Is there a human nature? What does it look like?

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Here is the riddle said the Great Father Serpent with a great flourishing of his two-tipped tongue, and it is a son-of-a-bitch I will tell you that, the most arcane item in the arcana, you will never guess it in a hundred thousand years some of which I point out have already been used up by you in useless living and breathing but have a go, have a go, do: What do you really feel? Like murderinging, I answered, because that is what I had read on the underside of the tin, the word murderinging inscribed in a fine thin cursive. Why bless my soul, said the Great Father Serpent, he’s got it, and the two ruffians blinked at me in stunned wonder and I myself wondered, and marveled, but what I was wondering and marveling at was the closeness with which what I had answered accorded with my feelings, my lost feelings that I had never found before. I suppose, the Father Serpent said, that the boon you wish granted is the ability to carry out this foulness? Of course, I said, what else? Granted then, he said, but may I remind you that having the power is often enough. You don’t have to actually do it. For the soul’s ease. I thanked the Great Father Serpent; he bowed most cordially; my companions returned me to the city. I was abroad in the city with murderinging in mind — the dream of a stutterer.

It's much easier to fuck your child up than it is to make it smart.

Great! What does it look like from where you sit, stand or recline?

The question of human nature frustrates me because it seems like a purely descriptive idea of it (rather than political or prescriptive) would have to be so general as to be useless and unhelpful. Humans generally organize into societies, impose order on their environments and social lives, organize by kin groups, have moral systems and cosmologies that don't have very much in common...what's interesting there?

Anyway, to elaborate on "Read Steven Pinker" (I'm only about 1/2way thru "The Blank Slate" right now) - Pinker subscribes to the 'selfish gene' theory. That is: humans are selfish in inverse proportion to our degree of percieved kinship with others and altruistic in direct proportion to our degree of percieved mutual investment with others.

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Did we ever figure this one out?

Read Steven Pinker

― Candy: tastes like chicken, if chicken was a candy. (Austin, Still), Sunday, February 11, 2007 12:11 AM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol

too explosive a topic. no one wishes to have it blow up in their face. I'm rather glad it didn't blow up in mine.

There's still time.

I'll take part of the blame – not only for reviving this thread but also for picking it out of a handful of others with a similar theme.

Fp for going off+script with revive obv

So… chalk one up for 'there is no such thing for human nature'?

*as

like so much about humans, it only shows up part of the time and complains a lot

change

(not that it’s anything special)

just a mechanism of power isn't it

It’s rectangular and orange

really the hobbesian thing is just england / europe projecting its misery onto the world which then becomes its own excuse