Kant goes further and says even a virtuous man can perform bad deeds in the absence of a good "will". Morality then comes from a sense of duty. Kant's ethical theory is the one I follow in my private life.

Meth, after thinking about it maybe I should narrow the term democracy down a bit and instead call it the "failed liberal dream". I think that's how Leo Strauss would have referred to it.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.