Are there good vs. bad people in society?

Zsolt Hermann
2 min readDec 11, 2022

--

Question from the Internet:

“What’s your opinion on: “What do good and bad humans have in common? Most members of good and bad factions love money and longevity.”?”

This notion that “most people are good or have good in them, and there are a few rotten apples we need to weed out, and then everything will be good” is what we would like to believe. This is also what mainstream propaganda fosters.

Of course, this mainstream propaganda also readily supplies the “rotten apples,” the evil individuals, evil groups, political parties, or cultures and religions we have to get rid of. Fortunately, we already have enough historical and contemporary experience to see how false this is and how much the world did not get any better by “weeding out the rotten apples.”

The truth is — and this is what most people simply do not want to accept or even contemplate — that we are all born “bad.” This means that we are all inherently driven by a 100% self-serving, self-justifying, egocentric, and exploitative nature. We are all convinced we see reality correctly, although our perception is totally introverted and subjective. We all succeed and survive at the expense of others — knowingly or unknowingly.

The rest depends only on the actual conditions we find ourselves in, and the individual hunger each has to obtain what they want.

It does not matter that most people are unaware of their true desires and intentions that drive them. Those desires and intentions are there driving all of us.

And we will never be able to achieve true and positive changes in human society until we all recognize and humbly accept that “inherently there is nothing good in us”!

We will never agree willingly to start purposefully and methodically changing and further develop ourselves until we acquire a true need and desire for such self-changes and self-upgrade because we have come to hate our inherent nature. It is much easier to keep blaming, correcting, censoring, or destroying others and manipulating the world around us, even if we keep digging ourselves ever deeper into problems and crises.

The crucially necessary positive human development starts from the so-called “recognition of evil,” recognizing the desires and intentions that drive us. Of course, we are not “evil”; we did not commit any “sin” with our inherent nature since we had no choice about the qualities we are born with.

Our responsibility and the so-called “reward and punishment” starts when we already know that we need to change ourselves, and we also have the suitable method and opportunity, and still, we choose to stay as we are.

This recognition can come through the worsening crises, wars, socioeconomic collapse, and intolerable suffering that force us to reveal our desires and intentions or with the help of a special method that can show us a “brutally honest mirror” in safe and manageable conditions, while also immediately providing the remedy and method to change ourselves.

--

--

Zsolt Hermann

I am a Hungarian-born Orthopedic surgeon presently living in New Zealand, with a profound interest in how mutually integrated living systems work.