Humans are born basically good. It is Karen Horney's view that “people are essentially good” but in my personal opinion, I think that humans are in the borderline of it. Tendencies of them being good or evil or just depends. But if you were to ask me and am only allowed to choose between the two, I think I’ll be siding on that people are basically evil meaning here that I will be contradicting on Karen Horney statement. I’ll be talking about why I think humans are basically evil.
An example is in the Bible about Adam and Eve. The snake had convinced Eve to take and eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which God had forbid them not to take and eat it but eventually Eve gave in even persuading Adam to eat it as well. God was really angry and punished them and their children to suffer. My point in this example is that if people are basically good, they will not take and eat the fruit even if they are being persuaded to do it. They were basically evil because someone had persuaded them to do it and somehow this had made the evil inside them become agitated thus them ending up doing it.
Another example here is that every human are being conflicted with emotions and ideas of doing some bad things thus making me think that humans are basically evil. If they are not basically evil, they won’t be thinking of these kind of things nor even do it. Like now in this generation, some people do evil things. People say a result of this is because of their past experiences like growing up in an unhealthy family lifestyle, lack of parental love in Karen Horney’s case “basic evil”. Yes, it is reasonable but still if people are not basically evil even if they are under influences or living under unhealthy family conditions, they won’t be affected and will do right things.
So in my conclusion, I think humans are basically evil. If humans are basically good, they won’t be influenced to do it and will refuse because they know what is right and what is wrong and will choose the right thing coz of them basically being good. I know that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are very relative terms and there’s no real way of measuring this. Even if we were to agree upon what makes someone good or bad. I think the state of the world says a lot about human nature. There is no doubt we are violent, hateful people. We rarely care about our neighbor, and it has created a rather gloomy global society. But whether that is who we are or just how we sometimes act, is debatable.
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