Is our species inherently “good” or “bad”?
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the social darwinists “informed” us that a “survival of the fittest” mentality rules us.
That “self-interest” is the highest moral order of the human species.
In otherwords, it was a competitive “me-first” world, and that you’d better be nasty to get what you want out of it.
Conveniently, the same people promoting this mind-set essentially controlled all the industrialized societies of the world at that time.
These people tended to be titans of banking, commerce, and industry, and well-heeled economists, politicians, and church leaders.
In otherwords, the ruling elite.
And so people “bought it”.
The masses became…. what they were told they were.
And by and large, the masses still do.