Nature or nurture, what is it that make us who we are?
Personally I do not believe it is an either or question, it is both.
It is my opinion that there are three condition in which a child can be born into. Pure Good, normal, pure evil. Most of us are somewhere in the middle.
Someone that is on the pure good side of the line will turn out okay regardless of their environment or upbringing. It is in their nature to be good.
Someone that is on the evil side of the line will turn out bad regardless of they type of environment they were brought up in (which explains why children of “good” families will go bad.
Fortunately most of us fall with in the middle and can be taught to be good or in the right environment taught to be bad.
A society’s primary function is to see to the survival of that society. Every successful society has rules that fall outside of any legal systems. Call them manners, call them taboos, call them right from wrong. These rules are usually enforced by the group as a whole.
As an example, up until recent history, out of wedlock children were rare but now it is quite common and if I can say, acceptable. There were no laws against out of wedlock children so why was it rare?
Shame, society made it difficult for a woman (or girl) that got pregnant. On an individual level, that was a heavy burden on the young mother. But the example she made gave strength to other girls and woman to say NO and have that no accepted.
Why did society condemn unwed mothers? Most people never gave it a thought, but there were reasons. We are living with the effect of that taboo being sent to the rubbish heap of history today with several generations of children that have never known a father.
Most often few people think about why some things are allowed and other are not. And often we think just how unfair it is to the individual. And it is unfair to individuals, but the opposite of order is chaos. Society can not exist in chaos. With out boundaries societies can not exist.
Maybe this is what destroys all civilizations in the end. They get so large they forget the reasons they had rules of civilizations and decided to throw out all the rules never realizing they have undercut the very foundation of their society.
Many very good points. And all those civilizations killed each other daily without ever knowing the concept of a movie or video game. Because people will always contain an element of the bad that thrives on chaos and evil, summed up ironically by Alfred’s line in the Dark Night. “Some people just want to watch the world burn’.
Except for Libya. We know for a absolute fact that a movie caused that violence... /s