Education Quote by Brian Behlendorf

There’s an almost bashful candor in Behlendorf’s phrasing: “I think,” “how do I put this?” The sentence is less a polished maxim than a live thought forming in public, which matters coming from someone shaped by systems thinking. A scientist (and, in Behlendorf’s case, a figure associated with open-source culture) isn’t expected to lead with moral metaphysics. So when he lands on “innate goodness,” it reads like hard-won empirical surprise: a conclusion reached not by wishful thinking, but by watching people behave when incentives aren’t purely profit-driven.

The intent is quietly corrective. It pushes back on the default modern story that humans are primarily selfish actors and that cooperation is a fragile exception. “Innate” does heavy lifting: he’s not praising occasional altruism; he’s arguing for a baseline capacity that can be relied on if the environment lets it surface. The subtext is institutional as much as personal: design the right structures and you’ll see decency at scale. In other words, goodness isn’t just a trait; it’s an emergent property that shows up in communities with transparency, shared ownership, and low barriers to participation.

Contextually, the quote belongs to an era of networked collaboration where strangers build consequential things together. It’s also a rebuke to cynicism-as-sophistication. By admitting uncertainty in the delivery, Behlendorf makes the claim feel more credible: this isn’t branding. It’s a scientist noticing that, against the prevailing mood, people keep choosing to help.