THE NATURE OF THE HUMAN BEING
Is human nature good or evil? That question worries the minds of many scientists and ordinary people around the world for many centuries. It is a complicated question, because the answer is not univocal. Throughout the evolution of humanity, many aspects of its nature were discovered. Various basic parts of the character define the way of interaction between humans.
In addition, all of those aspects reveal both the good and the evil sides of our nature. The self-preservation instinct is the founding quality of humans. That is the main characteristic that made us the dominant biological species on the planet and generates all of the other personal qualities and needs. Homo-erectus were the animals that moved on the two legs. They were cruel hunters, who killed everything for their own good. Then, they came to the point, where the need to cooperate and to communicate made them to unite in tribes, families and communities.
Since then, the humans started to feel responsibility, affection and even love. They became more social and begun to slowly evolve into the Homo sapiens.The need to survive made its mark on the human beings. The natural selfishness resulted in several positive and negative personal qualities that belong to every man and woman on the earth. On the one hand, we have greed, pride and cunning. However, there also are dedication, devotion, sociality and tenderness.
There are more than seven billion people living around the globe right now, and there is no certain answer about their nature, which would fit well to every person in the world. The good and the evil are the integral parts of the humanity, but the real thing is that some people reveal those two aspects in a different way and in various proportions.“Our history is full of terrifying examples of cruelty and hatred. Almost every decade is marked by a major war or a local conflict, every day thousands of people are murdered, raped, tortured or starved”. (Glover, 3) Numerous countries are experiencing serious social inequality, human trafficking, drug distribution and slave labor. Global terrorism is also a relevant issue that is threatening people everywhere.
All of those terrible things are the display of our evil side. Moreover, all of them are interconnected and generate each other. (Stevenson, Haberman and Wright, 28)While answering the question about the human nature, it is important to remember that people are born. “A newborn child is innocent, because it is not able to do something considerable”. (Ehrlich, 53) We come to the world with pure minds and souls. So, does that mean that human nature is originally good? It may be so, but it is important to remember that child is a reflection of its parents and it inherits most part of their physical and mental features. It means that some qualities that are inherent for the parents can be embedded in child’s DNA. Of course, that is a subject of the discussion by itself, but there are millions of examples …
