“Dog eats dog”; “survival of the fittest”; such phrases imply the need of individuals to survive to the point of pushing others below in order to meet such need. Like life is a game of gladiators, that we have to slay one another until the last person stands.

What is the point of survival in the first place? One intrinsic feature in animal nature is self-preservation; I’m here, I need to continue my existence, I need to survive. We humans are the most rational animals, thanks to several tens of millions of years of evolution, so we have the most complex methods of survival. We develop concepts, and one such concept is goodness. If something is conducive to me, I find it good. If it helps me preserve my existence, it’s good.

Humans, being social beings, find it easier to survive if we gather. Imagine you alone working to survive, then you found a fellow of yours in the wilderness. You have the same goal of surviving, and you utilise communication and teamwork as survival tools; you later find it easier to survive, and later you thrive. If you only think of yourself, there comes the term “selfishness”, which will not be good to self-preservation. The recognition of sentience, the sense of sympathy, and the act of solidarity become part of survival, self-preservation and goodness.

You then recognise the goodness of nature to you, you later acknowledge deities and how they favour you. Religion, ethics and morality become interconnected, and you give praises to your gods and do things in return. In certain belief systems, deities are put first before the self (“God above all”), which could clash with egoism. For clarification, egoism is a philosophy centred at the self and how one’s own actions affect the self; this is confused with egotism which inflates oneself’s own features, and egocentrism where the one puts the self around everything with disregard to others’ perspectives. I find some core tenets in Christianity as egoistic: if you want to be saved from eternal death, “for God so loved the world (you) that They gave Their only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16); for the reason that the believer wishes to not perish but live in eternity, another notion of self-preservation. But this is not bad at all, there is nothing hypocritical in its egoism, as God created us in Their own image and likeness (Genesis 1:26-27); we are made with the thinking and nature to preserve ourselves.

You then create a family, and you pass your values to your children, which are good to you and will be good to them. More families appear, and the families gather as a community. To ensure the community’s survival, order is needed, and to uphold order, laws are formed, which should be good to all members of the community. These laws should be based on the ethics and values based on goodness, as the community needs self-preservation, survival, order and harmony. Early codes include the Code of Ur-Nammu, the Code of Hammurabi, and the Torah. Human systems like governments are also created. Absence of discipline, law and order led to crimes and wars, which were not good, and governments have to promote these.

There was no way for humankind but only up: we found items around us as tools, we develop technology, and civilisations made advances. Technologies like making fire, astronomy, machines, irrigation and aqueducts, smelting, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the steam engine, vaccines, use of oil, carbolic acid (phenol), radio, journalism, air travel, computers, television, nuclear weapons, space exploration, artificial intelligence, the Internet, and genome editing. These made humankind thrive, but all are also subject to and at risk of abuse, which is bad. That’s why with the advent of different technologies come rules and regulations.

We humans also do not stop learning; we engaged in different arts and sciences, and we have philosophers and other great minds who guided us. The age of the prophets happened, as well as the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. We arrived at our lows especially the great Wars of the 20th Century, and now from simple codes and expanding empires, we now have the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in order to uphold the common good for the humankind and its surroundings, after centuries of learning, practising and disciplining.

When Western nations shifted to the human dignity approach after supporting right-wing dictatorships, and many of the left-wing autocracies reformed and the Soviet Union was dissolved, the Doomsday Clock moved farthest from Midnight– 17 minutes, we think it was the safest period, albeit having fewer abhorrent conflicts to address (and we still failed). But general goodness is seen as impediment to others’ survival. From citizens lacking discipline to powerful figures behaving like unleashed monsters, from 17 minutes we are now 90 seconds from Midnight. We fail to control the heating planet, our leaders are threatening a nuclear war, and justice, freedom and human dignity are treated as stumbling blocks.

Even certain values are painted as sins: multiculturalism “destroys”, sustainable development is “robbery”, recognition of prenates as our fellow is “disrespect”, education and empowerment of the fooled like populist voters and anti-vaxxers is “waste of resources” (“let social Darwinism happen”). They even think that we cannot have too much goodness, because “all things in excess are bad”. Bad goodness? How can we survive as one? Where now is kindness? Where now is righteousness? I’m praying to God that the worst of the Satanists, who wilfully despise concepts based on goodness, will never be rulers of the planet.

The concepts we made and lived on to survive– dignity, freedom, justice, kindness, righteousness, solidarity, ethics, morality, values– are being dismissed as mere social constructs not to be respected but are treated as artificial. But again, we call these constructs “values” because we value these, it is through these values that we existed together, we survived together, we thrived together, we lived together. It is through these values that we reached the impossible as one, from making fires to stepping on the moon and later on Mars. It is through the lack of values that we are at the brink of global destruction. If some would like to impose their ecocentric beliefs and we return to ashes and dust, the anthropocentric find importance in oneself’s existence and cannot be forced to surrender this.

“Dog eats dog”, “survival of the fittest”, because it is in our nature to be evil, sinful, savage, that we have to push others down in order to survive. But self-preservation, the resulting goodness, and the spread thereof all happened because we needed to survive. Goodness is part of human nature, and we’ll continue to be good that we will find ourselves happy in eternity.

Article posted on 29 March 2024, 14:57 (UTC +08:00).