| | Thanks for bringing this back, Ed.
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A lot of these posts get confused between individual versus human nature. And, man has the capacity to choose between being good or being bad (both out of human nature,and then by definition for each individual). We build and maintain character. So that it is a dynamic process. That is, our question isn't just is a man good or is a man bad, but are they becoming bad, staying bad, becoming good, staying good. Good and evil in this context are capacities. And when someone says that people are stupid, it isn't a reference to an accurately measured IQ level, but that people behave irrationally, unthinkingly. But people have the capacity to behave rationally or not. And we should judge individuals on an individual basis, but that is to an important degree, separate from judging human nature in this regard.
All of these choices that we are all making occur in a context and some contexts will encourage bad choices. Tyrannies, survival-level economies, highly irrational cultures... all examples that can encourage bad choices.
But none of those simple facts iterated above are what Joe appeared to be talking about in his article. He was talking about the disparity between what is meant by people who might say, "People are stupid and evil" and the facts. That facts say that outside of some very abnormal circumstances, most people are not stupid and evil.
The shortest way to prove his conclusion is simple - look at the fact that the more freedom in a given culture, as long as the initiation of violence is not allowed, the greater the human progress we see. Now, that wouldn't happen if most people were stupid and evil. Stupid and evil people, given freedom to follow their baser natures would take their society down lower and lower, but that isn't what we see.
Joe talks about the political gains that are inherent in telling this lie about human nature. If by nature we tend to be stupid and evil then we need to be controlled. Most of the article deals with the political side of this issue, but for me it is more interesting to talk about why someone would claim that irrationality and evil are dominate in man's nature - and that is a philosophical position. The evidence can't be rounded up to support that.
And that puts us into the category of psychology. That takes us to the question of why would someone project onto human nature the view that man is stupid and evil.
But before diving into the psychology of this, I should mention that Joe's article has the conclusion that it is your self-interest to see past any irrational or unneeded barriers to liking people... because it is rewarding to like people. He goes so far as to say that seeing the good in others is a virtue (and we Objectivists know that a virtue when practiced brings us rewards, and that is why its a virtue). I agree with this observation whole-heartedly!
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Leaving politics and philosophy for psychology:
There are those that are projecting onto human nature what is within themselves. There are those who think or fear that they are stupid or basically a bad person and they go through life pretending to not be stupid or bad (even, when it isn't true). They might think that their ugly nature would take over if they let it, or that they only hold it in abeyance because of social or legal constraints. In the overwhelming number of cases this is nonsense. Their fears of this base nature they think they have are unjustified. Hint: We sometimes get some really stupid ideas of who we are when we are too young to know better and sometimes they persist into adulthood.
Or it could be a projection of shadow material - of material they have repressed, of thoughts that they might be stupid or evil that at some tender age were too awful to experience and were hidden from themselves. Thoughts that one experienced as too painful to live with in consciousness were banished to the subconscious and little subroutines erected whose job was to not let the conscious focus get to those thoughts - banishing them to the subconscious. And like all repressed material, there is no such thing as successful repression - there are kinds of emotional energy, and certain processes that are the necessary side effects of repression - the price to be paid. In this case the content leaks out and gains expression in the projection onto humanity. Emotions clamor to be felt - its there nature. And the bad decision made is that it is better to feel disdain, disgust, and hatred for others than ones self.
But I'd say that far more often it is none of the above. Instead it is one of the many ways we distance ourselves from others to avoid some imagined hurt. We don't feel sufficiently appreciated - must be because others are too stupid to see our great value. We have a dread of being rejected, so we reject humanity and take the lonely path that others are too stupid to see. We fear that we might have our well being taken from us in some unnamed fashion, because others are to be feared (and then after experience takes away the sense of danger, it is replaced with disdain for those stupid, evil others).
Self-esteem is the antidote to most of the above. Particularly the virtue of self-acceptance. To the degree that we have ferrited out every negative thought or feeling we have about ourself and cast out those that are false, and accepted those that are true (not in the sense of going over to the dark side, but in the sense of, "This is true of me now, but I'll not disown it or act on it"), we project onto others the benevolence we are showing to ourselves. When we are split internally, we see a split between ourselves and others. When we attempt to hide an aspect of ourselves from ourselves we set the stage for not seeing others clearly.
Being a cynic, a curmudgeon, a pessismist, a misanthrope are all more likely to be defensive strategies whose patterns were acquired at an early age. They "feel" right, but only because there is some hidden fear/shame/anger/hurt that it "feels" wrong to allow ourselves to experience - a chunk of emotinal food that has never been digested and passed on.
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