Human Nature: Understanding Ourselves

A central responsibility of this project is to explore every human tendency that contributes to harm, exploitation, corruption, institutional decay, and collective failure.

The investigation includes us. No founder, contributor, institution, movement, or moral position is exempt.

People are capable of care, cooperation, creativity, and sacrifice, as well as cruelty, exploitation, indifference, and self-deception. How these capacities develop and interact with circumstances requires investigation. This document proposes research questions rather than a complete or fixed theory of humanity.

An open investigation into destructive tendencies

No pattern should be excluded because it is uncomfortable, culturally accepted, politically inconvenient, or recognisable in ourselves. Areas to investigate include:

• Greed, entitlement, hoarding, and the pursuit of unchecked power.
• Tribalism, prejudice, scapegoating, dehumanisation, and hostility towards outsiders.
• Dishonesty, manipulation, self-deception, hypocrisy, and selective application of principles.
• Envy, resentment, humiliation, revenge, and destructive competition for status.
• Conformity, obedience, cowardice, indifference, and avoidance of responsibility.
• Cruelty, possessiveness, coercion, exploitation, and enjoyment of others' suffering.
• Overconfidence, dogmatism, motivated reasoning, and resistance to correction.
• Short-term thinking, impulsiveness, denial, and disregard for distant consequences.

This catalogue must remain open to additions, counterexamples, and better definitions. Labels alone do not explain behaviour. Examine how otherwise useful capacities, such as loyalty, ambition, or caution, can become destructive under particular conditions.

Questions for each pattern

1. What precisely is being claimed, and how could it be observed?
2. When does the behaviour emerge, and what encourages or restrains it?
3. How can we recognise it in ourselves, including when we believe we are doing good?
4. How does it operate within families, communities, markets, governments, technologies, and movements?
5. How do incentives, power, group dynamics, and information systems amplify it?
6. Who experiences the harm, and whose experience remains hidden?
7. What personal practices, cultural habits, and institutional safeguards reduce it?
8. What evidence supports the explanation, what contradicts it, and what remains uncertain?

From behaviour to institutional failure

One hypothesis to investigate is that people acquire advantages, rationalise them, build rules that preserve them, and weaken mechanisms that could challenge them. Group loyalty may protect misconduct; dependency may silence objections; repeated compromises may become accepted practice.

Historical case studies should test these pathways against competing explanations, including material conditions, ecological pressures, conflict, and institutional structure. Human nature must not become a catch-all explanation for every social failure.

Working on ourselves

Personal responsibility and institutional safeguards should reinforce one another. Practise recognising conflicts of interest, questioning convenient beliefs, listening across group boundaries, admitting mistakes, sharing credit, and repairing harm.

Ask:

• Would I accept this rule if an opposing group controlled it?
• Am I defending a principle or protecting my position?
• Can someone challenge me without losing safety, belonging, or opportunity?
• What evidence would change my mind?
• Who bears the consequences of my choices?

Personal reflection must never become compulsory confession, ideological conformity, or a test of moral purity. Distinguish harmful behaviour from unpopular identities, unfamiliar cultures, disability, and mental illness.

The purpose is understanding, responsibility, prevention, and repair. Condemnation alone does not resolve a pattern. Findings should help people change behaviour or improve the systems through which it affects others.