I couldn't really think of any other word to describe what I mean. What I'm asking is, do you guys think there will ever be a time when people will stop having hurtful and overly selfish ideas? I know things aren't black and white but things like greed, torture, things that are destructive to ourseleves and the world at large. Is it a survival mechanism to be greedy? I used to be sort of violent until I realized that it was just me being afraid of one thing or another. This might be me just being naive, but is there a way to live without inflicting pain on eacother or is it a necessity?

No to the OP as this current human species but I do envisage a time such that if we select for empathy then we could deselect evil but by that time we will have ceased to be homo sapiens sapiens

Why would we not be the same anymore? There are people who select empathy.

Nope. I would wager even going so far as to say "Never".

Deep down we're still animals, tribal animals at that. There will always be people at all levels of society who look for the weak, watch for opportunities to prey on anyone who they see as lesser beings, and who see nothing wrong with breaking whatever law is in place on whatever subject. They also, more importantly, don't see that they have done anything wrong.

Without human eugenics programs (You're a Nazi! A NAZI!! ) there would be no way to weed out these people. It isn't just lower socioeconomic groups that are the easy target either...plenty of well-educated people from good backgrounds get a little piss into them and think it's a good idea to go into a graveyard and kick over a few headstones when walking home from the pub, or try and rob a service station, or attack that girl who dared to knock back thier drunken advances...it happens quite regularly.

No idea how you could fix it...but I suspect it will always be with us...

But it's not just genetics that makes people this way it's usually the enironment that turns these things "on" so to speak.

Well, Inka, Steven Pinker seems to think that in the grand scale of things humanity has never been so peaceful and non-violent. I haven't read his book yet but his argument seems pretty compelling.



Check out his presentation here:



Of course you have to note that he says in the opening of his talk that the trend of decline in violence does not mean that eventually there will be no violence or that the trend is even garanteed to continue. Not to mention the fact that there are lots of other kinds of evils beyond physical violence.

None the less it is really interesting to hear something as counter-intuitive as this. I've had so many people talk of the 20th century as being the century of genocide, I've heard Christians hang their entire theology of Christ's return on the notion that the state of the world is the worst it has ever been and that things are going to get much worse. It's interesting to note that at least in the scheme of violence and war along with obvious things like poverty and disease they couldn't be further from the truth.

The science-fiction author A E van Vogt posited a world which tries to bring this about, in his 'World of Null-A' series. Based on the theory of General Semantics as developed by Alfred Korzybski, van Vogt suggests that by changing patterns of thought then you can eventually change patterns of behaviour. But for this to happen it must be a world-wide cultural change.

Now as to whether this can happen in reality is of course another matter. Though a lot of religious people believe this will happen when we all agree in the word of 'God', unfortunately none of them can agree on just which word of God. In van Vogt's world Null-A refers to the use of non-Aristotelian logic and thought patterns, in some ways these are the opposite of religious thought patterns.

Unless we heavily apply eugenics at large this won't happen.
Reduction on things considered "evil": yes. You can only do so much with education and socialization.

What's Eugenics got to do with it?

Wiðercora wrote:What's Eugenics got to do with it?

"Fixing" genes to get rid of undesirable traits?

To give one example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2242349/

inkaStepa wrote:I couldn't really think of any other word to describe what I mean. What I'm asking is, do you guys think there will ever be a time when people will stop having hurtful and overly selfish ideas? I know things aren't black and white but things like greed, torture, things that are destructive to ourseleves and the world at large. Is it a survival mechanism to be greedy? I used to be sort of violent until I realized that it was just me being afraid of one thing or another. This might be me just being naive, but is there a way to live without inflicting pain on eacother or is it a necessity?

As you said yourself, things aren't black and white. People are sometimes good, and sometimes bad. We shouldn't dwell too much on one aspect without reflecting some on the other.

I've done some bad things in my life. One time, as a teenager, I did something that to this day I still feel bad about. I was hanging out with some friends, one of whom was a blind kid. We were sitting around playing Risk or something. I had no money and we were talking about getting food from a fast food place. Well, I "selflessly" volunteered to go buy food for people; I bought myself some stuff using the blind kid's money, hoping he wouldn't realize I didn't give him enough change back. I felt incredibly guilty about it later; what kind of evil lying bastard would do that to a blind kid? I think he realized I cheated him but didn't say anything. Does he remember this to this day, and did it make him a more pessimistic person? Does he hate people now? Did I fuck this kid up for life?

Of course, I'm not the only one who has done something bad like that, I try to tell myself. Am I an inherently bad person because I did this pretty bad thing once as a kid? No, I'm not a saint, and neither is anyone else, but I don't think I'm a bad person. We are all pretty confused about life, some more than others. Especially when we're young. We have to make mistakes like that in life in order to learn to be a better person.

Anyone who reads the news can be forgiven these days for becoming pessimistic about the human race, when all we seem to read about is terrorism, violence, wars, greed, how we're polluting the environment. Yeah, the human race has massive problems and often it seems like we're incapable of doing anything about them. Yet, we can look at human history and see we've always had massive problems. There is a lot of ignorance, cruelty and brutality going on now, but in many ways it was even worse in the past. I think we are very slowly improving. Maybe we're still very young as a species, still very confused but growing wiser. The mistakes we make are necessary because we didn't evolve already all-knowing and have to learn from our mistakes.

Bribase wrote:Well, Inka, Steven Pinker seems to think that in the grand scale of things humanity has never been so peaceful and non-violent. I haven't read his book yet but his argument seems pretty compelling.

Yeah, that is kind of my point here, I guess.

In nature, a defective or what we would call "disturbed" animal would be shunned by the group and probably driven out of the herd.
Humans do thier utmost to keep those who show violent, dangerous, disturbed, and antisocial qualities around as much as possible, being "inclusive" in the vain hope that somehow they will "change thier ways". Unfortunately a lot of these type of people see this as weakness..."turning the other cheek" is just an opportunity to slap that cheek as well.

The business of who I am and whether I'm good or bad, or achieving or not, all that's learned along the way and without money, a great majority of the crimes that are committed today would never occur. Virtually all forms of crimes are a consequence of the monetary system.

No,but we can improve much

Well, Inka, Steven Pinker seems to think that in the grand scale of things humanity has never been so peaceful and non-violent. I haven't read his book yet but his argument seems pretty compelling

Of course it depends on how you define violence. So far in most interviews Dr Pinker seems to think violence simply means physical violence, and discounts instituitional violence and the implied threat of physical coercion that exists in all states. Nor does he seem to think poverty and cuts to every aspect of social existence are of importance in discussions of violence.

Human relationships and society clearly have improved massively over the millenia. However, the actual drives and emotional basis for doing these hurtful things to others are just as much what makes as human as our charity, empathy, and love, so I don't think we will ever be free of them. These selfish impulses also go hand in hand with other beneficial qualities of humanity, such as drive to succeed, competition, and creativity. Were we to be able to excise 'selfish' impulses, I think the net result might be worse than the current situation. It's really only in the long-term that we can hope to see a change, as our knowledge grows, societies and politics become more inclusive, and cultural motifs are developed that turn our aggressive passions outwards towards more noble enterprises.

No.
There will never be a time when humans will stop being "evil".

Except for extinction----sooooo, eventually yes.

Evolution is basically an algorithm looking for local optima. trubble76 explains this pretty well, but to further elucidate: the likelihood for an individual to succeed in spreading his genes increases if he's just enough willing to cut the corners, without cutting too many - cutting too many corners will make people object, (of course, this is sensitive to circumstances - someone who is genetically predisposed to know what corners he can cut in any given situation will be more successful, someone who lacks that skill will more often be exposed for being a terrible person).

Cutting corners that way - taking something that isn't yours, backstabbing, etc, - does give benefits in some ways, benefits that may attract mating partners (to a certain extent, if we don't overdo it). Etc.

Racism, similarly, may very well in part be based in evolutionary convergence to some kind of local optimum - if you favour your tribe, the likelihood for genes similar to yours to survive is improved. So it's v. likely evolution has converged on this - probably somewhat suboptimal solution - tho' it's likely it has a greater likelihood of giving some kind of benefits as far as survival and reproduction goes.

Things like how easy we start raging, how easy we get depressed, etc, probably varies individually, and making it uniform is not very desireable - it would reduce a vector for (slight) adaptability of behaviours. Obviously, those who more easily start raging than others will be seen as somewhat evil in some sense just becasue they're more likely to react that way. Of course, if the tresholds for when one starts raging is very high, it could even happen that lots of individuals never reach it.

Finally, some behaviours might very well stem from unforeseeable 'bugs' in the settings that evolution has picked for us.