"Human nature is not of itself vicious"
About this Quote
Paine’s line is a grenade lobbed at the most convenient story elites have ever told: people are bad, so you need us to manage them. “Human nature is not of itself vicious” isn’t sweet optimism; it’s strategic anthropology. He’s clearing moral space for democracy by arguing that corruption is cultivated, not baked in. If people aren’t inherently depraved, then coercive authority loses its favorite alibi.
The phrasing does sly work. “Not of itself” dodges the naive claim that humans are naturally good; Paine is too hard-edged for that. He’s saying viciousness is contingent, a product of incentives, institutions, and desperation. The subtext is almost prosecutorial: look at where cruelty clusters - around hierarchy, poverty, war, and inherited power - and you’ll find the machinery that manufactures it. That turns vice from a theological condition into a political problem, something you can redesign away.
Context matters. Paine is writing in the age when monarchies and churches treated “original sin” as civic policy: distrust the masses, constrain them, accept inequality as fate. Against that, Paine offers a radical reframing consistent with Enlightenment reasoning and revolutionary stakes: if ordinary people can govern themselves, then rights aren’t a gift from rulers but a baseline. The sentence also anticipates modern debates about criminality and social disorder: do we treat harm as evidence of defective souls, or as evidence of defective systems?
It works because it refuses sentimental faith in humanity while still refusing despair. Paine’s wager is that institutions can either elevate or brutalize - and that’s a choice, not destiny.
The phrasing does sly work. “Not of itself” dodges the naive claim that humans are naturally good; Paine is too hard-edged for that. He’s saying viciousness is contingent, a product of incentives, institutions, and desperation. The subtext is almost prosecutorial: look at where cruelty clusters - around hierarchy, poverty, war, and inherited power - and you’ll find the machinery that manufactures it. That turns vice from a theological condition into a political problem, something you can redesign away.
Context matters. Paine is writing in the age when monarchies and churches treated “original sin” as civic policy: distrust the masses, constrain them, accept inequality as fate. Against that, Paine offers a radical reframing consistent with Enlightenment reasoning and revolutionary stakes: if ordinary people can govern themselves, then rights aren’t a gift from rulers but a baseline. The sentence also anticipates modern debates about criminality and social disorder: do we treat harm as evidence of defective souls, or as evidence of defective systems?
It works because it refuses sentimental faith in humanity while still refusing despair. Paine’s wager is that institutions can either elevate or brutalize - and that’s a choice, not destiny.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|
More Quotes by Thomas
Add to List
