Was there ever a time when you began to doubt one of your core beliefs? What happened and how did you respond?
"This I Believe," the popular NPR series, featured short essays by listeners about their core beliefs--the deeply held, often unstated beliefs that had consciously or unconsciously guided their lives. A lot of the essays were about kindness, the golden rule--new twists on old themes that most of us take for granted.
Often these beliefs, sometimes referred to as "core beliefs," are so much a part of our makeup that we don't even know what they are until they are challenged.
(When my mother, at age 90, was asked by her granddaughter to write a "This I Believe" essay, she struggled and struggled, going through countless iterations.)
For the podcast "This American Life," producer Ira Glass took the exercise one step further with stories about people who were forced by circumstances to give up a long-held belief. Something happened that challenged their world view, or their view of themselves, or their view of others. The incident was so jarring that it permanently altered their way of thinking. The title of the episode: This I Used to Believe.*
Back in April of 2024, we tackled this prompt in one of my writing groups. The other women in the group, who know me very well, admitted to being shocked that this essay had come from me. I view their surprise as a compliment.
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I had a comfortable childhood, I lacked for nothing, and thus I became an optimist. By the time I reached adulthood, I took for granted the innate goodness of people. Human beings were benevolent at their core, and it was only when bad things happened to them that they became harmful, out of self-defense.
I no longer believe this to be true. Instead, I believe that human beings are by nature harmful beings. Harmful to each other, to other species, and to the planet. I believe we are a scourge, a predatory species that is engaged in a process of annihilation. I believe this is in our nature and we are powerless to stop. I believe the world would be better off if our species were to be wiped out entirely. I believe the worst thing about the pandemic was that it ended too soon.
This belief makes me deeply sad. Would the world really be better off if I had never been born? Or my sweet little granddaughter? Or Mahatma Ghandi, or William Shakespeare, or Leonardo da Vinci?
Yes. The world would be more beautiful, not less so, if our species had never evolved.
And yet evolution is a natural process. The world could not exist without it.
If survival of the fittest is the law of evolution, are we really the fittest? What does that even mean?
We are the fittest at killing other predators. We are the fittest at exploiting natural resources.
Our fitness to survive in the short term is what will kill us in the long-term, unless we learn to protect our environment. But I believe that as a species, we lack the will to do so, because protecting our environment involves short-term sacrifice for long-term gain, and we are far too selfish and short-sighted to make long-term decisions based on the betterment of our species as a whole. We can barely postpone gratification for an hour, much less a century or more, especially when it involves such abstract concepts as the welfare of our great-great-grandchildren. We humans are essentially greedy, voracious, self-serving creatures, and though there are individual exceptions, they are not the norm.
When did I begin to doubt that humans were essentially good?
Although I think of my childhood as safe and comfortable, my world view was formed by a series of violent events when I was very young. These included the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy when I was barely 10 years old. They included my older brother being wounded in Vietnam, news photos of lynchings, the book To Kill a Mockingbird, and watching the Watergate hearings on television. All of this happened before I was 20. I grew up knowing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and knowing that we could literally destroy the world with our technology in an instant. I grew up knowing that a family friend, a scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, had later suffered from severe depression and died in a mental hospital. The idea that stuck with me from Dr. Bloom’s story was that one of the smartest, kindest people my mother had ever known was forced by our government to turn his talents to an evil enterprise, one that destroyed him and had the capacity to destroy the world.
Even the space race was contaminated by the idea that we Americans had to be first. Or what? What would happen if Russia got there first, and landed a man on the moon before we did? I didn’t have a clue. I just new that this was a race between good and evil, and that the U.S. had to win.
As a kid, however, I was pretty sure we would win, because in stories, good triumphs over evil. I took it for granted that we Americans would always come out on top because we were better than the Russians, better than anybody, simply because we were Americans.
And then, Vietnam, and Watergate, and the violence of American society destroyed that idea for me.
As a teenager, a rather cynical teenager, I read Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and “The Population Bomb” and other books that suggested we were losing our grip, through greed. The planet was suffering, and all because of us.
The idea was that we had to change our habits before it was too late. My father, an obstetrician, began preaching birth control. My mother began replacing hamburgers at the family table with soybeans and lentils. My parents set a good example. I still thought there were enough other people who thought and acted like my parents that we would actually do, as a species, what the wise authors of those books said we must do. I didn’t realize the kind of effort it would take, and the scale of that effort.
Everything I’ve learned about American politics and world politics since the Kennedy assassination has served to deepen my conviction that we are doomed as a species and it is our own fault. I can hardly bear to follow the news anymore—it is all too bleak. The world would be better off without us.
It was the safety and comfort of my world that blinded me to the true nature of human beings. We became the dominant species, because it was always about me, me, me, and now we seem to be incapable of the short-term sacrifices that we need to make to save not ourselves, as individuals, but our species. The notion of our species, homo sapiens, is abstract. We have no emotional connection to homo sapiens, per se, or even to our own unborn children. And human beings are governed by emotion, far more than reason.
All of our wonderful inventions have done way more harm than good, cutting us off from the natural world. That includes sending rockets into space. William Shatner was right—there is nothing out there. It is all here, on our planet, and we take it all for granted.
The story of humanity is not one of superiority or success or survival of the fittest. It is one of the saddest stories ever told.
Now, we come to what is for me the real question: If you believe as I do, that we are doomed, how then do we act? How do we live our lives? For me, the answer is simple. We live according to our highest ideals, with kindness, generosity, honesty, and courage.
Above: Still from "The Fault of the Mango," a 5-minute video set in an apocalyptic American landscape populated by evil fruit. The essay was written before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The video was made after.