‘Man’s nature is evil; goodness is the result of conscious activity.’ This is the first line from Hsun Tzu’s Man’s Nature is Evil. I strongly agree with this philosopher such that people without a modicum of knowledge of ‘Good vs Evil’ when left unchecked will always act in their own self interest/s. He masterfully uses the analogy of ‘warped wood’ on the first page of the PDF to liken that to how people act. I thought about his argument along the following lines as well; to do good, you must know good.
I think my beliefs link up with his especially well starting on the next page, where he criticizes the belief of Mencius such that people are able to learn because they are inherently good natured. Tsu makes what i believe to be a strong distinction between nature and the idea of ‘conscious activity’ (the idea of using effort to think about something). People are not born knowing what is good or evil, they are taught these ideas by ‘sages’ or other people in their lives.
In recent times, we’ve seen evil nature from people in our own community. A week ago I had seen a middle age women pull up her truck in front of a store to load up several boxes of toilet paper and disinfectant wipes. People were jeering at her because she and her husband in the truck didn’t give a rip about others; regardless of the store’s ‘1 per person policy’. Crisis seems to bring the most out of people i find; i was really too young to see it with 9/11, but I can see it with this pandemic. It allows us to see who’s a man/women of the people, who are trying to just get by, and those trying to profit/gain from this terrible situation. Extremes bring out extremes, but the worst part of all this is that we haven’t even started to flatten the infection curve!