money for the family loses his or her job, so they don’t have enough
food to eat.
T he father is probably the strongest one in the family. Does he
steal all the food and eat it, so all the kids starve? (I guess there are
people who do that, but then you lock them up. T here’s a
pathological defect there somewhere.) No, what you do is share.
Does that mean they’re not competitive? No. It means that in
that circumstance, they share. T hose circumstances can extend
quite broadly—for example, they can extend to the whole working
class. T hat’s what happens in periods of working class solidarity,
when people struggle together to create unions and decent working
conditions.
T hat’s true of the United States, after all. Take a look at the
Homestead strike a century ago [when Andrew Carnegie locked
striking workers out of a steel mill in Pennsylvania]. T hat was a
period of enormous ethnic rivalry and racism, directed mostly
against Eastern European immigrants. But during that conflict they
worked together. It’s one of the few periods of real ethnic harmony.
T hey worked together with Anglo-Saxon Americans and the
Germans and the rest of them.
Let me tell you a personal story. I’m not particularly violent, but
when I was in college, we had to take boxing. So the way we did it
was to spar with a friend, wait until the thing was over and go home.
But we were all amazed to find that after doing this pushing around
for a while, we really wanted to hurt that other guy, our best friend.
We could feel it coming out—we wanted to kill each other.
Does that mean that the desire to kill people is innate? In certain
circumstances that desire is going to come out, even if it’s your best
friend. T here are circumstances under which this aspect of our
personality will dominate. But there are other circumstances in
which other aspects will dominate. If you want to create a humane
world, you change the circumstances.
How crucial is social conditioning in all of this? Let’s say you’re a
child growing up in Somalia today.
How about a child growing up two blocks from here in
Cambridge? Just last summer a student at MIT was killed—knifed—
by a couple of teenagers from the local high school. T hey were