Are we born Bad?
Hi there, I recently thought about this thing where I tried to figure out if people are born bad or good. Of course, I had my own thoughts about it, but I wanted to know what other “scholars” and philosophers thought about it. It wasn’t shocking to find out there are people out there who had the same thoughts as me, even better I got to learn new things that made sense. These were my thoughts before I did my research, my thing was people are born and they aren’t either good or bad but the environment they’re introduced to makes them who they are, and that makes sense right? Yes, it does but it’s deeper than that when science is involved. We are animals, studies conducted on other animals in nature concluded that when animals are born their initial instinct is survival and we too are animals so it wasn’t far-fetched to consider that when we are born our first instinct is survival. When we are born, we can’t communicate verbally by words, we cry when we need help, when we get scared later in life we tend to scream. We scream for attention, when we are young our screams and cries tell the people that take care of us that we need something, that’s the only way to get their attention. When we feel we’re in danger we scream and sometimes even cry to get the attention of someone who might be nearby to come to our rescue.
My thoughts now are, we are born to survive then we adjust to the environment we are in. Survival, is it a bad or a good thing, well, it’s neutral in my opinion because it depends on what the surviving factor in question entails, is it a survival for the fittest situation or is it survival for protection? In both scenarios, your moral ethics are challenged, and you must deal with the situation accordingly to avoid living in guilt for the rest of your life. What I came to learn for the short time I’ve been living in this world is, when you avoid your fears and not deal with them, they tend to affect you later in life. They affect the people you love more than you’d imagine, at first it isn’t a big deal because you can handle the fear or you think you’re handling it when you’re avoiding it, fair enough. The realization comes later in life when that fear is the only thing between you and your goals, either it is career-wise, relationship-wise, or whatever your endeavors might be. That’s when it hits you, the fear you thought you had under control comes face to face with you, and this time it’s even bigger than you remember it being because now there’s a lot at stake, if only you had practiced how to get over it when you had nothing to lose. That’s not fair right? Because you didn’t think it was important at all, how could you have known you were supposed to conquer that particular fear, it didn’t seem important, and if you had nobody to guide you when you were younger it’s even worse because nobody told you that fear had to be dealt with, I guess now you have to live with the fact, that’s how the cookie crumbles.
Trying so hard to be good. If you’re living your life trying so hard to be good does it then mean you’re a bad person, to begin with? Or does it mean you’re trying to elevate your way of living? These are questions I ask myself from time to time. Is it okay to even try, is it worth it? and the most important query of them all, why even try to be good? I think we should all try to be good human beings to others, it might seem simple but it’s complicated, we tend to teach our children the right things but fail to practice the same things we teach them. We tell our children, don’t lie, and then we proceed to tell our spouses everything is okay when it’s clearly not. We tell our children don’t manipulate people, and then we proceed to turn people against others for our gain. We tell our children to be nice to others and then proceed to talk about other people behind their backs. We tell our children to be thankful if someone does something good for them and apologize when they make a mistake, then we proceed to ignore the little things people do for us and we also walk away when we step on someone’s shoes. It’s like the more experience we have in life the more we become hypocrites. The fastest and easier way to be a good person, at least for me was having empathy, EMPATHY really helps, practice putting yourself in their shoes.
