Raise your hand if you've ever debated the essential nature of humanity with another person.
The conversation often polarizes; "we're all self-serving pricks" declares one, "no one's perfect, but at our core, we're good" returns another. In everyday life outside of esoteric circles, it's easy to get reductive about things that are more nuanced than we give them credit for. In fairness, the intelligentsia is also guilty of making simple matters complex beyond practical application.
But in my staggering twenty-three years of life, it seems reductive to think that any individual could be reduced to an essential nature. Philosophers would no doubt chuckle at the baseness of that sentence, but emotionally and culturally I think this idea isn't very intuitive.
To draw an example from current affairs, think of race relations in the U.S. The following is anecdotal, but I'd be surprised if anything but a statistical minority of people disagree with my analysis based on lived experiences. Right now, there is another wave of black liberation movement in the United States following the justifiable frustration in communities of colour over violence and discrimination they've faced in civil life. Basically, black people continue to be killed by police officers in situations that don't call for any sort of force. Unarmed black people getting shot. It's initially absurd that police in the US are militarised in the way they are, but it's worse that so much violence between police and civilians occurs in communities of color.
There has been varied rhetoric in this movement. An overwhelming number of voices are calling for a more peaceful civil policing, policies to stop the school-to-prison pipeline, and a general awakening in the racial memory and consciousness of everyday citizens. There are really brave people out there trying to bridge the gap between the lived experiences of black and latinx folks and white folks. But imagine you're black in the US right now. Walking down the street or driving in your car, will your heart not skip a beat when you see a police car? Would you not be unsure of the intentions of anyone wearing a uniform?
We all have these ideas about groups of people that our own people have labeled as other. I didn't grow up in an insular white community, but even still I inherited a fear of black men wearing street clothes in black cars listening to rap music. I saw dudes who looked like that on the street and labeled them thugs. I assumed they did not have good intentions.
What does this mean? Arguably, the fear of black people is based in history and evidence and is totally justified. I think my fear of black people is the opposite side of that same coin.
We learn to categorize people and assign intentions to them for a variety of reasons, but in my experience those reasons are almost always rooted in fear. Whether that fear is based in reality or not is the topic of another discussion, but my point in this post is this: this same dynamic can be generalised to how individuals perceive people in general. In the same way that we can be prone to mistakenly classifying entire groups of people as essentially identical, this can be extended to how we perceive humanity as a whole. But at the aggregate level, it's my position that this is more a reflection of how we perceive ourselves than it is based on lived experiences.
I spent a lot of time assuming that most people usually were trying to do the best for everyone around them. I wanted to be a good person, so I tried to live like one and in doing so, assumed others were as well. On the flip side, I've known people who were bitter and guarded with nasty views of humanity. Some of them may have a dramatic facade, but most of them I know are actually pretty shitty people as well. Manipulative, lazy, and broken people.
The truth is, most of us are somewhere in the middle. Like a normally distributed statistical curve, so many of us hover around center.
People aren't inherently good or bad. I think we're all inherently neutral. And may the universe have it that we all die that way as well.
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