There’s a vast difference between Human Nature and the human condition.
For most people, the human condition refers to people's seemingly consistent persistence in making poor lifestyle choices as individuals and as a collective. They refer to inevitable phenomena such as people’s proclivity to make mistakes or irrational choices that don’t conform to a consensus as examples of humans behaving in an expectedly suboptimal way.
“It’s just the human condition” is what you’re likely to hear from someone when told that nations rise and fall or that people can become addicted to narcotics. In other words, the human condition is the notion that humans are ultimately meant to fail, given their extensive flaws and shortcomings.
However, this is not Human Nature.
Human Nature, far from being flawed, is the notion that humans have innate characteristics, proclivities, preferences, and priorities that we can discover instead of determining through conditioning. Human Nature is anything that is inherent within individuals without the need for further teaching, training, or conditioning.
This would include an intuitive understanding of right and wrong (morality), fairness, harm, empathy, logic, thoughts, emotions and sovereignty. Even a toddler understands the difference between right and wrong, what is inherently fair, what is actually harmful and who deserves empathy/sympathy. Without the need for teaching, even toddlers understand that physical violence is traumatic and undesirable.
It seems that children are born with Human Nature intact, but during their pathway to adulthood, they become conditioned into having a completely different state of mind, including beliefs they would never accept as children.
Examples here would include the legitimacy of killing animals because it’s fun or nutritional (hunting), circumcision, abortion, national borders, coercion and the certainty that authority is always right. Typically, children are frightened by such concepts because they intuitively know that sovereignty is being violated in each case.
However, this is not Human Nature.
Human Nature, far from being flawed, is the notion that humans have innate characteristics, proclivities, preferences, and priorities that we can discover instead of determining through conditioning. Human Nature is anything that is inherent within individuals without the need for further teaching, training, or conditioning.
This would include an intuitive understanding of right and wrong (morality), fairness, harm, empathy, logic, thoughts, emotions and sovereignty. Even a toddler understands the difference between right and wrong, what is inherently fair, what is actually harmful and who deserves empathy/sympathy. Without the need for teaching, even toddlers understand that physical violence is traumatic and undesirable.
It seems that children are born with Human Nature intact, but during their pathway to adulthood, they become conditioned into having a completely different state of mind, including beliefs they would never accept as children.
Examples here would include the legitimacy of killing animals because it’s fun or nutritional (hunting), circumcision, abortion, national borders, coercion and the certainty that authority is always right. Typically, children are frightened by such concepts because they intuitively know that sovereignty is being violated in each case.
Today, most adults accept things they would have been horrified by as children. The reason for this could be that Human Nature is built on empathy, free will, choice, and individuality. By the time they’ve reached adulthood, people believe it’s entirely legitimate to unempathetically trample on people’s individuality and free will because it suits a broader narrative, such as the greater good or an improvement to their personal well-being.
Government Threeway
According to modern social norms, being a child means doing what their parents, teachers and mentors tell them. Childhood becomes the monotonous learning of all the do’s and don’ts of society without ever asking why.
The broader idea is that children cannot retain their sovereignty; therefore, their parents take on the responsibility of deciding for their children on their behalf until they’re adults. At this point, sovereignty, including responsibility for the hundreds of day-to-day executive decisions they must make, moves over to the child (thereby becoming an adult).
Parents control what their children eat and when, what they do and for how long, where they go, who they associate with, what they practice, and what they avoid. The list could go on and on.
However, upon reaching adulthood, instead of becoming independent adults, people remain dependent on a new parent. Upon becoming an adult, a new entity comes into the fray to take on the role of adult parenting, including stipulating what adults can do, where they can go, and with whom. The entity I’m referring to is government.
Adults have government, as children have parents: day-to-day oversight of their thoughts, emotions, and actions with the justification that it instils order and prevents chaos. Children are told they must develop the skills required to become independent adults, but in actuality, they are coerced to follow arbitrary rules as they coast to adulthood. At the end of their journey, they end up equally dependent as the children they were.
The idea of infantilised adults who refuse to take personal responsibility for their actions, who become emotional upon not obtaining their desires and who prefer to consider their intentions as being more important than their outcomes -- are commonly seen among adults despite these behaviours being associated with immaturity.
It’s a rather sobering thought to realise that today, we live in a world where immature mental states are the norm. When an adult decides to become genuinely independent and remove their reliance on parenting (government), they are immediately ostracised, questioned, and reprimanded. In the same way, children are ostracised, questioned, and reprimanded when they disobey their parents/teachers.
Ultimately, most adults today are imbued with a deep sense of collectivism (human conditioning), preventing them from rediscovering the individuality they enjoyed as children (Human Nature).
Written by George Tchetvertakov
