Often we discussed about not having a fixed mindset (Dweck), that proved to be very difficult for me until the very end of this course. Even now, writing this, I am frustrated for some reason. It is probably because I am so intent on having answers to everything. Yet, I learned I have to give up my mere true beliefs, see them as wrong, and start from scratch in order to achieve something here.
In order to collect my knowledge, I began with the humanities. John Locke and Thomas Hobbes philosophies on the nature of man started our course off in an interesting way. With Locke, we understood that it was through gained experience that contribute to ones behavior. Yet, with Hobbes, he believed that everyone was born bad, that everyone has a war-like behavior. Here we talked about different issues like bad language, it being intentional to hurt or part of a sub-culture. We discussed movies like Pulp Fiction and discovered that desperation often times makes people bad. The case of Nelson Mandela was discussed, although he went against his own government, people look to him as a hero rather than a villain, and this was because of his situation, status, and his goal.
Moving on to the knowledge of the Social Sciences, I was able to see that there are reasons why humans may act "bad." Instead of trying to find evidence to place blame on peoples actions, the social sciences were able to find the causes of these actions. With the social sciences I learned that humans can be situationally bad. I learned that people can become bad based on the effects of different variables. I also learned that humans can become bad when they abuse power/privilege/authority (Zimbardo).
Last but not least, the Natural Sciences helped me better understand the theme and conclusions I was trying to come up because of neurological evidence. Although, these findings did not naturally answer the question of what makes humans bad, it did give good evidence as to why people do certain things, like pathological liars and violent offenders.
Through this process of blogging I had to figure out how to put down into words in this format what I am learning. I was not too keen on the idea at first, for blogging is not something I am very good at. But it has proven to be a great way to learn, for I was able to put down my initial thoughts and always go back and edit them as I continued to learn more.
To conclude this blog I want to go back to how I began. In my first post I stated that I believe humans are not bad and they are not good. Although my knowledge grew a tons throughout the process of this course, I think that I still stand my first thought and that is that humans are humans. There is no need for classification on my part for I am not a court system or the law, for in the hands of situations like that, we cannot use the justification we have been using throughout this class. In class we were always abel to justify the terrorist to its religion, the prostitute to its need, the murderer to his mental illness, the serial killer to his traumatic event. With all of this, we never said that the human was bad, we said that everything else was. This though, would not pass in a court of law, which is why I believe that although humans act out in the most horrid ways, I am not one to say they are good or bad. For they all love and have a weakness, because at the end of the day, we are all human, and those traits, unless one is a psychopath, are ones we all carry. In the future, I would like to look more into psychopaths to see how the lack of empathy and love makes them who they are. For I do not believe people are bad to the core, but as always, I could be wrong.
