We are born neither good nor bad. These are abstract concepts that children cannot truly understand until they reach 9 or 10 years of age or even later.
Those concepts are being thought to them and they digest them without chewing mostly and they become adults who think they are good / bad people but they are not or they are both, sometimes good, sometimes bad.
Good does not exist without bad. I know people like to think that at their core they and everyone else is good, but you must know that the more you dig inside the more dirt you will find. I guess dirt is good… Sometimes.
If we would all be good then there would be no bad, nor good. We would just be. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?! But we need someone to be bad so that we can be good by comparison without realizing that the worst person in our lives is in the mirror… Under all that dirt.
However, that does not make us bad people. Like the facade we show off does not make us good either. We just are living the best way we figured out to do it.
We are not born accepting others or different people/ stuff. We have no notion of normal, same, different etc when we are born. Those are abstract notions that [insert whatever I said above].
Infants are cruel, just look at how they treat pets, not because they are bad, but because they do not know boundaries. Some parents do not know how to teach them boundaries, so they become adults that are either too guarded or too loose or too frustrated or too much or too little.
If you think babies are accepting and kind, but they are thought afterwards to be discriminatory and unkind, it’s not true. Just think about children that have grown all by themselves – I think I heard about one or two cases – they are neither of those things. It’s not parents that teach us to be discriminatory and defensive. It is life itself who does that and so many years of instincts that were passed down from generation to generation. Without parents or elders we might even lose the sense of community, just like elephants, and grow to think all other individuals of our species, as so different that we would not associate with them.
It is our survival instinct that makes us beware of different and unknown since those things depicted danger for most of history. Also, most animals are discrimatory based on skin/fur color. That’s why they rarely mingle even if biologically they could still reproduce and represent the same species.
Even so, discrimination amongst humans should not be encouraged as we have the means to understand we are not that different just because we look different. We do not act only on instincts. However, we should be aware of them and that having them is not a bad thing, but that we need not act on those instincts all the time. Sometimes different can really be dangerous: say a different type of mushroom or a slightly different fruit could be poisonous, and we should not eat it even if it is similar to something you ate before.
What we are born is ignorant, and need to be thought who we could be.
Only that we are not thought to find out who we are in the society, but how to fit in the society to have an easy, successful, happy life.
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