Cliff Notes version: Anne Frank said people are “really good at heart” and she was wrong.
If you want to know why, we’ll start with the full quote that, while good poetry/literature, is not factually grounded:
“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
– Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but i’d rather you know the truth and be prepared than let you enjoy that blissful ignorance and be blindsided by the reality of life’s relentlessness.
People are not “really good at heart”. We’re a mixed bag of chemicals that respond differently to different environments and we all have the ability of self awareness and heightened intellectual capacity that we can choose to use to evolve or devolve accordingly. Many choose devolution. They retain the freedom of choice to use surrounding data to change but there is no core goodness fighting its way out.
It would be awesome if people were really good at heart but unfortunately there is no secular/scientific or religious basis to arrive at this conclusion, which is a purely emotionally driven desire-so-strong-it-becomes-a-persons-personal-truth.
Speaking to Jews, in particular on that front, but also making my point on the science of it is Dennis Prager:
The notion that people are basically good is a modern, post-Enlightenment one that is neither Jewish nor rational.
As regards Judaism, from the Torah through rabbinic Judaism, I am unaware of a single mainstream Jewish text that posits that people are basically good. The Torah cites God Himself as declaring that the “will of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8.21).
As regards reason, the empirical evidence against the belief that people are basically good is simply overwhelming.
Anyone with children knows how much time one has to spend teaching a child how to be a good person.
Anyone who is at all familiar with human history knows how universal evil has been — from human sacrifice to slavery to mass murder and torture.
And anyone familiar with evolutionary thought (see, for example, “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins, who is also a major advocate of atheism) knows that evolution’s emphasis on survival of the fittest hardly allowed the innately good organism (if there ever was one) to survive.
So, too, no body of wisdom literature in the East or West ever posited that people were basically good. The idea is a product of modern secular Western thought.
I think people are likely to believe this because they want to believe it about themselves. Especially those who feel ostracized by others will be inclined to find a new barometer other than collective-wisdom to analyze whether a person is good or not. They fear being falsely labeled bad or perhaps struggle with morality themselves and thus invent a convenient explanache that everyone is good and anything they do that is not good is the fault of some outside stimuli responsible for the badness.
This is false. We react to outside stimuli but it doesn’t dictate immoral actions. And the fact that many people convince themselves that their selfish or downright evil actions are acts of goodness aren’t explanations either. An individual’s perception of what is good doesn’t make them good and tons of people revel in doing bad that they full well identify as bad.
In our universities, newspapers, and television shows, it is a given that external forces are the cause of crime. If not for poverty, murder and rape would be much lower. If not for racism, America’s inner cities would be far wealthier. So on and so on. At the core of this belief is that people are basically good, and it is society that makes them bad. This notion is simply not true. As Dennis Prager explains in this video, human nature is not basically good. It is not, though, basically bad. People are born more or less neutral. And it is incumbent upon parents, teachers, and yes, society, to turn children into good adults. It doesn’t happen on its own.
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