Human Nature

If you consider both ancient and more recent history, humans have been brutish to both the world around them and each other.

The history we are aware of demonstrates our thin veneer of civilization.

In the some of our great early literature, we see the Greeks, after they take Troy, systematically throwing the Trojans they didn't enslave off the walls of the city.

The bible itself is full of brutal acts, the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, the many wars where they were defeated by the Empires of the time.

Rome, conquered much of the known world, murdering and enslaving the lands they vanquished.

Of course we don't have to go back that far, we have the subjugation of many native populations by the Europeans, the World Wars, the Nazis, the Stalinist Gulags and the genocides in many parts of the World that are still happening.

We may think we are civilized, but all of these events were recorded because we had civilization.  Its not hard to imagine brutality and bullying were with us from the start.

Many experiments have been conducted which show that educated, civilized people can inflict harm on others when authority figures tell them its OK.

The simple fact is that human nature reveals itself under duress and generally it isn't very nice.

Yes, we are also altruistic, we are nothing if not full of contradictions.  If however you look at war zones and how we easily ignore the atrocities in them, at least most of us, you see that civilization is in fact paper thin.

We see a move in this country to hate and terror, not from outside extremists only, but native groups expressing hate against changes they don't like.  Immigrants, refugees, minorities, and others are the victims of this hate and we as a nation need to combat it.

Unfortunately our leadership actually embraces it, it promotes their ideology.

We need to overcome hate and never forget it is always right there.