Nature versus Nurture,

The great debate,

get what you get,

that is your faith.

This may come as no surprise considering my obsession with self help books but I was a psychology major in college. I picked it because, let’s be honest, it was easy and I wanted to party. However, I did actually find the subject interesting and I enjoyed the heck out of many of the classes (except neuropsychology … that class, I think I dropped within a week. Remember the name of every brain fissure… yeah… right.)

Anyhow, there are many unsolvable debates in psychology and one of the great ones is nature vs. nurture. Do our attributes come from our DNA or how we were raised?

The answer, as usual, seems to be some combination of both for most things.

But this argument I have come back to recently because it got me thinking about pride and judgement…

Here is my theory.

IF everything we have been given in life… I mean everything… our looks, our athletic ability, intelligence, tenacity, charisma… and so on, was given to us by either our genetics or it was nurtured into us by others THEN this would mean that we are really not responsible for any of it. Therefore, we should not be egotistical nor entitled about ANY of it.

Everything we have isn’t our doing at all.

It is simply a result of three things— Nature, nurture and circumstance.

Once we realize this, it seems the only moral thing would be to seek out those that life has not been so generous with and try to nurture some of the more useful qualities out of them. There would be no reason to judge anyone ever because you would be able to see nothing is truly their fault.