As a society, we pride ourselves on survival. Our instinct, when it comes to anything, is to survive.
Even our education system has become a place of survival instead of what it is supposed to be which is a place of learning and expanding. As a high school student, I have spent numerous years “surviving” instead of learning and I can speak for most students when I say that.
We have to learn how to coexist in a way that shifts our “first instincts” from surviving to living. We are in a world that needs help and by having a survival mindset, we risk not helping our planet. In one of the contributor responses, they bring up the example of incest. I find it interesting that no one ever tells people that incest is wrong. As a kid or toddler, normally a person spends the most time around family but no one is told that incest is frowned upon. But everyone still knows that it is. Morality is inscribed in our brains as kids. We grow accustomed to the social “norms” of our society as children simply by observing, not necessarily by being told. I definitely agree that some things have to be told but I also think that not everything has to be and this is an example of one of those things.
Even as kids we are able to create our own opinions. Sure, those opinions might be influenced by parents and the people we look up to but ultimately opinions come from our brains, not theirs. Morality comes from within.
