Not long ago, I got into a political argument with a friend. It was terribly frustrating, as these things generally are, and led me to wonder about how people with seemingly similar values can see things so differently, and about the polarizing, stark division that’s become so rampant, that generally gets labelled left vs. right. It hinges, I believe, on different answers to the question: What is human nature? Are humans basically good or bad? Are we basically trustworthy, cooperative, even altruistic, social beings who want to do good, but sometimes make bad decisions for all sorts of reasons? Or basically selfish creatures whose good behavior demands inner and outer discipline?
We humans have many traits, tendencies, and motivations that are often conflicting. We have a need for love, drama, status, and meaning. We have both self-interest and mirror neurons. But far, far more than any other species, what humans are is malleable. We learn culture like we learn language, developing character as fluently as we master our native accents. So what humans are like depends primarily on the culture we’re raised in, both our immediate family and our society, the invisible atmosphere of what is respected, what is penalized, what is never even acknowledged.
On a macro level, our political and economic systems (drawing on the US and Israel, where I have personal experience, and inviting you to consider to what extent it applies to you) largely reward psychopathy. Self-interest is valorized. Our extractive economies are based on metrics of capital and production, as if there are no other possibilities. We assume and incentivize our least harmonious traits – competition, greed, entitlement, arrogance – while disparaging and de-incentivizing our best – altruism, generosity, solidarity, empathy. So the quality of our prominent politicians and business leaders is no surprise.
In these systems, actions bolstering the common good require individual initiative. It’s easy to see this with ecological behavior – buying something new is more accessible than fixing something, driving a car is faster than public transportation, putting trash out for collection takes much less time and effort than composting, recycling, or repairing. Unhealthy habits – both physical and mental – are promoted for profit, while there are more and more barriers to healthy behaviors. We put orders of magnitude more effort and resources into war than into peace, into consumption than into consciousness, into affluence than into well-being. Our society is rich with innovation and technology, but those can be brought to bear on any end, and ours largely do not serve the well being of humanity or the planet.
I could go on, but once you start seeing it, it’s easy to find. Again and again, destructive behaviors are the default, and they are funded. This isn’t necessity; it’s design. It’s ontology hardened into policy, reinforcing the worldview that spawned it. It’s privatizing good behavior and subsidizing depravity. But design, like human nature, is malleable. Culture, like human nature but on a larger scale, is malleable. So how do we start to mold it toward where we want to go?
First, before we can change it, we need to see it. Then can we call it out so others see it too. For example, when people say that competition and force are the only realistic ways to move things in this world, be able to list examples where cooperation is what enables thriving while competition impedes it, so it’s clear that force is more the exception than the rule. When people say there’s no free lunch, remind them that we are all only here because of the uncountable free lunches we received, whether from mothers who birthed and nursed us, from plants creating our oxygen, or in myriad other ways. Because only when we see how culture has been designed to shape us, can we change it to foster different values.
When people say we must take personal responsibility, we can say “Yes! And we must also take collective responsibility for creating the conditions to catalyze the results we actually want.” We have to design the cultural and economic conditions that will encourage the kind of human nature we want to see flourish. We can create alliances with people who see different parts of the puzzle than we do. We can work for defaults that are benign and beneficial. We can learn to hear wisdom in the ways of other humans and other than humans. We can listen with understanding for what makes people who they are. We can tolerate being in the mess of it, admitting mistakes as we feel our way toward a society that embodies better values than what we have, because mistakes are a sign of learning, not weakness. As we call out predatory power, as we take on our own power to see through what we’ve been told and work together to change, we won’t just be starting to shift – we’ll already be in the midst of it.