The Nature of Man

Beneath the smiles, when we’re happily distracted from our nature, we all tend to be self-serving survivalists. When people are acting “happy-go-lucky” they are not being true to their human nature. It is our nature to do right by ourselves, to take care of our own, and to succeed in life.

The aggressive actions of people that we observe such as warfare, general confrontation, and prejudice are for the most part just effects of man’s self centered nature. Being self-centered is different than selfish. Selfish people are generally possessive, while being self-centered is more about surviving. When we are focused on meeting our needs we aren’t interested in what’s going on in the life of others. We’re just doing right by ourselves and in so doing tend to push others aside. We do this to people of other cultures because of fear of their questioning, and possibly impeding our lifestyle.

It’s easier to succeed in life when you have people around you that are like you. Some say that discrimination is a part our nature, those people see discrimination as categorization. When we look at a person it’s in our nature to judge them based on how they will interact in relation to us. “...this dump....he lived as miserably as any farm laborer...a stifling smell of garlic...” We get a vivid picture of a person when the writer describes them by what our first-impression would be of them, instead of a description of that persons character.

When we discriminate (categorize) people we are determining whether we should invest time in them or not. Naturally we will spend our time with the people who can benefit us and neglect the people we have categorized differently. Thus we will spend minimal time with them in favor of the people who we know have more in common with ourselves. Because of that we won’t understand those who are different. It’s likely that in situations where we are forced to interact with people we prefer to avoid, conflict will arise. Simply because we don’t understand people different from ourselves.

It’s not our nature to fight with each other; conflict is the result of not understanding one another. We don’t understand each other because we choose not to invest time in people who are different, and in our opinion won’t help us to succeed. It’s our nature to do what’s best for our own survival and success. This isn’t necessarily bad or good it’s just the way we are.