When we stop to think about it, to critically reflect on the standard meaning perspective on our universally shared belief in our negative if not dangerous human nature, we can begin to see how that belief accentuates our vulnerability, increases our need for regard of any kind, and strengthens the defensive and materialistic parts of our being. Quite simply, it just feels bad to live inside this pervasive and very ugly definition of our shared human nature. We live trapped within the extraordinary limits of the expectations that surround if not engulf our human nature, our being, and aggressively ignores our becoming self. We get lonely and isolated.
The usual and prevailing inherently low expectations of human nature and our conduct limits us dramatically and tragically. Viktor Frankl speaks of such expectations in his work. When we lower expectations of the human beings around us, we limit their ability to perform to their fullest, positive extent. Actually, we do more than limit. We distort them in ways that could not happen if we chose to believe in a much higher form of human nature and act on that belief. The distortion comes in many ways as we grow into our lives and then live them out.
Distortions motivated and justified by assumptions about human nature begin early. They come with the assumptions we make about children or others made about us assumptions about us when we were children. Many if not most of us believe in this statement: "Children manipulate." I entered "Children manipulate" into the search engine search line. 17 million plus results appeared. The first site listed made this statement: "Kids manipulate their parents. It’s part of their normal routine. They learn to use their charms and strengths to get their way and negotiate more power in the family."[85] The implications in this one sentence bring us to a dramatic realization of the assumptions about human nature and the distorting results of those assumptions. We expect the children for whom we care to operate in a manipulative fashion. They could not have learned this when babies. Most who claim the manipulative in children claim it for babies as well. If we practice such manipulation on them, they might learn it. If we teach it, we have to live with it. That being an unlikely part of the manipulative children meaning perspective, the assumption here assumes manipulation an integral part of human nature, and children come into the world trailing clouds of manipulation rather than those of glory.
Manipulation represents us in a very conscious, very planned, and very ego driven activity. We actively make others do our bidding without asking or respecting them as ends in themselves. Through manipulation, we make others a means to our end. In that case, we are born outside the moral sphere. If caring adults assume such a mental process as an essential part of the child for whom they care, what could possibly become of unconditional positive regard? Such unconditionality disappears in a fog of suspicion and distrust. A child in our care cries or makes some other demonstration of need. Armed with our meaning perspective about human nature and manipulative children, we can resist responding to a manipulative child as we would naturally do, spontaneously and caringly. We would judge the sincerity of the expression and create a plan to act without encouraging manipulation. If a child in our care, expresses a need for unconditional regard and care, and we ignore that cry, that need because we have been taught to suspect it's just a manipulation.
All of this suspicion seems like a kind of poison that permeates everything. When manipulation forms part of the essence of human nature, which it must if babies and children do it naturally, unconditional positive regard cannot exist in such an environment of suspicion, in such an atmosphere of distrust. It's a poison to our essential trust in others and to a free and joyous sense of mutual caring later in life as well. When we assume the aggressive egocentricity of manipulation, we assume that human nature begins us at a low level of development as decent human beings. In some Western terms, we seem to suffer from some original sin.
According to Frankl, when we make such an assumption, and treat the people in our care in a degraded level, those people may well then become even less than we have shown them we think they are. Low expectations breed even lower levels of conduct and relationships with others and our own being. Such low expectations drive our identity into stronger and stronger defensiveness through the power of ego. Our identity will defend itself against such expectations by rebellion or acceptance thus further solidifying our identity and become a more and more rigid material version of our being, a limited and degraded identity. All that endless insecurity causes even greater levels of vulnerability and an even greater desire to find some semblance of almost any form of regard. Low expectations nurture meaning perspectives that limit the scope and individuational nature of our identity in its relationship to and with the becoming self.
Such a situation shifts more and more power to dominator and conformist models of conduct and governance. It makes us desire some form of direction toward attaining regard and escaping from the nasty, brutish, and degraded human nature in which we feel forced to live.