#uma

The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news throughout history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value you put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today. That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.) Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. 'Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,' Kagan notes, 'they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.' This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, 'is a biological feature of our species. ↗

— Daniel Goleman

#human-nature #social-intelligence #anger

Too many people are endowed with a feeling of entitlement, but born without God-given empathy. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#pitfalls-of-the-human-race #truth-quotes #wisdom-quotes #empathy

I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation--which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about. ↗

— John Wyndham

#funny

They're butterflies because...well, he thought it was cool. They eat humans." -idk..... ↗

— Katsura Hoshino

#canibals #cool #d-gray #humans #humor

Piteous human insecurities make the world go round. ↗

— Thanos Grigoriou

#humor #insecurity #humor

Life deprived of beauty is not worthy of being called human. ↗

— Luis Barragan

#being #called #deprived #human #life

Since the war, we're the only intelligent species left in the universe, therefore we think everything in this universe has to conform to our paradigm of what makes sense. Do you have any idea how arrogant that view is and on how little of this universe we base it? ↗

— Robert Buettner

#conformity #grand-picture #human-behavior #human-superiority #humankind

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices. ↗

— Irvin D. Yalom

#human-nature #life #life

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet, ↗

— Stephen Hawking

#life #intelligence

Maybe I’m a human, but I’m a me-and-Ma as well. ↗

— Emma Donoghue

#jack #ma #thoughts-on-life #life