The Lowest Animal

There are a ton of things I would want to change about human nature. I believe in original sin, although not really in the conventional sense. I believe people are born with the capacity to do both good and evil, but their bodies tend toward the selfish. I think that people are innately bent towards doing wrong because doing wrong tends to be fun or satisfying in the short run.

I think that it takes a lot of strength to move against one's natural human inclinations. I think that the biggest stumbling block for this is human pride, and I think that if I could choose, human pride would be the part of human nature that I would change.

Pride is said to be the root of all evil. I think this is mostly true. I think when we are selfish, we pridefully believe we are more important than others. When we are cruel, we pridefully believe that we can get away with it, or it was justified because of our circumstances. When we exalt ourselves above others, we do so because we feel the need to pridefully give ourselves meaning and purpose that makes us better than other people. Part of human nature is the need to have purpose and to be special. I think this manifests itself in our pride, and it causes us to fall short of our moral goals.

If we could eliminate pride, we would not worry about what others think about us when we act. We would not be cruel in order to feel powerful; we wouldn't need the power. And I think that reaching our idealistic goals would be so much easier, because the competition for fame and glory would be swallowed, and the competition for success and reform would be so much more fruitful.