What a newborn baby reveals about whether people are naturally selfish

For centuries, a good deal of Western thought has taken it as settled that human beings are, underneath the manners, fundamentally selfish and prone to aggression. Thomas Hobbes described the human race as violent, competitive, and concerned only with self-interest; famously, when caught giving money to a beggar, he insisted he wasn't doing it to help the man, only to relieve his own discomfort at seeing poverty. Freud later called the drive toward aggression an original, self-subsisting instinct. Two twentieth-century writers, Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz, looked at predator animals and concluded humans were built the same way, wired to fight over territory.

The Dalai Lama argues the opposite, that gentleness, not aggression, is our basic and predominant nature, and that hostility, when it shows up, is a secondary reaction, usually arising when people are frustrated in their attempts to get love and affection. His argument doesn't rest only on Buddhist doctrine. He points to something available to anyone, the pattern of how human life actually begins. An infant's very first act, nursing, only works through mutual affection, the child bonding to the person feeding it, the mother or caregiver responding with warmth. Take away that affection on either side, and the act that keeps the infant alive doesn't happen.

Later research pushes in the same direction. The 1986 Seville Statement on Violence, signed by twenty scientists, concluded it is scientifically incorrect to claim humans have an inherited tendency toward war or violence; the capacity exists, but nothing in human neurophysiology forces it into use. Studies of infants themselves reinforce the same picture: at birth, a baby's underdeveloped senses of smell and taste are already tuned specifically to breast milk, and nursing relieves tension in the mother as much as it feeds the child, an arrangement that only works because the infant is, in effect, built to bring the caregiver pleasure too.

This isn't a minor philosophical footnote. What you assume about human nature quietly shapes how you read every stranger's face, every ambiguous remark, every driver who cuts you off.

Each time a stranger's behavior seems hostile or careless, before assuming ill intent, run the alternative explanation past yourself first, that this is likely someone whose default setting, like everyone's, leans toward gentleness rather than malice, and something else is probably driving their behavior. Pay attention for a day to how often you assume the worst about people you don't know, drivers, coworkers, customer service agents, and count how often that assumption turns out to be wrong once you actually talk to them. When you catch yourself bracing for hostility in a new encounter, deliberately relax that guard slightly and notice whether the interaction goes better than you expected. Over time, let this become your working assumption rather than something you have to remember to apply.