Our Basic Nature is Goodness

I approach life with the assumption that people act with good intent. This is not wishful thinking, it’s an observation. Look at how we proceed through life and through history. It seems each human life repeats the progress of our species.

We all have desires, dreams, goals we’re reaching toward. But the focus of what we want changes depending on where we are in our growth trajectory. We start with a core need for physical and emotional survival. We learn how to get by in a world we are grappling to understand, and as our basic needs are met, we’re drawn to something more. As we learn the basic skills of school, work, and career, we also explore our needs for creativity and engagement, topics and activities that interest and excite us. And, of course, we feel the strong need to connect with others in bonds of friendship, community, and love.

As we walk through life, all of these needs are continually pulled by a moral gravity to higher orders of consciousness. While our early efforts are directed toward ourselves, maturity brings an expansion outward. We’re no longer satisfied with only selfish concerns, our focus grows to include the welfare of others. Anyone who reaches a basic level of maturity strives to enhance the world for others, to make the world a better place.

This matches the growth trajectory of human history on a grander scale. Over the millennia, an innate drive has pulled us constantly toward greater freedom, fairness, and interconnection. From warring tribes to nation states to an interdependent global economy, each evolutionary step required a critical mass of common conviction that more freedom, more equality, more collaboration, more recognition that working together for a larger community was better for us all.  Modern society could not function if the vast majority of us did not act honestly, morally, and with concern for our neighbors.

I’m not blind to the atrocities of our age that sprout alongside our progress. Our world still has senseless wars and tribal genocides; enslaved labor and sex trafficking; a drug addiction industry fueled by brutal cartels; systems of wealth creation that lavish obesity on a tiny few while masses live on crumbs. There is evil in all of this, and it angers me. But the evil is in our actions, not in our nature, and actions change as we mature. Not every human step is in alignment with our goodness, in our individual lives or at the grander scale. But the direction of the bigger picture clear – the pull of moral gravity is greater than our depravity. Our missteps are swept up with our mercies, large and small, into a tangled, blessed mess that has no choice but to roll in the direction of our basic goodness.

I don’t look for who to blame. Yes, there are those whose basic goodness is so clouded by distortions it is difficult to see, most tragically, even by themselves. I try not to spend my vital energy lamenting these outliers. Everyone is somewhere on their own growth trajectory, fighting demons and trauma wounds inside a tangle of their own. I acknowledge all the misguided steps we’ve taken, theirs and mine; I realize we learn best through our mistakes, even though they can cause great suffering; I work to repair the damage that we’ve done and get us back on track.

Our species is maturing. I sense we are at a juncture where old systems are giving way to something new, something better. Such transitions frighten us because the scope of change is so great and the disruption so destructive. I want my growth to match that of our species. I do that best when I look for where I see our goodness growing and add my efforts there.

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash