Where do I start? Hobbes or Machiavelli? More to the point, I do not believe that people/humans are "good by definition", there needs to be a higher thing that regulates our behavior so that we will not do harm to each other. Hobbes believed in the "Leviathan", there are other people that believe that the magical "assembly" of some of their representatives (a "central" Government, if you will) would make the latter more responsible and less eager to look for their own good and prosperity, and then there are people like me who believe that the free market is one of the best tools in solving the inherent conflicts between humans.
Like they say, money has no smell. Anyway, it's a very long discussion :)
Really? No higher anything tells me to be a good person, I do it because it's the right thing to do and I've seen pain and wouldn't want people to experience it for no reason. Maybe you need someone/something to tell you what's right and wrong, but not everyone does.
In replying to @jeremyarussell bellow, because somehow my comment is being down-voted to oblivion and I cannot reply directly:
What can I say? To each his own. I did not say that you, jeremyarussell, or any specific person taken "per se" needs a higher thingie to stop him/her from committing any crimes, it's just that for example the 20th century has been marked by some of the most heinous crimes in our existence as a species while in the same time only a small percentage of our fellow humans are psychopathic or sociopaths or however else you want to call those who commit crimes for pleasure only. Somehow, to make up for the difference (in the "people killed vs. natural-born-killers" ratio), I believe that we have somehow to look deeper into ourselves. Also pls. see this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil.
And now that I'm reminded of Hannah Arrendt and the crimes of the 20th century, and for once to make a documented reference to Godwin's law on the internets (and to give people real reasons for down-votes), there's this little photo right here (http://imgur.com/PfM0e) of the Tiraspol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiraspol) train-station taken during WW2 by a German soldier. I paid around 0.50 euro-cents for the photo in an antiques shop (I live in Eastern Europe), around with other photos taken by the same soldier on the top of Eiffel Tower in occupied Paris or on the shores of the Aegean in Thessaloniki.
Now, those train tracks that you see in the photo at first don't signify anything by themselves, what with the peasant women waiting patiently for the next train or what-have-you. But if you happen to know (like for example I do) that tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of Romanian Jews (Romania being the country where I grew up and currently live in) were carried in trains to their final destination to close-by Transnistria (http://isurvived.org/Transnistria.html) then you begin to see things differently.
It took my country's Government close to 60 years to finally starting to acknowledge that we actually did exterminate people in Transnistria. Up until not that long ago there still was a statue of Ion Antonescu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu), the guy who ruled this country when all these, let's say really bad things happened, in a church's front-yard a couple of metro stations from where I'm now writing this comment. In fact, if I were to take the tramway to work tomorrow instead of the metro I would pass right by the said church (no statue of him now), which Antonescu actually helped build (the church, that is). Do you honestly think that church-building Ion Antonescu thought of himself as being a bad person?
And this is one of the many reasons why I think Governments do not deserve our trust.
I keep thinking of the crusades as a prime example of higher power gone wrong(and just how bad humans can get, and also that happened way back when and all). It's just interesting to me though that you say we need a higher power, and that higher power is often the government that is corrupt.
No worries about rants, I like reading them and trying to get myself to not just see another's point of view, but to own it, try and make it mine and get an even deeper sense of what's going on behind the words. And sleep well.
