Human Nature (page 3)

smellsgood

I think we all have a flawed nature, and can make moral or amoral choices. I think men, man is easily corruptable, that we are susceptible to immoral actions. I think it is a matter of the will, like Kierkegaard says.

Just look at history or the present, and see how much suffering and ill-will and terror caused by men. Clearly it's not really confined, rare, or sporadic. Just look at how many ordinary Germans became tools of Hitlers slaughtering machine. I don't think that that many people could have been considered psycopaths or sociopaths before they became murderous villians. I think they were just like you and me, but there is something inside where its almost like we have our conscience overtaken through insidious means, and I think that they believed they were doing the right thing under the hypnosis almost of their Fuhrer, while they were performing the most wicked and violent of atrocities imaginable.

It's interesting to see how entire societies, this is easily seen in history, can be party and unified in doing immoral things. Such as the Incan, Aztec or Mayan human sacrifice. The younger, the more pure, the more pleasing to the gods. This means that seven year olds were taken up the mountain and blugeoned.

There is something sick, and it seems that human nature can find itself lacking immunity.

ex-nj-jw

I have no idea

nj

Mum

Does everyone understand the difference between "amoral" and "immoral" ???

smellsgood

amoral -a means without, or against. I probably used the the terms a bit interchangeably. oops.

Dogpatch

Ernest Becxker, author of "Denial of Death," (won a Pulitzer prize for this) wrote:

Kierkegaard was hardly a disinterested scientist. He gave his psychological description because he had a glimpse of freedom for man. He was a theorist of the open personality, of human possibility. In this pursuit, present-day psychiatry lags far behind him. Kierkegaard had no easy idea of what "health" is. But he knew what it was not: it was not normal adjustment—anything but that, as he has taken such excruciating analytical pains to show us. To be a "normal cultural man" is, for Kierkegaard, to be sick—whether one knows it or not: "there is such a thing as fictitious health."38 Nietzsche later put the same thought: "Are there perhaps —a question for psychiatrists—neuroses of health?" But Kierkegaard not only posed the question, he also answered it. If health is not "cultural normality," then it must refer to something else, must point beyond man's usual situation, his habitual ideas. Mental health, in a word, is not typical, but ideal-typical. It is something far beyond man, something to be achieved, striven for, something that leads man beyond himself. The "healthy" person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the "real" man, is the one who has transcended himself.
How does one transcend himself; how does he open himself to new possibility? By realizing the truth of his situation, by dispelling the lie of his character, by breaking his spirit out of its conditioned prison. The enemy, for Kierkegaard as for Freud, is the Oedipus complex. The child has built up strategies and techniques for keep¬ing his self-esteem in the face of the terror of his situation. These techniques become an armor that hold the person prisoner. The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self-con¬fidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his "cultural lendings" and stand naked in the storm of life. Kierkegaard had no illusions about man's urge to freedom. He knew how comfortable people were in¬side the prison of their character defenses. Like many prisoners they are comfortable in their limited and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of chance, accident, and choice terrifies them. We have only to glance back at Kierkegaard's con¬fession in the epigraph to this chapter to see why. In the prison of one's character one can pretend and feel that he is somebody, that the world is manageable, that there is a reason for one's life, a ready justification for one's action. To live automatically and un¬critically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the pro¬grammed cultural heroics—what we might call "prison heroism": the smugness of the insiders who "know."

Kierkegaard's torment was the direct result of seeing the world as it really is in relation to his situation as a creature. The prison of one's character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one's creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. Once admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man's anxiety, the anxiety that re¬sults from the human paradox that man is an animal who is con¬scious of his animal limitation. Anxiety is the result of the percep¬tion of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-¬expression—and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food? Cynical deities, said the Greeks, who use man's tor¬ments for their own amusement.
But now Kierkegaard seems to have led us into an impasse, an impossible situation. He has told us that by realizing the truth of our condition we can transcend ourselves. And on the other hand he tells us that the truth of our condition is our complete and abject creatureliness, which seems to push us down still further on the scale of self-realization, further away from any possibility of self-transcendence. But this is only an apparent contradiction. The flood of anxiety is not the end for man. It is, rather, a "school" that pro¬vides man with the ultimate education, the final maturity.
p. 86, 87

Dogpatch

Sorry, that was Ernest Becker as the author. :-))

Randy

nvrgnbk

Thanks for sharing that Dogpatch.

I'm still digesting it.

flipper

Nvr- Mr. Flipper here. I tend to lean bothways a bit. I think we have the freedom of choice . To make good choices, bad choices. I think our environment can shape the decisions we make, but I think it's possible for someone born into a loving family to turn out to be a terrorist too.It's within the individual how each one will let his or her mind be shaped. Human nature may control some inclinations, but a lot of good people have come from crappy upbringings from parents. I think it's a case of individually being an actualizing person, living in the here and now, trying to make a positive impact on people's lives that we can, and not trying to manipulate everything and anybody we deal with. Essentially, be real. Just weird psychobabble . I've read a few psychology books

RAF

Dogpath :
Very very very interesting !!! didn't know the guy and what he was saying ...
but you know what this is (to me) what says the Gospel globally on the subject (be spiritual - and grow up for real)

SixofNine

Quote: "Are we essentially moral beings, corrupted by society?

Or are we in fact amoral, socialized by cultural pressures and religious beliefs?"

I'm sitting here eating all the cashews out of a can of mixed nuts. You tell me.

Human Nature

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