Is human nature basically good, or basically evil?
First Response: It is blindingly obvious that human nature is basically evil. In each person’s dark brooding depths a killer lurks. In every human soul evil predominates, and consumes all that is good. Religions all teach us this valuable but depressing lesson about ourselves. Great literature, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, teaches the same lesson. Where religion and literature agree so thoroughly, who is any one of us to disagree? Some feeble-minded or overly sentimental people will still claim that we are basically good by nature. They should consider historical events like slavery or the Holocaust, and then they will realize their embarassing mistake. Besides, if we were essentially good, wouldn’t we do good things all the time? We don’t do good things all the time, and so we are essentially evil. The occasional good deed is merely the exception that proves the rule. That rule, established by religion, literature, history, and finally by overwhelming logic, is that human nature is ess
