Are people born innately good or essentially evil?

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People are not born evil, they become evil when they consistently listen to the worst part of their nature. We have the capacity for altruism, and the capacity for selfishness. Being selfish is a natural thing, we’re all selfish in some ways, and altruistic in others. How and why we’re selfish or altruistic is the main component of what we call personality, there are so many variables in human attitudes that we can each be considered unique on that front alone.

Evil, however, is a state of affairs in which selfishness has compounded on itself for so long that good, the consistent deployment of altruism, cannot manifest. It’s bigger than a person, who still retains a personality and so is never completely 100% selfish all the time.

No, it takes a whole society to create evil. The evils of chattel slavery, of the Holocaust, of gang violence, of the American prison system, are when humans organize to bring order to selfishness, and that very order ends up turning human dignity into a resource to be bought and sold.

Things don’t start out evil, they slowly succumb to a long long slow crawl of vice and selfishness. And like the proverbial boiling frog, those caught in it don’t know they’re already burning in hell until it’s too late.