One of the most prevalent questions in the universality of morality is “Are people naturally good or evil?” It’s a fair question, and it’s worth asking because it gives us insight into our own character, and what we do naturally vs. what we are trained to do.
But my take is that neither side is right. The natural moral state of people is to be self-destructive. We all have a limited time here on Earth, and how we choose to spend it is inherently self-destructive.
For instance, if we decide to help somebody because we want to be selfless, then we are still being self-destructive. Depending on the circumstances in which we need to help, we could be, one, putting our lives in danger, or two, on a much smaller scale, we could be inconveniencing ourselves that day, and on a microcosmic level, that is self-destructive; it’s destroying the limited time that we have here on Earth.
In this lens, whether or not that action of selflessness is right or wrong and is what we are naturally inclined to do is almost irrelevant, because the act in and of itself is self-destructive. My critics might argue that doing nothing is the perfect counter to my argument, because if we do nothing, then we spend nothing, and that is on the contrary of being self-destructive.
However, I would argue that doing nothing is one of the biggest acts of self-destruction, mainly because it wastes what precious time that we have on this Earth doing literally nothing.
I think that the self-destructive nature of humanity is a tool for either good or bad deeds, but in an economical way of thinking, everything that we do costs something, and it’s that cost that makes us self-destructive.
