But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism? Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities? Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities.
– Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays
I recently spent nearly an entire day in the company of a wild bobcat. Since the bobcats in that area are somewhat familiar to me, I was able to determine that another nearby bobcat, also a male, had been forced off his territory and into a distant valley. This morning as I was squashed on a Muni streetcar with the other chattel on their way downtown to make the rich richer, I imagined the streetcar was filled with bobcats instead of people. But we weren’t bobcats. I think we were closer to field mice.
Amen, Emma. We can talk about human nature once we’re achieved it. Till then slave nature is the only nature we know anything about.