Throughout history, mankind has sought to reconcile the selfish desires inherent in him with higher and nobler ideals. One cannot argue that human nature is selfish. From the day a man leaves his mother's womb to the day he lies on his deathbed, he wages a constant battle with his basic instincts. Indeed, though children are considered to be innocent, they are in fact the most selfish beings on the planet. They want what they want and if their want is not gratified they will cry, scream, kick and whine until they are happy. Only as one matures does he learn to mask these desires by imposing upon himself a standard of behavior "his morals. Yet, though mankind attempts to mask his desires with a thin, often transparent veil of civility and morality, his instinctual greed and selfishness always remains. In the deepest part of a man's heart there will always be the desire to do what is best for himself, not what is best for those around him. .
As an unfortunate consequence of this aspect of human nature, there has always been a division of wealth, property, and power. There have always been those that have the power, wealth and property, and those that don't: the haves and the have nots, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the rich and the poor. Yet, because man prefers to consider himself a more noble and idealistic creature than he actually he is, there is also the need to justify this inequality between people in different social classes. Due to this need for justification, the upper classes found various ways to reconcile poverty with their own comfortable lifestyles, and morality became an entirely subjective term. The ideas of the White Man's Burden, Social Darwinism and Utilitarianism were all presented as solutions to this dilemma facing the middle and upper classes. The lower classes, however, were not surprisingly pressured to find a reason to justify to themselves that they were somehow worse people than those of the upper and middle classes.