Sterling's Truths for Life #17

Explanation

I have an atheist friend who once told me that human depravity is the only empirically verifiable moral fact. I’m not sure that’s a popular belief among atheists, but it is a belief held by at least one. However, I think that depravity is probably the single greatest cause of atheism and I have seen it in at least two forms:

1. Atheists take comfort in the fact that no deity is looking down upon them and judging them for their moral failures.
2. The world is full of horrors, many of which are perpetrated by evil people. How could there be a good and benevolent God ruling over this nightmare?

Both impulses demonstrate a basic moral sense and I have found that most atheists are extremely moral people, even legalistic, as a whole.

Yet, if people were basically good, why is it so hard for people to get along? People who believe in basic human goodness will always come up with some external factor to blame instead of people. They usually appeal to some variation of “money is the root of all evil” or power or whatever. If we could just somehow force things to be equitable for all via socialism, communism, the great reset¹, post-scarcity society ², transhumanistic transcendence, or whatever else you might imagine, then everyone would be nice and we’d live in a utopian paradise.

Such utopian dreams have been tried, but some will always hold out the hope, “but the next time we try it and do it right this time, we’ll finally get there.”

Or, more realistically, we won’t.

• Most socialist systems still assume private property, but provide public social safety nets. But such systems are always built on taxes. If people were basically good, there would be no need for safety nets. People would share and share alike when need arose. The only organization that would be required would be helping the money get from those with extra to those in need.
• Communist systems are inevitably forced to centralize authority to ensure equity among the people. In every case, this central authority has been abused and created a new oligarchy.
• A great reset would never hold because money and ownership are not the primary means by which those who have more keep more. It will result in some people who are wealthy and powerful becoming poor and powerless, but after a reset, those who are good at organizing people will find themselves in possession of more power and wealth in the post-reset world order, whether those people had it before or not.
• A post-scarcity society is an interesting concept that has never really been tried, but it could be effectively argued that we ought to already live in such a society. There are studies showing that enough food is already produced to feed everyone and yet that food does not make it to everyone on earth. If there’s enough food, why is there still scarcity in any quarter? If we’re basically good, wouldn’t we organize a society that fixed this inequity?
• A transcendent society wouldn’t even be human, so this is a dream of achieving godhood or at least some sort of superhumanity. Whatever this society is, it is irrelevant to the discussion about human depravity because whatever it is, it won’t be human anymore.

All of this is moot, in my opinion. If humans were basically good, I would argue that we would be immune to corrupting influences like money or power or whatever people want to blame for the depravity around us. We would serve one another and ask for nothing in return and whatever we needed others would provide to us.

There are some who would argue that this does not make evolutionary sense, that what is depravity is merely an efficient means of economy. But if that’s true, then you have a new problem: there’s no depravity because you’ve just made the entire concept of morality and meaning itself go away. If our sense of depravity is merely the outworking of evolution and has no intrinsic value, then nothing does and therefore, I might as well eat puppies as snuggle them for all the moral difference it makes.

The consequence, though, is that this belief in the basic goodness of man is used as the first step toward tyranny. Every tyrant in history started by convincing people around him that he was working for the best of all and because of that, he was justified in doing whatever he did. Whatever things go wrong are justified because his intentions are good.

Even in well-ordered republics, you will hear echoes of this in every party meeting. “We’re good, but our opponents are bad because they have accepted the corrupting influence of <name your party’s biggest hate>.”

No. It is wiser to accept that whatever good people may do, it happens despite the fact that each of them is a depraved being. A monster lives within every person and the sooner we accept that, the better we will be at building societies that are better than the ones who came before.