Do we start off good or evil

I read with horror the reports of more gang rape in the DRC over the past weekend. Many women and young men were raped by soldiers (of a form), with guns and violence that will impact on them for life. Many of these soldiers are themselves young men, who have grown up in a world of violence. They grew up in a world that said violence against women was their right, and was a way to prove a point to other men about their prowess and power. The DRC has been a war zone for so long, it is hard to imagine that it was once non-violent.

My question then is where the good men are who are not prepared to sustain this culture of violence? The same can be said of any other nation, especially South Africa where people bandy about our “highest rape stats of a country not at war” and the stats on violence against women worldwide are incredible. So, as they say in inception, we need to go deeper. Right back to the roots of nature nurture and ask ourselves — are we born good or are we born evil.

If we are born good, and then are exposed to evil in the world, then it is the world that makes us do things like rape, murder, steal and abuse. The evil came into us from the outside and we are influenced by the way we are nurtured. So children become rapists because of a number of cultural influences that tell them that raping is OK, or good, or from the realisation that the world outside does not punish rapists, or condemn them, so they will get away with it.

But, where did that evil come from? If the evil is in the world it had to come from someone/somewhere. So perhaps then we are born evil, and the ability to curb that evil is enforced on us by authority figures who know that Mill’s harm principle means that if we all did bad things to one another, bad things would happen to us too. So they contain their own evil, in order to create some sort of social order. In panoptican style we do not commit evil for fear of retribution. So our evil comes from within, and what we know as good is not “good” but rather ordered.

When our world is in crisis, the boundaries of good and evil become slippery. And when you look at a country in crisis, it’s hard to tell whether those rapists were ever good, and if so how to get them back there. My intuition tells me that unless men are the most vocal critics of this behaviour, and until rape becomes detached from their concepts of their masculinity, we won’t ever get them back.