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ArgumentThe crooked timber of humanity
Selfishness, amour-propre, and aggression never quite fade: laws and morality are dams, not cures.
Supports
Freud, Hobbes, Pascal · · 1930
- Look at what men do the moment constraint and the gaze of others fall away: pillage, cruelty, war reappear at every collapse of order. What resurfaces so constantly is no accident of history.
- Even our best conduct is undermined from within: beneath generosity, the need to be loved or admired; beneath displayed virtue, an seeking itself. The dark part is not outside, it inhabits us.
- So the dams that hold us, laws, mores, institutions, do not cure this nature: they contain it. Let them loosen, and what they held back returns.
Therefore So man is not an angel whom society brought low, but a 'crooked timber' that nothing quite straightens: a livable common life demands reckoning with this depth, not betting on a primal goodness.
How far does this reasoning convince you?
Not at all
Entirely