I find the it grating whenever westerners say "humanity is so cruel" or "humanity deserves the worst for what it's done to the earth," for example. No, this is not "humanity" the source of these crimes against humanity and against the earth is not the primal moral charecter of human beings. The source of theses ills are, especially at this current moment, the logic of capital. It's the logic of endless infectious growth, along with the conversion of all sectors of our soceity to spread this virus known as capital.
This logic pulls the strings of every modern atrocity, and it's home, at this moment, is the imperial core, specifically, the United States. It is not the nature of "humanity" but of humanity dictated by the unconscious whims of capital.
To condemn all of humanity for the crimes perpetuated by and in the interest of, a certain outcrop of humanity (the western world), is just imperialist chauvinism attributing their own actions to the universal human tendency.
Yes, throughout history, cruelty has existed, but it's been due to the dictates of former politcal-economic systems governing soceity. In each case, it was thr crimes committed by certain classes for the express purpose of suppressing other classes and maintaining the benifets for those ruling classes brought about by their societies political-economies.
Humanity is driven by the logic of those systems, and currently it's capitlism that is hedghemonic. And capital has avatars from which it expresses itself in our world. Those vessels of capital have names and places in this world, and they largely reside in the imperial core.