From: spiritual energy on
In another forum some teenage kid asked the question: Why is humanity
really so corrupt?

Several nice responses were generated to this question:

1. People wanna be on top at all costs

2. Maybe because we were made by microsoft. But honestly its becuase
of Darwin's theory of evolution, where everything is based on SURVIVAL
OF THE FITTEST (also called natural selection). We have traits that
are required for our species to survive.

3. I guess it is because we see ourselves as creatures of free will,
we were taught this all our lives, and still the human race can not
escape the fact that we are animals, and as all other animals we have
the same basic instincts and desires.

Sadly we are also able to think of ways to get to what we desire,
morals and ethics are taught by the place we stem from in the world,
but they do not replace the basic instrincts, when these collide
morals and ethics have a high chance of getting the boot.

Oh on top of that we have to remember genetic imperfections insanity
and personality disorderes, these are usually partly genetical (to say
the least). ALOT of people have mental problems, these come in a wide
array and are rarely purely negative tho.

Last but not least... Humans are far from as Intelligent as they are,
If you try to study them, and their behavior it shows quite fast, the
Human mind is lacking! It can not comprehend alot of "wrongs". It has
rarely foresight, humans are stupid by nature, they really are.

4. I don't think that humans are inherently self-destructive. But I
would see SOME possible merit in the idea that we're "too smart for
our own good". More specifically, in the idea that our technological
development has so immensely exceeded any changes to US.

Humans have changed very little over the many thousands of years.
We're essentially the same as the people who hunted woolly mammoths
and wrote on ancient cave walls. But the way we innovate
technologically and utilize the stored knowledge of past generations
has recently led to an INSANE amount of technological innovation that
has drastically changed the way people live. And the result is this
kind of disconnect between what we are, and the world in which we have
built for ourselves. Many of us still think as if we were living in
early history, except that instead of spears and rocks we have AK-47s
and atomic bombs.

Luckily we are a highly adaptable species, so we adapted to live as
things changed at an insanely fast rate. But adapting to a new
environment doesn't really make us different people. I think that
today's racist is someone who (in a long gone time) may have been
praised by his tribe for mercilessly defending the tribe against
outsiders. But the same attitudes that worked thousands of years ago
in a small tribal setting may not work so well in a huge society such
as the ones we have today. The racist is exercising a totally natural
need to hate "the other guy". He simply has just failed to adapt his
concept of "the other guy" to fit in with modern society.

Have you ever read David Wong's article about "The Monkeysphere"?
Well, I think that a lot of that is going on. We simply were NOT
mentally designed to live in societies consisting of millions of
people. Or god forbid, a global society of six billion people. We're
still slaves to our biology, and our biology sort of directs us to
seek out small groups. Once we have to start dealing with thousands of
strangers on a daily basis, we sort of just go a little bit insane.
It's just that some people handle this insanity better than others.
Some people get stressed out and relieve their stress by shooting
people in a videogame, while others dress up in hoods and go out to
kill blacks and gays.