Born Good, Born Evil
A question posed by a Brother
I can’t claim any true authorship of this post, as I’m simply repeating a question that I was asked by a Brother a couple of weeks ago. It came up very briefly last Sunday at Rummer & Grapes as well.
Ever since this Brother mentioned it to me, I’ve been contemplating it. Ultimately I don’t think we can know the answer, but I do think it is valuable to consider, and really valuable to come to our own personal understanding of it.
His question, as best I remember it was:
Are we born Good, and those who become Evil do so because of something that impacted them in their lives?
Or
Are we born Evil, and can only become Good through our own efforts or divine intervention of some sort?
I had never thought deeply about that question before.
I just always assumed that people are born Good, and that if they go Bad it is because of things that happened to them, or their own conscious choices.
But, that was an assumption, not a deeply considered belief.
Indeed, the faith tradition in which I was raised teaches the latter. That we are sinners from the very moment of birth and can only be redeemed through our own good works and divine intervention. The whole Original Sin bit.
But, like much of the dogma of that faith tradition, upon contemplation, I find that I can’t agree.
It seems much more likely to me that we are all born Good. And if we go Bad it is due to bad influences on us, and our own bad choices.
But I presume that everyone has a different answer.
What do you think?
Are we born Good? Or are we born Bad?
Does Freemasonry offer anything to help inform the answer to this question?
Let’s discuss it…
I would argue that genetics plays a bigger role than we care to admit. I would say that people have good and evil tendencies first on genetics. 2nd on in utero development such as maternal drug use. 3rd on post birth environmental influence particular age 0-5years nutrition and toxin exposure. Lastly on moral education from age 5 onward. If a person has had all bad influence from conception to age 5, no amount of moral education after age 5 will redeem them. If they have had all good influence from conception to age 5 it will be hard to corrupt them through bad experiences later. The vast majority of humanity falls between those two extremes but whether they are mostly good or mostly bad is by my evaluation of the research primarily determined before the age of 5.
In my humble opinion, a first perception is that a person is borne "good", in the sense that he has no knowledge of being evil a-priori. This should be much like in animals. Can we say an animal is borne evil? Even a lion (of lioness) kills to survive only.
So evil must be acquired... But why?
IMHO, a baby borne is, like any animal, equipped with a sense of survival. In other words, he must have natural egoism. Without that - his chances of survival are Low (in nature).
However, as Thomas Hobbes believed, human beings, realizing that the sense of survival is stronger than any other, would also kill to survive snd hence, formed the state, to regulate and Co tril the use of force.
However, in SOME humans, something went wrong. They became criminals, evil, in the sense that they kill (in the broadcast sense) for purposes other than survival.
No doubt, when they were nice little babies in their cot, they had no knowledge of crime or evil. This could evolve however due to several, psychological or environmental reasons, that drove him to crime.
This MUST have been a matter of freewill however.
The suggestion that a person could be borne evil is very dangerous: it pulls try he carpet from under moral and legal responsibility, because if evil is a borne feature, how could that person be indicted for his crimes? He would simply claim that "it is his borne nature"...
Thus we MUST assume, sxiomatically, that a person is NOT borne evil.