On the Nature of Man and Self-Actualization
I always get great blog ideas during the day. Or at least I think they’re great blog ideas. Perhaps they’re just nonsensical thoughts that run through my head transiently because by the time I actually get to a computer to write them down, I can never remember them.
But this particular subject has been brewing up in the noggin for a few days and I saw part of a show that gave me a way to tie it all together.
We’ve all heard the argument that violence in media causes violent behavior. Whether it’s video games or movies or toy guns or whatever, just letting a kid have eye-contact with a weapon is said to send ideas of death through his head and bloodlust boiling through his veins. But is that really true? Is that the cause of it? Or merely a catalyst acting to set off something that is already there?
I’ll just come right out and say that I think violence is a catalyst, not a root cause, which it is often painted as. You know what I mean: “If ONLY guns were harder to get! If ONLY the kid hadn’t played as much HALO! If ONLY they hadn’t seen the Matrix! Etc etc etc.” It’s easy to confuse catalyst and cause.
So if not these violent things, what IS the cause for such violent behavior as 9/11, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and Virginia Tech shootings?
I would say the answer is simple: man is evil.
Or rather, man is naturally more prone to evilness than to goodness.
Is that so hard to believe? Most people RECOIL from that idea. “Man is basically EVIL!? NO! I refuse to believe it! Mankind is basically good!” Heck, even I don’t like to think about that. Who WANTS to believe the worst about something? But the proof is in the pudding, as it were. Either way, this idea, that man is basically inherently good, permeates our culture. Abraham Maslow was the first in recent history to push the idea with his philosophy. He basically asserted that Mankind is basically good and that human beings will acheive perfection through greater education and “self-actualization.” This is the idea that people who do ‘evil’ things such as kill kids with a shot gun or use airplanes to blow up skyscrapers do so out of sheer ignorance influenced by their bad circumstances. Somewhere along the way, this basically good human was turned bad by some wrong information taught to him/her or by some poor circumstances and thus they kill and maim and rape and become the dregs of society.
You hear this way of thinking all of the time without even realizing it! What’s the first thing that happens when a kid blows away his classmates? Or actually, lets take 9/11. What happened? What were the questions asked? “What happened to those poor men to make them think blowing up the World Trade Center would be a good thing?” “What did we do to create that anger in them?” “What circumstances were these men placed into to make them do that?”
In essence, Maslow’s philosphy is thus: There is no moral or ethical absolutes (because there is no God), mankind is basically good, but man is corrupted by his imperfect surroundings and is simply a product of his brain’s input, rather than the choices he makes when faced with those surroundings.
It really flies in the face of what the Bible teaches which is: There ARE moral and ethical absolutes (set by God), mankind is basically EVIL, corrupted by his OWN decisions when PRESENTED with a certain CHOICE.
So when these liberals start to talk about how poor Johnny was molested by his dad as a kid and liked to play Grand Theft Auto and religiously watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre and THAT’S why he took a semi-auto to the halls of his highschool, I can’t help but be frustrated. That awful stuff MAY have happened to that kid but that doesn’t excuse his behavior, it doesn’t explain why, it just states how.
So I feel silly asking the who’s and why’s when the root problem is never addressed because it’s inconvenient to acknowledge the truth.
Which is really the problem, isn’t it? Deny the truth, deny God and deny the fact that man is basically evil.
Because IF man is basically evil then man cannot fix himself. And if man cannot fix himself then he needs a Savior. And if man needs a Savior then we have to acknowledge God. And if we have to acknowledge God, we also have to acknowledge that we need to do what he says is right to do. Which is extremely uncomfortable for people to think about, which and only further serves to prove that WE ARE depraved beings (constantly seeking to be disobedient).
So you see the drawing factor in continuing to live in denial about all this: continuing to assume that mankind will achieve perfection through education, evolution and actualization. That man needs no God because WE are gods ourselves.
Anyways, this is long. Sorry. But before it’s done, something to consider:
Are we truly becoming more civilized? Or are we simply becoming more efficient at being evil? The last 100 years have been THE BLOODIEST in human history. Well over a quarter billion dead to various wars and political ideologies (Nazism, Atheism, Communism). How is that self-actualizing towards perfection? Mankind is evil because of our sin nature. How can mankind solve a problem that runs as deep as our own nature? We can’t. That’s the whole philosophical point of the Old Testament.
Man is truly capable of anything he sets his mind to as God himself admits. There are undeniable good things man has done. We’ve all heard that: “man is capable of both great good and terrible evil.” But which of those are because of our fallen nature? And which is owed to the trace of a good God that we all have inside of us?
Well, I’d actually have to disagree with you on this because I think there’s another way to look at it.
Your premise is that man is evil, but I’m of the opinion that man is at his core, good. It is Culture and the nature of a fallen world and fallen humanity that create the evil in us, not Man himself.
You mentioned Maslow’s philosophy which says “Mankind is basically good and that human beings will acheive perfection through greater education and self-actualization.” I don’t believe this to be right either because it assumes to ignore the presence of God and the circumstances that have caused Man to be fallen. Its the common idea of modern socialist political theory, stating that a 100% equal society is possible and all we have to do is enforce it on the people. This is the philosophy commonly held by the left in the US these days. It fails to consider the reality of our world, especially when explained through a Christian world view. (i.e. - Man is fallen)
My reasons for believing that Man is good at his core is probably hard to understand. Its a lot of things, and starts with God calling his creation good. And perhaps we’re even saying the same thing and don’t know it.
I feel that if you were somehow able to take a human, brand new, and put them in a place completely seperated from any Man-created culture, you would find the good nature in him. Its something that exists in us all, and we are constantly searching for it, looking for glimpses of it, but it constantly escapes us. I think it escapes us because of Culture. If we really understood Culture and its effect on humanity, the effects of socialized behavior on a person, we would understand how this causes us to be evil. (Not saying it would fix us, just would help us understand fallenness more. ) You see, I think that somewhere in the vague definition of what fallenness truly is, you find the fact that our culture keeps us in that state. I can’t look at fallenness as some magical spell put on us long ago, but rather I look at it as an entirely likely situation that took humanity and its socialization down a one-way road that we cannot recover from.
As usual, Parker, we agree on a lot of things, and I know there’s much similarity in our opinions of this. Perhaps we should talk about it sometime, and perhaps its just our semantics that separate our opinions of the nature of man. I’ll save the rest for another time.