Assuming The Worst About People: Humanity's Deadliest Disease

It's been awhile since I took some time to discuss a topic of this nature, but I just wanted to sit down for a moment and share some personal thoughts about the more disappointing aspects of human nature.

Whether you believe in religion or not, most people concur the mass majority of us tends toward seeing the worst. Because even the average atheist will concede we are far from perfect, it's human nature to be suspicious of anyone claiming a virtue. They expect that, not entirely unreasonably, to be another shoe to drop.

To be fair, this is partially based on some truth. Since so much of humanity tends to see the worst in others, believing terrible things about them is easy, and from that it becomes easier to rationalize anything good about them as being a smokescreen for them being as bad if not worse than you believe they really are. The more you convince yourself someone is a horrible human being, the more confirmation bias drives you to take whatever truth you learn about them and interpret it in the most evil, petty, and twisted light. This also drives you to invent the most terrible lies to supplement that biased slant on truth, and by the time you are done, you've convinced yourself someone is the devil incarnate.

This happens quite often in politics and other fields where strong differences of opinion become radically polarized, and it occurs in any area of human endeavor where strong differences of opinion turn into a bitter brinkmanship game of "Us v. Them". Unfortunately, while the more rational among us would be able to step back and realize maybe a difference of opinion isn't reason to deserve a lynching, the more extreme members of each side have the line between beliefs and the people who hold them blur to nonexistence and that's when we get name-calling and violence entering the picture when sanity takes too long to reassert itself.

The thing I try to remember to keep myself from become utterly depressed with humanity is such activity can be avoided. If you focus on what can be proven, avoid making things up about people, examine all evidence about the person and their views with as little bias as possible, and doing you best to remember behind your conceptions is an actual human being, then it becomes very possible to avoid becoming yet another evil, twisted, petty soul who sees the worst in everyone and twists them into monsters because you are so full of bitterness you can't bring yourself to believe there is no good left in them.

I won't pretend I'm immune. Like all imperfect people, I've been no better and I won;t pretend I haven't been a hypocrite before. I'd be lying not just to the world but also myself if I tried to insist otherwise, and I don't like to do either.

That all said, I do believe keeping that in mind is one of the first steps to avoid catching what I consider humanity's deadliest disease, or at least not getting more sick because of it.