One of the most divisive, perplexing and polarizing concepts in the history of man has been the debate over the presence or the absence of a distinct, individual "human nature". While the debate has raged among the sciences (sociology, psychology, anthropology), in the realm of government ideologies, atrocities have rained down on racial, intellectual and economic groups in the name of one side of the argument or the other. For instance, Hitler believed in the concept of human nature and that it had unique and detrimental qualities in certain races. With this as policy of the National Socialist Party, he killed 3 million Jews because of what he believed was a flawed or "non-Aryan" human nature. Conversely, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot did not believe there was any such entity as "human nature" and that all men were born with the exact same set of tools - a "blank slate" - to make their way in the world. To accept that as truth, it logically followed (in their minds, at least) that those who succeeded - those who excelled and functioned in society as intellectuals, professors, doctors or had acquired wealth - were evil, nefarious and self-centered to the detriment of the state. With this heinous logic to guide them, millions and millions were purged in Russian, China and Cambodia. Even in a relatively-stable democracy such as ours, the question of whether human nature exists as a measurable, reproducible entity has caused (and continues to cause) perhaps the most divisive political arguments of our Republic. I propose, here, to present my take on the subject and attempt, in my simplistic way, to show why such arguments, in truth, has absolutely no meaning to a rational, fair, nurturing society. In brief, the emperor has no clothes.
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