Today, I was asked if I thought that selfishness is part of human nature. I don't know how well I responded to that question at the time, but I would like to try to write a better response now.
Yes, I believe that selfishness is part of human nature, but human nature has many different parts. First, there are the physical parts, largely governed by the Natural Man (except, if I mentioned this in my conversation earlier today, I would have had to explain who the Natural Man is, and I didn't want to bother with that). The Natural Man is selfish and impatient and proud and has various other negative traits. For the most part, we have the Natural Man because he's good at ensuring the survival of the species and because he's excellent at giving us opportunities to practice self-control.
That's where the other set of parts comes in: the spiritual parts. In addition to bodies, we each have spirits, and not just any spirits. The spirits we have chose to follow God's plan of happiness and fought valiantly against Satan. This means that we each have (and were) spirits who were devoted to developing the traits God has, including empathy, temperance, and generosity. That doesn't necessarily mean that we were all unselfish before we were born and were thus born with unselfish spirits to counter our selfish bodies, but the little evidence we have leans that way.
So, is selfishness part of human nature? Yes, but so (probably) is unselfishness. Cowardice and Valiance, Pride and Humility, Natural Evil and Divine Good are all elements of human nature. Humans are dual beings, and our self-conflicting, paradoxical nature reflects that fact. So selfishness is part of human nature, along with many other negative traits, but so are many of their opposites. Many contradictory traits are part of human nature. But now it's up to us to decide which of those conflicting traits we develop.
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