Human Nature Must Be Basically Bad

I was reading the NY Times report on the two Afghan detainees who died after being tortured by US military interrogators in 2002. The story made me absolutely heartsick. What a waste of a human life. It convinces me that God actually doesn't have a grander plan for us, and that if we're fucked up it's because we do it to ourselves (vs, like, because God is testing us), and that maybe there's more evil in the world than even an omnipotent power can handle. It's so unfair that a person had to go that way.

It made me think of how this civilized fiction we maintain is just a hair's breadth on this side of total chaos. Human nature inclines toward cruelty, it seems, and we're so quick to fall into it as soon as it looks like we won't have to pay the consequences. This is why in archaic times it was of paramount importance to be a fighter; how else were you to prevent these kinds of wrongs from happening to you, when people would beat and kill you just because they could? And that's why kinship was so important if you weren't a fighter; your family network, and their potential for revenge, was the only thing defending you from the brutality that is our nature.

This is all very Girardian, I know.

But it's something I've been giving a lot of thought to lately. I do believe there's something inherently sadistic about us, so that if we didn't have this rational fear of punishment, we'd all become a little like Alex in A Clockwork Orange (a movie I'm not a fan of, by the way). Well, maybe not all of us, but I suspect a surprisingly large number of us. I was thinking about this during all that time I've spent at Happy Donuts, which is patronized by a few regular vagrants. At first I felt bad for these people, because they were so lonely and unfortunate. Then one of them tried to talk to me, and I just got scared because he clearly wasn't playing with a full deck of cards - and I don't know, there's something frightening about the world when the rational principle is taken out of it. And then I saw this same vagrant waiting for the bus in the dark, and it occurred to me suddenly that he had much more to fear from me than I from him. He was alone, and no one would miss him; whereas I was loved and protected. If it wasn't for the police and the social contract (a concept that Girard roundly rejects, incidentally), there would be nothing to stop a sadistic person from beating him or making him the victim of cruel entertainment. Because that's essentially what happened to the US soldiers in Afghanistan and their prisoners. The opportunity presented itself for consequence-free violence; and what happens? The soldiers immediately turn into animals, such that civilized people hardly even recognize.

In light of this phenomenon, I wonder if charity isn't a freakishly unnatural impulse, instead of the default one. Far from feeling sorry for the unfortunate and wanting to help them, maybe it's more intuitive to want to take advantage of the situation, and beat them and get rid of them. What a grim thought. Well, I'm very lucky to have the family and friends and community that I have. I didn't really do anything to deserve them, seeing as I'd be too weak to be a survivor if the world were to return to a state of nature tomorrow. Violence and human fates have such random courses, and when I consider that, all I can say is that I'm very, very lucky.