This is something that has been rolling around in the back of my mind for a while.... I thought it would be interesting to see what you all have to say about the topic.
There seem to be two competing schools of thought on this. One is that "people are basically good", but sometimes resort to doing bad things because of their conditions/environment/failings of society/etc. This kind of thinking seems prevalent mostly on the politically left-leaning side of the spectrum. (I would call it "wishful thinking".)
The other school of thought is that people are basically bad, but can choose to do good. I think this idea tends to align with Christian philosophy, i.e. that man is "fallen" and therefore lives in a state of sin, but by faith/choices/good works can become good. I think this also aligns with conservative ideology / politically right-leaning people who tend to be more rational / logic-based in their view of the world (whereas the left are more emotional-based), because any rational person looking around at the condition of the world would have to acknowledge there are a lot of bad people out there.
My personal take on it is that people are inherently... selfish. I view selfishness as a bad quality in general (although there are always limits/exceptions), so if there is a spectrum from good to bad, most people are somewhere on the bad side.
Certainly humans are capable of great evil, i.e. your Hitlers, Stalins, etc., but that's the extreme. Most people are not murderers -- but I do think most people are predictably too self-centered in their decision making. I'm talking about people who care about their own desires more than (or at the expense of) the needs of others, if they even think of others at all, and who take advantage whenever they feel they can get away with it. People who naturally lie, cheat, or steal for personal gain (no matter how small). In my experience the majority % of people fall into this category.
(And yes it should be stated here that "good" people do exist, i.e. people who genuinely care about others above themselves, who often make sacrifices at great personal cost for the needs of others, or for the objective moral "right thing to do". But based on my "lived experience" I would say this is a minority % of the population to be sure. When you find genuinely good people, you should cherish them!)
All that being said -- if people are generally selfish (or on the spectrum of being "bad", if you will), why isn't the world an even more horrible place than it already is?
It occurs to me that there is at least one other force going in the other direction -- people's inherent need to be "liked" by other people. Certainly the importance of this influences different people to varying degrees -- some people are extremely sensitive to what others think of them, some very little so. But it seems to me that this a fairly universal phenomenon.
So there we have 2 competing forces -- one the desire to get whatever we want regardless of who's expense at which it comes, but at the same time the desire to be liked or thought well of by others, which restrains us a bit.
Am I on the right track here, or am I missing something?