A partial explanation of bad human behavior

Cruel, sadistic rulers who slaughter their own people in order to maintain their power. Greedy, egotistical billionaires who rig their political system in order to get even richer. Husbands who hit their wives. Mothers who murder their children.

Anyone who does anything malicious to anyone else at all.

Whenever I become frustrated with the comportment of our supposedly-evolved species and wonder, "How can this absurdity be happening,?" I remember something I learned in a child development class only a few years ago.

Based on studies he did throughout his life, renowned psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg concluded that there are three main levels of moral reasoning human beings can achieve as they mature and develop their individual personalities.

He called them “Preconventional Morality,” which are the first two stages children must go through in order to learn right and wrong, “Conventional Morality,” the third and fourth stages of development during which we come to understand ethics and socially accepted behavior and “Principled or Postconventional Morality,” which are the two highest levels of comprehension, where the person recognizes the need for and behaves in a way that will achieve the "greatest good for the greatest number of people."

Unfortunately, what he also concluded was that less than 25% of the adults in this world ever actually even reach this higher level of moral understanding and establish an altruistic goal of attaining what’s best for society rather than what’s best for the individual.

Which means, in short, that most human beings, at least by Kohlberg’s standards, are ultimately selfish creatures who care less about the world around them than they do about themselves.

Pretty depressing analysis no doubt about it, but at least it partially explains why the world we inhabit is, and may always sadly be, as messed up and maddening as it is.

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And in a gloomily appropriate follow-up to a column I wrote a few weeks ago recounting how I had removed the refuse from the roadsides in my neighborhood and was curious to see how fast the filth would begin re-accumulating ... well, it didn’t take long.

Exactly seven days after my muscle-exhausting, time-consuming tidying expedition, I counted 23 bottles, cans or fast food containers within 200 yards of my driveway, and I’m not exaggerating one bit.

Twenty-three freshly deposited pieces of trash in little more than 1/10th of a mile, seven days after there were none.

And the entire mile-and-a-half? Suffice it to say, you’d barely be able to tell it had ever been cleaned up at all. It was a bit disheartening to say the least, but in light of Kohlberg’s conclusions about human behavior, probably not that surprising.

Garbage, garbage, garbage — we make it, we live in it, we die in it, then obliviously bury ourselves under it.

Ah, mankind. What a glorious lot we are.

Wilkie’s column runs every Wednesday. He lives in Jeffersonton. He can be reached at mrmwilkie@aol.com.