And I Thought I Was Being Clever

So, I thought that I'd come up with a clever turn of phrase this morning in the shower. I was contemplating fairness, equality, liberty and the rights of citizens in the U.S.A., and I was thinking about bosses and workers, and the different jobs that we all do well, and the different abilities that we all bring to those jobs. My mind lit upon the phrase "all men are created equal." I got to thinking that we aren't. If we were, there would be no need for laws preventing discrimination, since there'd be nothing to discriminate against. Different people are good at different things, most importantly, different people have differing levels of ability in treating others with respect and in doing no evil.

That led me to what I thought was original (and I only wound up re-proving Ecclesiastes):

All men are created evil.

Perhaps it's pessimistic, but we are all born of a baser nature. As babies, we're fairly innocuous, but that's only because we don't have a lot of control over our actions at first. Just think about the last two-year-old you met. Terrible twos, indeed. The child discovers the freedom to do what it will, and so it does exactly that, heedless of the consequences to itself or others. Only through learning restraint and consideration and that actions have consequences do we have any hope of that little monkey growing up into an actual human being.