Susan - acts of kindness become natural to you/me/others when someone has first visited acts of kindness upon us. It's not a genetically inherited trait, in my observation, it's the effect of particular environmental conditions.
For the more fortunate, this occurs young in a family, so they think it is 'natural', 'human nature', because it was their parents doing it to them.
That doesn't happen for every infant, though. There's plenty of studies showing what happens e.g. in orphanages.
You will also find that the propensity of men to hit women is increased amongst those who were physically abused as children. Just as children abused sexually tend to seek out abusers as partners when adults, for some reason that most people wish could be easily reversed.
Human nature in general is learned, although there are genetic predispositions involved too.
Some of us learned far more human kindness than we learned dominant power games. Others learned to manipulate, to coerce.
Our human nature usually results from what we happened to experience in the first 35 years of our lives.
Susan - acts of kindness become natural to you/me/others when someone has first visited acts of kindness upon us. It's not a genetically inherited trait, in my observation, it's the effect of particular environmental conditions.
For the more fortunate, this occurs young in a family, so they think it is 'natural', 'human nature', because it was their parents doing it to them.
That doesn't happen for every infant, though. There's plenty of studies showing what happens e.g. in orphanages.
You will also find that the propensity of men to hit women is increased amongst those who were physically abused as children. Just as children abused sexually tend to seek out abusers as partners when adults, for some reason that most people wish could be easily reversed.
Human nature in general is learned, although there are genetic predispositions involved too.
Some of us learned far more human kindness than we learned dominant power games. Others learned to manipulate, to coerce.
Our human nature usually results from what we happened to experience in the first 35 years of our lives.