Soceity and Human Nature
 

This thread is of more of a social nature than a political one. Its purpose is to discuss your views on humanity and soceity:

To start the discussion, I'll propose a theory I have on human nature: this is basically a thesis I constructed to be used in a paper I wrote on the symbollism in William Golding's The Lord of the Flies. I have cut out all instances relating to actual events in the book so as to insure that I don't disclude those who haven't read it. My argument supports one of the main reaccuring themes about human nature that appears throughtout the piece. Note that the essay this thesis is written for is not in any specific template, so the thesis doesn't have to be in a specified form either. Also note that, since the essay the thesis is meant for was a minimum of ten pages long, the thesis itself is also invariably quite lengthy, and might be hard to understand out of context. However, no matter how complex it is, you people are smart and should be able to understand it, and also consider that I chose this excerpt to start the thread for the purpose of discussion, and hopefully it will provide the grounds for/give rise to good ideas/oppinions. I'll post my argument and then leave the thread open to discussion (a.k.a disagreeing with me;)):
I hope that wasn't too condiluded. Go ahead and feel free to express your thoughts/oppinions on the matter.

I think society is going downhill faster than I would have liked. Everything is evil now, the world is run by big companies that cut out individualism and just lok for the next dollar. It really upsets me that society doesn't care about all the changes that are being made, movies have been made, like minority report and enemy of the state and such, where people watch and go wow imagine a world where that stuff happens, ads that target individuals, tracking 24 hours a day. I heard that 7 11 uses transponder tech now that lets them tell if you have a text message cell phone when you come in, and if you do they send you a text message with a coupon, and then when you use it they put you in a database to see how you respond to certain ad texchniques.

Some people say stuff like this isn't bad, but I think that eventually there will be no privacy, and no concerns for individuals. haha I feel like one of thos econspiracy theory guys that I always thought were crazy, but the farther we go in technology the more and more I think they are all right, the mans gonna get us all!

Slash on a side note we should build time machines and go back in time about 10 years, hah I think those were the golden years.

I have many beliefs on humans and human nature, and ive forgot half of them, and ive written dow a few.Firstly, People are always asking what the meaning of life is, and I personaly believe that it is to find your meaning, at first we are all meant for something, unlike some pessimests who believe there a useless mass. I go to church and my Teacher in my Youth class asked us "Do you believe God has made a plan for us all right as we are born?" I personaly am not THAT religious and believe that we are not part of the ever fabled "bigger picture" when i explained this to him it trouble him. He did think that our lives were already pre-planned. So a week or two later he took me aside after church and gave me a passage from Romans. I read it and we discussed what it meant and I evewntualt came to this, "We are born with the skills that we can obtain when we grow older, and we can use them how we like, we can use them to help a single person, by giving a homeless person some food, a country, like helping Guatamula become more learned (which my youth group is actualy involved in), or help the world, by keeping peace like the canadian army, or finding cures to fatal diseases. Since that day I've tried to live by that, helping out how I can, though I have an explesive anger so it is hard. Human nature is also to fit in with a certain crowd. Your born, you go to primary school and your all basicaly similar in the way you act. After that, Secondary school, where the charecter building really starts. we get strained out, and we meet new people, and learn new things. Personaly when I was in elementary school I was basicaly average, though I was leaning towards nerdy. in junior high i hung out with the nery group, playing magic at lunch, and starcraft when we got home, the I started making friens with people who were almost the polar opposite, punks and goths. I was introduced to Slipknot and my outlook on life changed entirely. I started listening to music almost always and drifted further and further from my nerdier friends, completely detaching from them when my 2 best of friends in the nerdier side left to vancouver (they were twins). Now I'm in High school, have only a few friends, I'm a loner who hangs out with loners, i walk to and from school listening to Marilyn Manson and go to church on sunday (oddly enough), and I live for Music, and Helping Guatamulan children get a good, free education, I'm Zach Ward, and thats my totaly screwed up views on humanity. By the way could you send mme that thesis, it sounds interesting my email os Zach_Ward@hotmail.com, make the title "the thesis from nuklear power" thanks.

You know, I've never really agreed with Mr. William Golding's idea that people would return back to their basest level when stripped of civilization. It's more likely that they would attempt to recreate it. A group of all children, like in the book, most likely would 'de-evolve' into violent little wretches, but that's just because children already ARE violent little wretches for the most part. It's just removing the punishment for it.

However, punishment for being outside the moral codes of society only keeps some people in line. If all of society was just a bunch of bubbling violent tendencies kept down merely by the fear of repurcussions it would quickly fall apart.

Society works because people are designed to work together to achieve goals more than they're designed to kill, hurt, or maim. People have always been social animals, and would continue to be so regardless of the circumstances... so long as there were other people to be social with.

That's not to say that humans can't be brutal, but merely that human brutality is secondary to a human's capacity to work with others and help others. How many people have killed? How many people have maimed? How many people have commited atrocities? On the other hand, how many people have given love, donated to charity, protected their friends and family, or just brought happiness to others?

It's fun and easy to say that humans are horrible deplorable beings capable of great evil, but people forget that humans are also capable of great good. That's probably because humans commit good every single day to the point that we just take it for granted, but when someone does something TRULY deplorable it catches our interest because it's relatively rare. Not to mention that killing someone is quite a bit more permanent than any act of good.

Human nature is constantly shifting. Every aspect of our culture is in direct opposition to the world that spawned it, from the food we eat to how we think; the only thing that has stayed the same is our heard mentality. I believe this is societal evolution at work, up to a point thinking like a heard is essential for the survival of a civilization. But we have passed beyond that point, and mankind is something to be overcome.

I have been told many times, by scholars of British literature and high-school English teachers alike, that Lord of the Flies is not based on reality. The situations described are not plausible in the real world. Heck, their plane happens to crash onto a small deserted island in the middle of the Pacific after being gunned down by Nazis, and somehow not a single one of the children is hurt: This is definently not realistic. However, to be acurate is not the purpose here: the point is that Golding does not attempt to make it realisitic; he doesn't care how plausible his situation and enviroment are as long as they convey a message about human nature. This may sound really wierd, but his novel contains many parrallels with the Bible; after all, they both attempt to portray messages about humanity through improbable situations and events. When reading either, you can't just look at the plot, you must look at the symbollism and the messages trying to be conveyed by the plot. The only difference is that Christianity's outlook on human nature is mostly positive, but Lord of the Flies tends toward a negative outlook on humanity as a whole. The island and the children are merely vehicles for Golding's views about the nature of mankind. Children don't really act like that, and probably wouldn't even if they were stranded on an island. But it is a good reader's responsibillity to look beyond the text, to the root idea trying to be portrayed by the author, evident through his language and the many random moments that appear to have nothing to do with the overall plot.

But about whether or not their thoughts and actions could have really happened, I agree with you that individuals would not act that way. However, when people are massed together they become dumbed down and start to display chaotic and savage actions and ideas that normally they would never do at all. But when seemingly normal, average people form a crowd or gang or group or whatever, they also gain a group mentallity that is completely spontaneous, revealing, often cruel, and regardless of consequence. When emmersed in a larger crowd, people seem to play off eachothers' adrenaline rush and gain confidence and ambition, becoming willful and disobodient. This group-initiated savagery is what Golding uses as his reason the boys' actions on the island. I agree that humans have a much greater capacity for good than for bad, but throngs of people, what many a fearful leader has called "the masses", gain a level of invisibillity that allows them to do things they could never do when visible to the public eye: Humans don't like being cruel to others, but yet we see horrible acts of cruelty all around us, but if we look closely we see that most of that cruelty is somehow associated with a group of people. People are cruel in groups, because the presence of so many other people hides individuals from responsibillity for their actions, so humans, always trying to break the barriers set in upon them by soceity and authority, do things that they would never dream of doing as individuals, simply because they can. They can help beat some poor kid to death, knowing that they won't be held accountable afterward, and why? Because humans always test the limits of what they can and cannot do, and group mentallities allow for those limits to be widened and broadened far beyond what soceity would normally deem acceptable. Golding pounces on this idea, and displays the majority of the boys' faults as caused by this same group mentallity, taken to the breaking point of savegry and brutality. This book was so popular, and still is, because we see the same types of violence that we read about in the paper each morning being carried out by meer children, the great taboo of mainstream literature, but not going overboard. Its shocking to see such savegry in 9 and 10 year olds, and then to hear about that same kind savegry being carried out by racist, black-hating groups in the Mid-West, or learning of that same type of fanatisism being displayed when we see video footage of an extremist anti-America rally on the ten-o'clock news.

Another One Of My Ideas (Most Of Them Talk About Groups, and Grouping People).

No Matter What You Do You Are In A Group. The Day You Join A Sports Team, Your In A Group With Them, When You First Do Drugs Then Your In The Druggie Group, Even When You Become A Loner Or An Outsider Your In A Group

This may sound a little harsh, but you seem to be more focused on telling us how much of a "loner" you are than actually keeping relevant to the topic at hand; after all, you've mentioned your classification as a loner in every post you've written in this thread, especially in your first post (the last half of it was just you reflecting on your social status). If you keep telling us how much of stereotypical outsider you are, that is how people will picture you, regardless of any of your subsiquent actions...

My theory is that human nature is not inherently bad, but it IS inherently self-serving. There is a difference here because it is clear that you cannot view things as society=good and chaos=bad or even vice versa. People are self-serving because at base, people are animals and being self-serving is a survival tactic.

Allow me to explain something: society is a self-serving institution. People create laws and societies because they want order. Order and rules mean that people are on a level playing field, if you don't go around killing people, neither will they. Thus, you're safer and society has served it's purpose of helping you. Virtually everything that can and does take place in human nature is self-serving.

Now, when you leave a society, the laws and jurisdictions of the society are removed and people like Golding's reversion idea could take place, not because this is what the people want, but because this is what is necessary to survive and survival is human nature. If you are in a land with no laws, following laws that no longer apply is both STUPID and WRONG! It is wrong on every, EVERY level becasue it goes against every deffenition of intelegence or common sense. If no one else around you is bound by rules, binding yourself to invisible restraints doesn't help anyone and isn't right.

Of course, this nature also applies to group mechanics. People naturally flock to groups because the human survival instinct tells them groups=safety and security. So, people become driven by a need for acceptance and often confrom to a group or stereotype, even if they're trying to avoid that. So, when mobs form, humans are instinctively attracted to the growing group. And, once inside, the mob has it's own society with it's own consequences that people conform to as naturally as a regular government.

And, unfortunately for you and me Krylo, it seems that all the good works that humans do also falls under a self-serving nature. Love, charity, or protecting your family are all self-serving acts. For they all either make you happy, ameliorate guilt, or assist in the basic animal instinct to pass on genetic information.

So, at base, humans are really just souped up animals and all this complicated psychology is just a need to reconsile intelegence with instinct. However, the simple fact that people have intelegence is the sole saving grace of humanity, because it leads people to break away from and denounce bad groups. It lets them understand consequenses and help one another out and build societies. In some, it even works to simply remove the instinctual altogether and simply work with logic and feeling.

But I feel as if I have gone on about this long enough. If I remember anything else about this thesis I'll put it up and thank you for your time in reading and possibly disagreeing with (I like to back up my points of view) my statements.

There's something from Men in Black that I've always thought about with human nature:
That's really about the scariest thing about people: no matter how smart you are, you're stupider around your friends than you are alone, or with people you don't like. I never understood the purpose of pep assemblies, for example; you go, sit through overly loud music and speeches you can't understand a word of, and then go off feeling slightly sick to your stomach, or at least I did. And then I realized during one that I felt sick because of the spirit (aura, whatever you want to call it) filling the room: it was a desire to kill, or at least to maim. If you've ever read Orwell's 1984, that's what pep assemblies are: the Two Minutes' Hate. Some people are immune to things like that, but group mentality is the most dangerous force in existance. If you're going to talk human nature, I'd say this.

A person is basically good. Self-serving or no, they know the difference between right and wrong, everyone has morals, unless they burn them out themselves. Everyone likes to be happy, and know the only way to be really happy is to help other people at the same time as you help yourself. People, on the other hand, are dangerous. Around people, you have to guard your every thought, or you'll end up doing something horribly stupid. If you want to say society's going downhill, blame things like sporting events, 80,000 people all of one mind and in one place, out for blood. Hardly as bad as the Romans, but there it is.

But generalization is hardly a way to talk about people. Some people are immune to that sort of thing, and others make concious effort to not get caught in group mentality. Others can disengage from this and lead good, productive lives, most of the time. Like Krylo said, it's a relative few who cannot manage to control themselves.

What it comes down to is desire. Everything you do, and I mean everything, you must want to do. If you don't want to, you don't do it. Even if it's for something like avoiding pain, or wanting to please someone else by doing something you'd never normally do, the desire has to be there. That means if the majority of people are basically good and don't go around acting on every violent impulse they have, it's because they want to be basically good. I'd say that speaks pretty well of humanity as a whole; outside of a few "mob" moments, nearly everyone wants to be a good person.