To organize a society around the belief that every person should have equal rights and be afforded equal opportunities is unnatural. What is natural, and what comes naturally to people, is to treat people unequally, to give people unequal opportunities, and to assume that people have unequal rights.
Human nature leans toward the organization of systems in which some people receive preferential treatment, have disproportionate influence, and exercise favoritism in their treatment of others.
The organization of a government composed of freely-elected representatives — which corresponds to an intuitive notion of ‘fair and just’ — is unnatural. It is also the way in which civilization has managed to achieve its greatest accomplishments.
The benefits of this unnatural pattern are relatively new in history, as scholar Jonah Goldberg writes:
Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural. Human rights are unnatural. The world we live in today is unnatural, and we stumbled into it more or less by accident. The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death. It was like this for a very, very long time.
The achievements of the last century or two are significant: both in terms of percentage and in terms of absolute numbers, fewer people are living in poverty around the world. Average lifespans are increasing worldwide. Literacy is rapidly expanding around the globe.
Humans are experiencing the benefits of free market economics and free enterprise system — what is generally called ‘capitalism,’ although strictly defined, ‘capitalism’ is something broader than free markets and free enterprise.
The growth of market economies correlates to, and parallels, the growth of the arts, the expansion of civil rights, and better standards of living even for the poorest of people.
Economics is the best way to tell the story of humanity’s quantum leap out of its natural environment of poverty. Until the 1700s, humans everywhere — Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Oceania — lived on the equivalent of one to three dollars a day. Since then, human prosperity has been exploding across the world, starting in England and Holland with the rest of Western Europe and North America close behind. Debate climate change all you like. This is the most important “hockey stick” chart in all of human history.
The natural status of humans is poverty, disease, violence, and ignorance, as fans of Thomas Hobbes know. Advances and developments in civilization occur despite human nature, not because of it. It is by opposing nature that benefits are accrued for people in general, and for the most vulnerable of people in particular.
