The “Inherently Evil’ Question

Contributing Writer
Waking Times

I think one of the greatest things holding back regular people from standing up to their government and the corporations who own them is they believe that people are inherently evil and that is why we will never be able to change anything on a mass scale. I have heard it said over and over – “People are bad! People are evil! People are corrupt!! People want power!! People are selfish!! We need elected officials to make laws for us because if they didn’t we’d all run around killing each other!!”

“Damn, dude. Why the heck would anyone want to start a family? Or perpetuate their own lives at all, if they really believed that??”

This black and white view of what humanity is is very damaging to the future of our species. Why don’t we instead take the view that something like moral actions (not doing things that hurt people) is a learned behavior. We do what we see as children and continue to act in those patterns until we are shown a very good reason to stop. Since birth we get showered with material crap and told it’s “ours.” And the more people like us, the more stuff we get at our birthdays. The more stuff we get, the more people like us and want to hang out with us. The idea of social acceptance is so based on money and material wealth it’s sickening.

When presented with that, why wouldn’t we want to go out and make as much money as we can, at whatever expense? Why wouldn’t we look at CEOs of huge corporations and think they are the ones to be emulated? They are winning in this system! Doesn’t it make you want to throw up in your mouth a little bit that the CEO of Phillip Morris, whose product LITERALLY kills thousands of people a year, is revered as a productive member of society, while an Occupier is jailed for sleeping in a park?

So, the fact that a few really messed up people (about 230 families) basically control the global economy and tell us these are the rules, is ACTUALLY the reason most people are acting in a non-empathetic way, not the fact that people are bad.

And herein lies what I believe about humanity. It’s basically a bell curve. There are a few people that are corrupt, most people can be easily swayed, and the ones trying to reveal the truth and institute a new cultural paradigm in this time of cultural depravity are looked at as naive, unsophisticated, stupid, or worse, crackpots. And right now, the money and the power are concentrated in the hands of the ones acting corrupt. So the masses are swayed by the lure of material wealth and all that comes with it (personal freedom and power).

So, we are not bad, we are easily swayed. Swayed towards the only thing that is looked as acceptable in our culture – make money, consume, make money, consume, think about self, make money, consume.

When talking to people about The Zeitgeist Movement I’ve had some say to me that it’s not money that’s the problem, it’s power. They are right. You can’t just get rid of money and think a Resource Based Economy will just happen naturally. It requires more than that – it requires the shift to believing in humanity rather than believing it’s doomed. It requires believing in your heart that people genuinely want to help others if given the opportunity. It requires believing that if people have their needs met, most people will not hoard more stuff, most people will not go out and steal more, most people will not try to hatch a plan to have power over others. If you’ve been loved, fed, sheltered, clothed and cared for, you would not feel the need to go out and trounce on top of others…what would be your reward? You wouldn’t get more “stuff” because “stuff” would be free. You wouldn’t have anything others didn’t have, because everything is open source. There would be absolutely no reason for someone to try to be more powerful than the next. It wouldn’t make sense in this context.

There are a plethora of new studies that say children as young as 15 months grasp the concept of equality and sharing. But instead of that making main stream news, we see stories about youth violence and gangs and depravity. We see what is cherry-picked for us to see on the main stream channels. TURN YOUR TV OFF. Turn your logical mind on.

By believing that YOU SHAPE YOURSELF, YOUR WORLD, YOUR CHILDREN AND YOUR COMMUNITY, you believe that you can change the world.

And in conclusion, I would like to offer this movie I recently watched. This is a compilation of Internet footage, with no identified narrator, no person taking credit.  It documents The Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Transition Movement, Permaculture, The Zeitgeist Movement, The Venus Project and Anonymous. This movie is inspiring and to me is proof in the face of everything, that people are waking up, looking at the evil that has been spread far and wide and saying “Fuck, no. This isn’t my world. I didn’t have a part in making this. I AM NOT THIS. I AM NOT EVIL. I WON’T PARTICIPATE IN THIS ANYMORE. And I’m doing something about it.” This is proof that people can be swayed to good the same way they can be swayed to evil.

In fact, we are in the midst of an evolutionary change – global empathy. It’s going to be (and already is) beautiful.

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