Is human nature evil? Or is the violence of nature to blame? | Steven Pinker | Big Think

Is human nature evil? Or is the violence of nature to blame?
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One of the reasons we don't know whether limiting access to guns would effectively decrease the homicide rate in America is because the Congress passed a law that bars the Centers for Disease Control from conducting such related studies.In the United States, gun rights are a sacred cause of the right and are protected vehemently. As Steven Pinker says, "anything that might compromise the right of everyone to have a gun is squelched." The word "anything" seems to even include research. A lot is at stake — people's lives — by not conducting research to find out how to control gun violence in America. We need to keep politicians accountable to the people, and pressure them to enact policies founded on solid research. This first means though that such research is no longer suppressed.
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STEVEN PINKER :
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
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TRANSCRIPT:
STEVEN PINKER: One of the big puzzles when it comes to understanding violence is why the American rate of violence is five to ten times higher than that of other wealthy democracies. There are countries that have spectacularly high rates of violence mainly in Central America and North and South America and in Southern Africa. But it's funny to see the United States not quite up there but much higher rates of homicide than our peers in the British Commonwealth and in Europe.
Now the ready answer is well, that's because we have all those guns. And that is part of the answer but it's not the total answer. Because even if you subtract out all of the gun homicides in the United States and you just look at all the murders committed with ropes and candlesticks and knives and so on. The United States still has a higher rate of homicide.
But and we also don't know for sure whether the favorite remedy of many people on the liberal left, namely tougher gun control, would have an effect in lowering homicides given how many guns are already out there. The United States has more guns than people so restricting the sale of future guns is a small measure. Maybe it does but no one really knows for sure. And we do know that the United States itself had quite a spectacular reduction in violent crime starting in the 90s and again in the 2000s. It certainly wasn't because massive numbers of guns were taken off the streets. Quite the contrary. So there's a lot we don't know but tragically and boneheadedly the U.S. Congress passed a law that the Centers for Disease Control was not allowed to study gun violence as a public health problem. Now that is insanity. That is an example of political interference with conductive research.
In the United States gun rights are a sacred cause of the right and anything that might compromise the right of everyone to have a gun is squelched. I've talked about many of the threats to academic freedom from the campus left but the political right is far more pernicious because they actually have power. I mean academics, it's often said that academic debates are fierce because so little is at stake but when it comes to government a lot is at stake and the suppression of research on gun violence is an example of how the right is also guilty of suppressing freedom of inquiry and it's one of the reasons why we really don't' know how best to reduce gun violence in the United States.

[iannacn]

Most people seem to be heartless, selfish, and wicked. If I had the money I'd move off grid. I can't stand most people. You can't trust them.

[virtualrealitychannel]

"But the universe actually bends toward chaos and decay"

In the absence of light there is darkness, so produce light.

[hughjohnston]

The human condition of evil is often likened a void of empathy for other life and the absolute focus on self gratification regardless of consequence to anything else.

[nastygreyfurt]

Really wanna know whether humans are good or evil?

Just ask a random weak person how people are.

You'll get the actual answer to it.

[JonSebastianF]

*interviewer:* Want to talk ethics?
*Pinker:* Yes, let's talk physics!

[jpgrumbach]

Concerning human nature the chinese philosopher mencius put it shortly:


Our nature is good only when cultivated. So education is very important.

Otherwise we tend to care for ourselves only.

[oooweebaby]

A portion of humans are deeply troubled and wicked.

[diannerussell]

That's interesting when he said that no one cares what happens to us. When I hear that, he is right no body or thing gives a toss. The sooner we except this the moor we strive to survive. Life is hard it really is survival of the fittest.

[kostailijev]

I have discovered, people are evil, or, rather, especially when they simultaneously think that they are good. There are exceptions, of course.

[kokomanation]

I believe that human nature has both a good and an evil counterpart but most humans have the ability to empathize in a way that their nature leads them to apply moral behavior to other people especially because everyone has experienced moments of suffering and doesn’t want to see this around him after it’s over

[camyoung]

It is Human nature to be selfish. People act based on perceived benefit in everything they do. Sometimes evil actions are assumed (generally incorrectly) to be beneficial to the individual or associated group. As the definition of a “group” expands to include greater perspectives, “evil” in the world and society should continue to diminish.

[goku]

The more I listen to this video, the more I think that the person who titled it doesn’t know what it’s about haha

[flfydragon]

Human nature, as in the nature of our species, is reactionary.

If you have a system of cuthroat competition where the most sociopathical behavior is that witch has the highest chance of creating success then you'll give the power to sociopaths witch is the common problem of all oligarchic systems including capitalism. If you create a system of true democracy (requires that everyone is well educated) then you have the best possible system as the majority of enacted policies would have a positive effect.
(perfection is impossible, some mistakes are bound to happen)

On top of that we do not live in a closed system, the earth trades energy withthe rest of the universe and mainly with our sun, therefore unless all of human civilisation encompasses the entire universe that argument is out. (and even then it's invalid because there is 0 point energy where the universe itself violates the second law of thermodynamics in a vaccum creating what is known as "dark energy" witch is 68.3% of the universe that means that you are extremely off)

On top of that we are below the carrying capacity of the planet let alone the universe.
We currently have enough actively utilized resources to put a system in place that could guarantee a minimum living standard that's comperable to that of a mutimillionaire solely through work optimisation and networked productionand distribution management.

A great example for this is food production where we produce enough to feed 10 billion and yet there are people starving with our measly 7 billion because access to all is not profitable as it would effectively lower prices to 0.
And that's nothing to say about the production technology we are not using becuase it would demolish massive global industries such as hydroponics.

And If we are to put the next 1-3 decades of automation taking over then we literally have to choose between a non capitalistic system or a world of barbarism that surpasses the atrocities we have seen in any other phase in human history.

For your argument to hold merit in a technologic civilisation we'd need a massive population boost of at least 2-5 times above the current population and a absolute stagnation in our technology.

[thelonestarpelican]

I call someone evil if they consciously and deliberately set out to hurt, harm, or degrade the dignity of others outside the scope of defense of self or others, retaliation, or punishment. Even with these justifications, it's still evil to engage in excessive levels of such - i.e. the hurt, harm or degradation you did in the name of defense, retaliation, and punishment are clearly out of proportion to the wrongful act the other person commits. By that measure, I'd say most people are either evil or condone evil acts and expressions against even clearly innocent parties - often for simple petty gain or even cheap entertainment or endorphin surges.

[goku]

The video doesn’t really seem to get into whether humans are evil or not, but more that we had more time to think about the nature of good and evil with advancements that helped us fend off entropy haha.

But I guess he’s saying it’s more about survival and we started to label things good and evil once we had more time to think about human nature? I agree if that’s what it is haha

[ZOOTSUITBEATNICK]

imo
"Is human nature evil? Or is the violence of nature to blame?"
Yes.
And no.
To both questions.
Stuffing the whole species into one bag seems like profiling a race.
Blaming it all on "the violence of nature" seems like a cheap excuse.
I think we are all responsible for only two things in our lives: what we say and what we do.
And I do not think that there are any excuses for the "evil" that we do.
imo

[josee]

Human mind is easily influenced (programmable). Examples are, marketing, news, the military, suicide terrorists...etc...

[dragonflyxj]

Evil is born out of the desire to control nature; which is uncontrollable.

[ForAnAngel]

It's not inherently but it can be. Ignorance leads to Fear. Fear leads to Hatred. Hatred leads to violence. Violence leads to suffering.

[chrisw]

First off I just want to say I'm a Steven Pinker fan, I've read several books and enjoyed them. I appreciate the positive, clear headed message and consider it refreshing in an otherwise emotionally driven, cynical, and reactionary way of speaking about the world. That being said...

I think it's extremely easy to dissuade people from blaming, or demanding fairness, while being "Steven Pinker", a person who has very little to worry about in terms of fundamental human needs in 2018. There really is a detachment problem with many intellectuals, in that they tend to have no idea what it's like to be at the bottom rungs of a technologically advanced society, surrounded by financially well off people, including themselves. In contrast, I was a single child to a mentally ill parent from a poor country, raised in new york city. I couldn't make it in life, after years of physical and psychological abuse. All I could do was make a hobby out of psychology, which eventually lead me to discover my mother had something called "Narcissistic Personality Disorder", and eventually was lead down the rabbit hole of what that entailed about children of people with this disorder. I lived poor, and abused, and now get to live in a world that is so patently designed to profit from the bottom rungs of its society, and have intellectuals essentially, and too often say, "Tough shit", as their enjoy their smart phones, internet connections, and non mentally ill single parents which allowed them to actually make it in life. The experience of someone crushed under the sociopolitical model of any first world country has only had it's surface scratched, as far as I can tell. There's no real empathy going on anywhere, almost. I am not missing the point of the spirit of the video. I acknowledge the problem of internet mobs with knee jerk reactions, I acknowledge the problem of cynicism, I acknowledge that we as a species must be proactive and solve problems - everything Pinker is trying to say here, I fully acknowledge and support. I'm just pointing out a detachment with the *actual* experiences of the impoverished masses(And they are -masses-), whose experiences are too often either forgotten, or exquisitely failed in being related to or understood.