Well if every modern US President is a War-Criminal, and most Senators and House members are war criminals…….what big questions does that raise about America, Americans, and Life on Earth ?
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I still think most humans are “good.” Or, at least, “innocent” until taught to be bad. I think they’re taught to be bad by a very small fraction of society, which actually does have pathologies of sadism, obscene cruelty, selfishness, etc. We inherit the societies they develop, because those societies benefit them on so many levels. And the message we get from them is that everyone is this way, when it’s really just the fraction in charge.
The first step, IMO, out of this morass, is to reject the idea that “human nature” is essentially evil from Day One. We can thank (among others) organized, early Christianity and its take on the story of Adam and Eve for a good bit of that, but mostly Augustine (with the help of the Roman Empire), whose reading of the story altered our ideas of “original sin” for centuries. This is the essential “conservative” worldview. That mankind is born in sin, from sin, and can’t escape from it, so we need ruthless authoritarians to keep us forever in check. Augustine, to Hobbes and his war of all against all, to Burke and his hatred for people’s revolutions, on up through today’s evangelicals, loving strongmen types who bring down the hammer on minorities and women. Humankind’s fear of ourselves leads us to cede our own autonomy over to authoritarians to protect us from the Other.
Until we radically shift away from this view, this idea that we must always fear each other, and that we’re locked in a battle for survival, a competitive, not cooperative battle for survival . . . I don’t know how we’ll going to change the loop of endless war/empire/corruption . . . and Arendt’s “banality of evil.”