I have, over the past year, begun developing a philosophy to life. A worldview, if you will, that gives a foundation for knowing how things work and how best to deal with life. I first started thinking about my understanding of the world when my bible study did a series called the Truth Project. Its goal was to explain the Christian philosophy.

What makes this remarkable was that this was the first time I had ever heard of philosophy explained as a holistic foundation from which to approach life. I had gotten the impression in school that philosophy was a pointless exercise in debating and explaining things that nobody in the real world thinks about and has no bearing on one's decisions. The Truth Project showed me what the point of a philosophy is, and why it's worth thinking about.

Namely, that everyone has a philosophy. That is, the set of foundational beliefs that drives a person's decisions. You may not know what those beliefs are, and they may not have an 'ism' attached to them, but somewhere, there is something that makes you choose option A over option B. This is what drives people. It explains why people do the things they do. Something which often takes some serious explaining.

With my philosophical foundation being Christianity, I start off with an assertion that directly contradicts society: people are basically evil. People put themselves first, seeking after their own desires and pleasures, and only secondly, if at all, think of others. However, most Westerners seldom think of fulfilling your desires and pleasures as evil. Didn't Maslow say that self-actualization was the highest form of being? But they never seem to think that most people self-actualize at the expense of others. If your goal is yourself, then what do you care if you have to rape to get sex, or steal to get money?

But of course, those are the exceptions, not the rule, right? If people are really evil, why do we have the idea of progressivism, the idea that people are good and working to make things better? Perhaps somebody should tell Darfur that they are basically good people. But here in America's favorite baseline for everyone in the world, we are raised with Christian morals and values. Which seek to curtail our evil desires. Morals which most people don't have. Americans simply don't think of murder as a form of advancement.

So I behave according to the idea that people are evil and only moral teachings (Christianity does not have a monopoly on these) keep people from being totally depraved. This means I should expect, as moral teachings are more and more removed from society, that Americans will become more selfish and more likely to harm others in seeking their desires, with the level of harm increasing. Which, anecdotally, seems to be the case.

Believing people to be selfish rather than altruistic gives rise to a number of interesting realizations. First, you can't really trust people. Or perhaps I should say you trust people to work in their interest and not yours. So if you want something from someone, be it honesty, goods, or help, you have to make it in their interest to give it to you. Else why should they bother? There are any number of ways to make someone help you, but payment and force seem to be the most popular. So I can take what I want by force, or simply buy it from you.

Force is easy to understand. I get what I want and you get to live. Or you're strong enough yourself to keep me from bothering you. Of course, I could get some buddies to tip things in my favor, splitting the loot, but then, so could you. This ends when one side wipes out the other, or 'buddies' grows into nations and everybody goes bankrupt with a military industrial complex.

Or we can come up with some other method of getting your cooperation, one that doesn't involve wasting time or resources trying to take...your time and resources. Such as payment. I convince you that it is more profitable to give me some of your stuff in exchange for some of my stuff, rather simply taking all your stuff outright. Perhaps at the end of the day, we are both better off with the trade than if we'd devoted time and resources to fighting and taking whatever is left.

But we still have to keep each other honest in our dealings (or at least honest enough). If you have overwhelming force, it's easy to keep me in line, but the idea was to not spend everything on fighting (so you can spend it on yourself, remember). You could stop trading with me and tell other traders I'm too dishonest to trade with. Or you could start trading dishonestly yourself. Of course, I could force you to trade with me, but now we're right back at using force to coerce good behavior. But we have changed the dynamic somewhat. You want to trade, because you know is often times more profitable than conquest. So you need strength of arms to prevent me from taking from you. But you only need enough strength to make it too expensive to be worth invading. As more people figure this out, those who trade will become richer, and stronger, than those who simply fight.

So from the biblical premise that all men are evil, selfish beings, we arrive at not only the foundational logic for capitalism, but also with maintaining a relatively strong fighting force to keep people from taking advantage of each other. This also reveals the fatal flaw of capitalism, that what's good for me is not necessarily good for you, and a strong arbiter is needed to prevent me from forcing deals that only go my way. The use of force, either to coerce good behavior, or for theft and conquest, is a natural outworking of men being evil, and capitalism cannot escape it.

But what of capitalism's big rival, socialism (called welfare in America)? The idea behind socialism is that each person contributes what they can, and each person takes what they need, regardless of how much they put in or how much they need. What you put in the pot is unrelated to what you take out. If people are good, with a natural inclination to share, this would actually work. But if people are evil, they will quickly realize they can simply not produce anything, but still take what they want. This will lead to poverty as production approaches zero, or someone will come in with a big stick and force people to produce. The historical examples of each should be obvious.

I will end with a prediction, since the point of a philosophy is to understand the world enough to make informed decisions. And while it might be many years, perhaps decades, before I'm proven right or wrong, it is worth writing down so that I and others can look back and take note.

As America implements more and more socialist policies, and by this I mean wealth redistribution by which the wealth of those who produce is given to those who do not, the per capita income will go down, and the GDP of America will shrink. Left unchecked, America will come to resemble a third world country, eventually unable to provide even for the basic needs of its people. This will happen quickly enough that people will remember living in the land of prosperity.

This will be stopped in one of two ways; either people realize socialism doesn't work and they go back to capitalism, at which point wealth flows back through America, or America becomes so poor that it can no longer force socialism, and America splits in rebellion and civil war, as each person or group tries to find wealth outside of socialism.

All this, just from believing people are evil.