Well said. In a world without stop signs, traffic lights, laws and judges, the people who think they’re the most wholesome may otherwise be the most vicious perpetrators.

We like to think being a good person is an innate thing. Truth is, hatred, jealousy, lust, anger, murder, rape, violence - they’re all human nature. Every single person reading this comment is capable of murder if the set of circumstances required it. Societal conditioning (including education), the environment you’re raised in, social punishments, the threat of lack of freedom, and learned introspection are the factors preventing people from doing these things.

If you’re the nicest person someone has met, then you lucked out, but it has very little to do with your ‘true nature.’ One caveat: some people seem to be born with a predisposition towards violence. Not many are born with a predisposition to anti-violence. Anti-violence is as innate in humans as the English language. Nobody’s born with it, but if you’re raised with it then you do it mostly subconsciously. If anti-violence was a common function of human DNA then we’d all have been eaten by lions. Just to illustrate it further, even plants innately use violence (poisons) as an anti-predation mechanism, although they (probably) aren’t conscious.

I can’t count the number of times in AA and NA I heard stories about people not knowing it wasn’t ‘normal’ to get fucked up and beat their spouse until they were out of their parents house.