I've had this weird thought stuck in my head over the past few months as I've been reading "Humankind" and watching the horrors of politics and the pandemic:
The idea of "human nature"—good and evil—makes a hell of a lot more sense if you think of humans as a colony species where each tribe is a single individual competing against others.
It's not so much that humans are uniformly capable of both good and evil. It's that what we deem "good" is mostly how we treat our own tribe and what we call "evil" is how we treat others. It's like trying to decide if an arm mostly good or mostly evil because it washes its own body and strikes other people. Those actions are fundamentally different—on incompatible moral levels—because the former is done to the arm's own organism and the latter to another.
It may not even be meaningful to try to aggregate how we behave to our in-group and how we behave towards our out-group into any unified metric.
May I offer an alternative/supplemental approach: rather than thinking of the situation from the perspective of a human within a tribe, analyze the system from the perspective of an ~alien who is outside the system. Treat it like a standard systems analysis exercise: isolate, decompose, and abstract the various objects within the system. So what was formerly a person, is now an agent running a sophisticated yet obviously hilariously flawed biological neural network, running on top of a similarly flawed set of data...and so forth and so on.
I find that from this perspective, all the pieces start to fit together the more you think of it. Not only does what we are living through increasingly make sense, after a while it starts to seem logically inevitable (under present conditions, that is).
And once you spend sufficient time on this phase, ideas might start falling out of the sky on how to plausibly rectify the situation.
Do we have any hope of ever treating all of humanity as our in group? Ideally we should treat people who are infected with dangerous ideas not as enemies, but as we would treat sick members of our tribe.
The idea of "human nature"—good and evil—makes a hell of a lot more sense if you think of humans as a colony species where each tribe is a single individual competing against others.
It's not so much that humans are uniformly capable of both good and evil. It's that what we deem "good" is mostly how we treat our own tribe and what we call "evil" is how we treat others. It's like trying to decide if an arm mostly good or mostly evil because it washes its own body and strikes other people. Those actions are fundamentally different—on incompatible moral levels—because the former is done to the arm's own organism and the latter to another.
It may not even be meaningful to try to aggregate how we behave to our in-group and how we behave towards our out-group into any unified metric.