Just had a discussion with my parents over last night's revelation...

Some points that came across:

1. We are born with different personalities (which aren't good or bad as such, just different), but we are born with a 'blank' worldview. Worldviews are learned.

I agree that worldviews are learned (and we try to teach kids a good worldview), but I am more interested in the question of whether our worldviews are really born blank.

Imagine taking a bunch of kids right after they are born (before teaching them ANYTHING), and putting them in a forest with no animals; imagine, for the sake of keeping them alive, that we secretly provide them food to eat every day. Now, if we put a toy in the midst of them, will they fight for it, or will they share it? That is their innate worldview, their instinct.

That's where my parents and I kind of agreed: that humans, if nothing tells them otherwise, ultimately fight for their own survival. We may think we are not, because we live in abundance, and we don't really need to 'survive' in they physical sense. But even in an abundant society, people can still be very selfish and fight for different 'kinds' of survival (at work, at social status...)

And that bothers me very much, because this says I am really no better than any other person on this Earth. This instinct, this plague, is in me. Now I am doing quite alright keeping my instinct under check, but in times of life and death, I am not really sure how selfless I can be.

The comfort is, again, that something in my heart tells me that there's more to be human than our animal instincts; that even in times of life and death, there is such a thing as human dignity, as many noble people in history have shown us.