Man is Inherently Evil: My Philosophy For Man

"Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars...not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another."

-George Orwell

Let’s face it; everything we do is to benefit ourselves. Even when we help other people it is to achieve some level of self-gratification for helping someone who was in need. No person can be considered good because every single person was born into sin and is a sinner. Because of one event thousands of years ago when Eve made a choice to disobey God and eat of the forbidden fruit, mankind has been cursed with living a life of sinful shame. I believe that man is inherently evil because every single one of us was born into sin as a consequence of Eve’s disobedience. We cannot help that our nature is one of evilness; however, I believe that no matter what our true nature is we have the ability to overcome it and make the right choices in life. 

        Through my years of exercising my Christian faith by reading the Bible, attending church services, and going to many Christian events, I have learned that there are no “good” people in the world. Many times we humans ask the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The problem with that question is that as humans, we feel that we are inclined to make the judgment on what should be deemed good and bad. In reality, we need to realize that no “good person” exists. The only truly “good person” was Jesus and he is not on the Earth anymore. The only way to be considered a “good person” is to life a sinless, spotless, pure life. No one but Jesus can attest to living such a life.  

       Sometimes, in order to feel better about ourselves and make up for our evil thoughts to achieve a level of self-gratification we do nice things for other people. But our true animalistic intention is not to help them; it is to boost our ego and make ourselves feel better for doing something for another human being. We can choose to do “good things” for other people like volunteering for charity, giving money to the poor, or helping a friend or relative who is going through a hard time; but, these nice actions towards others doesn’t change us on the inside. Even when giving up time or money to help someone else there is some sort of gratification felt deep down inside the person doing the nice action towards someone else. No one has a truly altruistic personality and takes part in helping other people without an underlying reason to benefit themselves first.

         Though man may want to try to overcome his evil nature, it is impossible to do so. Just by thinking about doing something evil can consequently give man an evil label. Many times in life we are confronted to do something that may have bad consequences, but may give us the instant gratification of the “feel good” feeling. For instance, there is a girl at school who has been picking on me since I moved here. I would like nothing more than to slap her in the face to make her feel half as bad as she makes me feel. But do I act on this impulse? No, I don’t act on it because I have acquired the knowledge of what is right and wrong and I have learned to exercise self-control and overcome my desire to incur evil actions based on what someone else has done to me. However, just the thought of doing this evil action proves that man has an evil nature. It’s like the parable in the Bible when Jesus tells a man that if he even thinks about committing adultery to someone else’s spouse in his head, then it’s as if he had already done it in real life. If we think something in our head that is evil then our human nature can be rightly said to be inherently evil.

         The main goal of man is to benefit himself and avoid suffering. We, as humans, will do whatever it takes to avoid suffering whether it be getting food, water, medical care, housing, or any other basic need that we feel is a necessity to living. It’s part of our animalistic instinct of survival to avoid suffering. This ultimate goal of avoiding suffering is proved in the book, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. He proved this goal of man by creating a story about stranded boys living on an island and showing how they managed to survive on the island with no help from the outside world. The boys realised that they needed to avoid suffering by killing pigs for meat, finding fruit to eat, making shelters for them to live in, and keeping a fire burning in hope that a ship would see the smoke and come and rescue them. However, in the story the boys’ evil nature took over the best of them and they started acting like savages in order to get the necessities in order to survive. The boys’ human nature took over each of them and they started putting themselves before other people and losing their sense of civilization that had been beaten into them by society for their whole lives. When man is left to his natural nature without the pressure of worrying about impressing the society around them, man starts to live by his true human nature.The problem in the book is that the boys started only caring about themselves individually and even started to harm others in order to survive. It’s the classical tale of the theory of “survival of the fittest.” 

           Everyone has done something wrong, made a bad decision, or not helped someone when they could have. We all have flaws, and it’s because of our evil sinful nature that we cannot be deemed good people. Even though we have an innate evil nature to us, we still have the free will that God gave us to make the right decision when our inner-self wants us to make a bad decision. Humans have the ability to make choices and overcome their evil desires. There is no possible way to get rid of the sinful desires altogether. We as humans have no say in the matter of trying to change our biological human nature because it’s already been predestined to be our nature by God. The only change we can make is to make a decision to try to overcome the thoughts of our evil human nature and make the right choices in life.

And that was Lindsey's thought of the day, where Lindsey shares an Everyday Thought.