It is sad that so few people think humanity is inherently good.
The fact is that humanity IS inherently good, if we actually took the time out to stop and think about it. Altruism, the true definition of goodness, isn't about doing good for the sake of doing good - it is about working together as part of a team. Humanity is, by nature, a social species that are excellent team workers, with incredible communication and collaboration skills. We tend to work together for the mutual benefit for everyone involved.
The biggest problem we fact is a lack of intelligence and a lack of trust. Both of these undermine our otherwise natural tendencies to overcome our immediate instincts and work out the best solution in any given situation. As society has evolved, it has become increasingly difficult to work out who to trust and the best solution, so we have become selfish and independent, and when you have 7 billion people all basically acting the same way, the world goes down the pan.
However, anybody who can actually take the time to think about things will realise that working with people for the mutual benefit for all is always the most efficient outcome. Sometimes we get deluded by issues of ego and the idea that life is a zero-sum game - that is, that we can succeed by making others fail - but this is not always the case. We need to be able to look past our limitations, to think beyond terms of hatred, spite, and suspicion, and see others for what they really are - people just like us.
This is often our biggest failing: we do not respect others yet demand that others respect us, because we rarely consider that other people are human beings capable of intelligent and rational thought. We are quick to dismiss them as monsters because we want to see them as unreasonable to preserve our own perceptions, than to understand others and work with them.
Yet, at the end of the day, I suspect that if the poll was phrased to ask if you thought yourself were good or evil, the people voting themselves as good would be much higher. This is how people think - that we, ourselves, are inherently good but others are often less so. Therefore, we often describe them as evil or neither. Yet, logically, if I am inherently good, so is the person I am dealing with.
It is therefore only logical to conclude that humanity itself is inherently good, even if it does have limitations and quite often lets itself down. As such, we can only strive for goodness and self-improvement. It is our ability to choose to be good which makes us human.
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