65. It's Just Human Nature—Or Is It?

How can we solve the problem of greed? Ask nearly anyone, and they will likely say, “You can’t. It’s just human nature.” Most people seem to think that being greedy or violent is just who we are.

But the choice to be pessimistic about human nature is just that—a choice. And a regressive one at that.

And today I want to talk about why: how pessimism about human nature supports authoritarian governments and capitalist accumulation. How it keeps us on a track to destroy the very foundation of our life, our beautiful Earth. And how it is the secular version of an ancient Christian belief that the Western world has steeped in for fifteen hundred years.

It starts with Hobbes

The modern story begins with Thomas Hobbes. He was an English philosopher living in France in the 1640s to escape the chaos and violence of the English Civil War. After the war, in 1651, he published a book called Leviathan, which he expected would solve all the violence of his time. But to his surprise, almost everyone hated it.

What he offered was a vision so grim it horrified everyone.

The “state of nature”

Hobbes argued that the natural state of human beings is violence. People are so selfish and acquisitive by nature, he said, that we are driven to steal everything we can from others and try to kill them. We are in a state of perpetual war, he said, “a war of every man against every man.” And then came his famous line. If nobody stops us, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

To be clear, life in the time of Hobbes did look rather brutal. The English Civil War had raged on and off for a decade, with Parliamentarians fighting Royalists to limit the power of the king. Hundreds of thousands of people in Britain had died. Hobbes, always and forever a Royalist, had been horrified by the rabble and had sailed to France, living near the English royal family in Paris, even tutoring the teenage Prince Charles.

But life in Europe also looked grim, for Europeans were fighting the Thirty Years’ War over religion, and by the time it ended, a fifth of Europe’s people would be dead.

And a less visible violence was also going on in England. Wealthy landowners were seizing pieces of land that had been used in common by the peasants and converting the land to their own private use—and private profit. Whole villages had been displaced from their homes, with masses of people trying to find work in the cities. The wealthy had stolen what had belonged to all, and now rates of violence and theft around the country were exploding.

As far as Hobbes could see, all was indeed theft and violence.

The solution: An absolute monarch!

So Hobbes offered his solution: give the king more power! Only an absolute monarch, he thought, can keep people from slitting each other’s throats.

He proposed what he called a social contract: people agree to give up some of their personal power to a strong ruler, and then the ruler has the authority he needs to prevent people from destroying each other, for we can’t do it ourselves; we are murderous to our core.

It is important to say that this was the first time in Western history that such a dismal view of human nature was put into print. And most people hated it.

But it goes way back

But it is also important to say that Hobbes’s vision was only an exaggeration of the negative view of human nature that people in Europe and Britain already held, for both Catholics and Protestants began with the doctrine of original sin, the idea that human beings are sinful at their core. Hobbes was merely stating it boldly and inserting an equivalent idea into secular philosophy.

The doctrine of original sin came from Augustine, a bishop and philosopher in the late Roman Empire of the early 400s CE.

Augustine also lived during a chaotic period of war and violence, just as the power of Rome was crumbling. When he was a young man, at the formative stage of his career, Christianity had been made the official religion of the empire, and Augustine spent the rest of his life thinking about how Christianity might save an empire. His doctrine of original sin would become central.

Christians had always believed that human beings are prone to wrongdoing—the fall of Adam and Eve showed the tendency—but Augustine pushed it further. He famously said, “We cannot not sin.” It’s more than just a tendency, he said; it’s a state of being that we inherit from Adam and Eve. We sin just because we are born.

Now think for a moment about what this means. If people really are powerless to be good in and of themselves, it means they need some outside force to make them good. So that is what the church became.

Augustine’s idea of powerless human beings ensured the need for a powerful church to save them.1

Original sin was the Genesis story of the fall on steroids: the idea of human failing filtered through the power of Empire.

Violent people need authoritarian rule

And here’s the thing: When you start with a pessimistic view of human nature, the solution is almost always strong central power. The link holds true in other places and times as well.

For instance, the Confucian philosopher Xunzi, who lived in China in the 300s BCE, taught that human nature is “detestable,” and he too supported a strong monarchy.2 No surprise, he too lived in a time of perpetual conflict, the Warring States period.

And the link holds true in our time too. Think Project 2025, whose authors come out of American evangelicalism and conservative Catholicism, both of which teach the doctrine of original sin. Project 2025 is a blueprint for purging from American life, through authoritarian rule, everything that its authors think of as sin.

When you start with sinful people, authoritarianism becomes your only playbook.

The predecessor to Project 2025 was of course Vice President Dick Cheney, who worked for decades behind the scenes to expand presidential power. And where did Cheney get his conviction that we need strong central power? He said that his favorite political philosopher was Thomas Hobbes.

Which is all to say that being pessimistic about human nature has political consequences, not just personal ones. Yes, at the individual level being cynical about human nature is a dead end. It leads people to rationalize bad behavior and unjust systems—as if human beings are simply unable to do any better. It tempts people to despair, to give up looking for solutions, and then to get frustrated and angry about how things are.

But believing human beings are selfish and violent helps to shore up undemocratic political systems as well. It’s exactly where authoritarians begin.

Holding a bleak view of human nature plays right into their hands.

It serves capitalism too

And here’s another political consequence. Believing that people are basically selfish is the bedrock of capitalism too. Because the philosopher who wrote the bible on capitalism, Adam Smith, picked up Hobbes’s idea from a century earlier and began his defense of capitalism right there—with selfish, warring individuals.

But Smith put a new, modern twist on it. Being selfish, he said, isn’t a bad thing after all! To the contrary, if every man pursues his own self-interest, everyone will benefit! Because self-interest is the engine of the market, and if everyone pursues it equally, the market itself will hum along nicely and keep everyone in balance.

It was an epic sleight-of-hand that Smith accomplished—turning conventional ideas of social and antisocial behavior upside down. Selfishness had always been seen as a sin because it harms others, eroding our connections with them. But if, as Adam Smith said, following your own interests doesn’t actually hurt other people, then why not do more of it?

The wealthy of the eighteenth century who were itching to exploit every new market jumped on Smith’s idea, eager to believe that enriching themselves at the expense of others might somehow magically help society too.

It was a monumental shift in morality. Smith made selfishness sexy.

Or, to put it another way, he sacralized self-interest. He started with the idea that selfishness is natural, and he pronounced it good.

Thanks to his magic, we have an economic system that defies every commonsense principle of good relationships. Instead of rewarding reciprocity, it rewards profit. Instead of incentivizing equality and justice, it incentivizes self-interest and exploitation—of other people and of Earth. Every ecological mess we are making, from destroying forests to damaging the oceans to depleting the soil and heating the air, owes something to Smith and his sorcery.

And if we feel helpless to change this system it’s because the system itself teaches us that greed, after all, is “only human nature.”

Which means that the first step toward a world beyond capitalism is withdrawing our consent from that belief.

So, who are we?

Does this mean we aren’t selfish and violent? Clearly we are sometimes, but that’s not all we are. We are also by nature kind and compassionate, fair-minded, and generous. Nature made us complicated.

The problem comes when we think selfishness or violence is all we are—that it’s the primary core of us. Or, to paraphrase Augustine, when we think we “cannot not be greedy.”

People in other societies often hold a more balanced view. We are multifaceted, they say. We can choose.

Two matching birds

I think of an ancient text from India called the Mundaka Upanishad, which includes a few verses that go like this—and I’m paraphrasing:

Two matching birds sit in the exact same tree. One bird feels isolated and alone, scrambling to satisfy all its desires, endlessly competing, because it thinks that every being is separate from all other beings.

This bird, the text says, is miserable.

The other bird holds a far different view. It feels connected to all other beings because it is in touch with the source of love and joy. It recognizes that source inside itself, and it sees that the very same source of love and joy dwells within every other creature too, even in “a clump of grass.”

Which bird will you identify with? asks the text. Choose wisely. If we choose the isolated bird, our lives will remain hemmed in by winning and losing, and we will feel that we are never quite making it. But identify with the bird that sees the source existing within all, the text says, “and you will be freed from sorrow.”

We look so separate that it’s hard to remember we’re so connected

Because this right here is the crux of the matter: we are all connected. We share the same source of life. We are in fact one planet, wheeling through space as a single living organism.

But in everyday life we look so separate from others. We are born with individual bodies, thinking separate thoughts, and we spend a great deal of our lives learning what makes us unique. So it’s very easy to forget that we are all shoots of the same great tree of life and our own happiness and welfare depends on the happiness and welfare of all others.

We are connected through the soil, through the streams, through the atmosphere and oceans. We are one organism.

Cultures that are wise choose customs and laws that nudge people toward caring and generosity. They build social systems that continually remind people how connected they are to all others. They expect people to treat each other with decency and respect, which makes it easier for people to do so.

Keeping the idiot thought in check

I think of the Aboriginal people of Australia. Tyson Yunkaporta writes in his book Sand Talk that his people designed their customs and laws over thousands of years to keep one thought in check.

That thought is: “I am greater than you, you are less than me.”

Tyson calls it “the most destructive idea in existence,” the “original sin” of thoughts because it sets a whole cascade of evil into motion. Every possible misery follows when we give in to the thought that others exist to serve us.

Aboriginal society recognizes the danger of this thought, he says, so they put “massive checks and balances” on it. Because everybody, he says, “has a bit of idiot in them from time to time.”

Notice how he talks about it—not that we’re enslaved to this tendency or that we’re powerless in the face of it. No, we just give in now and then to being idiots.

Aboriginal society, he says, tries to make it harder for people to follow idiot thoughts and easier for them to choose respect and kindness. For example, he says, when there is a group decision to be made, his people insist that all voices be heard. In every kind of trade or exchange, people must practice reciprocity and fairness. And if people disagree and, in the worst case, do come to blows, the winner of a fight must have the same injuries inflicted on his body as he inflicted on the loser, just to remember that he is no different from his opponent. In all these ways, Aboriginal society creates incentives for people to act with respect and love. To keep their idiot thoughts in check.

Just the opposite of our choices

Which is just the opposite of what my culture has done. In capitalism we reward the most antisocial behavior possible—the urge to become greater than others. Our economic laws are written to support competition and greed because they grow from the assumption that we are separate, not connected. Our system rewards our worst tendencies. No wonder we are threatening our own survival on Earth!

The solution is moving beyond capitalism. Choosing new rules to live by, laws that remind us we are connected to all others on Earth. The Western world has much to learn from Indigenous cultures, who have been making and following such laws for many centuries.

I am thinking of an economics professor named Ronald Trosper, of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. Ronald writes about changing the rules of capitalism, and he takes his model from the potlatch.

The potlatch system

The potlatch is an economic system traditionally practiced by people of the Pacific Northwest coast in North America. The tribes adopted it originally—or so one chief said—to solve the problem of killing each other over land. In other words, they recognized people’s tendency to compete and become violent, so they passed some new laws to keep it in check.

In the potlatch system, every village is composed of different houses, and each house is headed by a chief. Each house has its own hunting and fishing territory, and people are strictly forbidden from taking anything outside of their own territory.

Chiefs and their houses spend a few years gathering and preserving the wealth of their own territory, and then they host a communal feast, inviting as many houses and villages as they can possibly support. They provide all the food, and in addition they lavish the guests with blankets and other gifts they have spent years crafting.

In the very public atmosphere of the feast, all the gifts are carefully counted and recorded. This is a fierce competition, after all, to see who can be the most generous

Giving away generously shows that a chief and his house have been good stewards of their territory; they have treated the more-than-human relatives with respect, and their house wins more honor and political power. Others will treat them generously at future feasts.

If people are not lavish in their gifts, everyone will know that their house is mistreating its salmon and berry relatives, and the house will lose respect and prestige.

Required sharing

The potlatch system is a law of required sharing. It essentially makes every chief and his house a part owner of every other chief’s territory. It is masterfully designed to match human behavior to the reality of the natural world—that we are connected to all others. It helps people remember what in everyday life is not at all obvious—that we are indelibly connected, and having enough depends on others having enough too.

And, as it turns out, when people are required to share, they use their land in the best possible ways. When honor and prestige depend on how much you give away, you consume as little as possible so you have more to share. Which helps the animals and plants of your area because they are being gathered sparingly, and they respond by multiplying abundantly.

Because, as it turns out, gathering a small amount of a population—say, of salmon—stimulates the others of that group to increase their numbers. Using the gifts of the salmon wisely keeps them returning in generous numbers year after year.

A potlatch corporate system

Ronald Trosper thinks the potlatch could be adapted to modern organizations such as corporations and nonprofits. It would mean requiring organizations within a given region—for example, a watershed—to share a portion of their profits with each other.

Why would CEOs be willing to give up some of their profits to their competitors? Because your competitors have to share their profits with you. You own a share of their surplus, as they do of yours.

Which only matches reality, after all. In a watershed, “everyone lives downstream.”

We can thrive on Earth only by thriving together. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “All of our flourishing is mutual.”

A better worldview

We need a better worldview. The old idea that human beings are primarily violent or greedy is a lie.

The truth, instead, is that we show our worst selves when we forget that we are connected with others. And that we act with respect, compassion, kindness, and generosity when we remember how solid are our connections to all others on Earth, sharing one soil, one water, one atmosphere, one Earth.

So wise cultures design their laws and customs to help people remember. This is the power of a worldview—to tell people how the world is so they can act in alignment with reality. Our current worldview is profoundly dysfunctional. We need a better one.

We need better laws, to help us remember connection.

We need laws to ensure that we share with others. We have such laws now, and we call them “taxes,” but sharing can be conceptualized and practiced in many ways.

We need laws that require sharing power as well. It will mean dismantling the authoritarian hierarchy of capitalism, where a few wealthy people, the owners, get to decide what everyone else’s energy will be used for. It will mean introducing democracy to the workplace, such as through worker-owned cooperatives.

We need laws that require us to practice reciprocity with our more-than-human kin. Preserving a livable planet will mean changing the rules of commerce so we take from our more-than-human relatives only as much as we need. When we care for the soil it will replenish. When we care for the oceans, the fish and corals can multiply. When we stop burning fossil fuels, the atmosphere can heal.

It’s time to think better of ourselves

That old excuse, “It’s just human nature,” is the foundation of the most destructive worldview the Earth has ever known.

Saving ourselves means adopting a better worldview—one that allows us to see ourselves differently. One that expects us to be kind and supports us in acting that way. And therefore one that dismantles the power of authoritarians and oligarchs, who possess such extreme power in the first place because our laws encourage it—because those laws begin in the idea that people are ruthless and competitive.

It’s time to think better of ourselves. We need a new social contract, one that encourages and supports the generous spirit inside all of us. When people feel connected—when they are aware of being held and supported by others—they usually can’t wait to share with them. They are eager to show the kindness and generosity and love bubbling up from within.

That source of love and joy lives within each of us, as the ancient verse of the Upanishad says, even in a clump of grass.

Wishing you the joy present in flowers and grasses,
the generosity of the morning sun,
and the courage of birds preparing for a long, long flight.

May we be brave enough to see ourselves differently and choose wiser and more generous ways of treating each other.

Notes

¹ I told the story of Hobbes and Augustine more fully in Kissed by a Fox, chap. 4—and how this pessimistic view of human nature crept into Darwin’s work too, influencing how he thought evolution worked.

² Although, to be clear, everyone around him supported it too. A strong monarchy was the only option at that place and time.

For diving deeper

For more on Hobbes and Smith and Augustine and how this negative view of human nature migrated into our views of all of nature, see my Kissed by a Fox, chap. 4.

For more on Indigenous worldviews, check out this inspiring conversation on The Holy Wild podcast, where Victoria Loorz interviews Four Arrows, an adopted relative of the Lakota, who talks about how “it’s only human nature” gets used to rationalize all the systems we don’t want: “Indigenous Worldview Can Preserve Our Existence, with Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs),” Holy Wild, April 18, 2025.

Quotes from Leviathan come from chap. 13, available online at Project Gutenberg.

For the idea that Hobbes was reiterating, in secular form, the theological positions of Luther and Calvin on fallen human nature, see Helen Thornton, State of Nature or Eden? Thomas Hobbes and His Contemporaries on the Natural Condition of Human Beings (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005).

Joseph Cropsey argued in Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (1957) that Smith began with Hobbes’s assumptions about human nature. The book is available at the Internet Archive.

Read about Xunzi in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

For more on how Dick Cheney worked behind the scenes in Washington for 30 years to give presidents undreamed-of power, check out this Frontline episode from 2007: “How Dick Cheney Worked to Expand Executive Power: Cheney’s Law.”

The Upanishad passage is Mundaka 3.1–4. I especially like the translation of Eknath Easwaran, The Upanishads (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 2007), 192–93, and the “freed from sorrow” quote is his translation. But a very traditional translation comes from Swami Gambhirānanda, Eight Upanishads (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1982), 2:143–50, available at Internet Archive. That translation also includes a commentary by Sankaracarya, who talked of the source of love and joy being found everywhere, even in “a clump of grass.”

Tyson Yunkaporta’s words about the idiot in each of us are found in Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (HarperOne, 2020), in the chapter titled “Albino Boy.”

For more on the potlatch, see Ronald Trosper, “Incentive Systems That Support Sustainability: A First Nations Example,” Conservation Ecology 2, no. 2 (1998). His most recent book is Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands (Univ. of Arizona Press, 2022).

Robin Wall Kimmerer relates the experiment that she and her graduate student Laurie designed to test the idea held by traditional Potawatomi basketmakers that harvesting a little of the sweetgrass causes more of it to grow. The idea was laughable to the university faculty overseeing Laurie’s thesis, but their faces changed when she produced her results. The only plots of sweetgrass that did not thrive were the ones she had left completely untouched. See Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed, 2013), 156–66. The quote is from 166.