Yoga from the Inside Out: Part 3

I am not a pessimist (one of my five strengths on the Strengths Finders Test was actually Positivity), but I struggle with the idea of humans being intrinsically good.  I’ll accept that some of it is probably due to my upbringing in Christianity.  I was raised with the Lutheran doctrine that we are under “bondage to sin.”  So, yes.  The idea that we are born with original sin is engrained in me; however, my experience with the reality of humanity and what we are capable of has never really been a great counter argument to the theory.  Are there good people in the world?  Yes, of course, but when people are given the opportunity and the freedom to turn against one another, most of the time they do.  Again, I’m not trying to be excessively severe, but take even social media as a small example.  How many times over the past year alone has their been story after story about a teen suicide due to bullying, both in person and over the internet.  When people have a sense of anonymity, and therefore perceive a lack of real responsibility for their actions, it’s like their morals (and rhetoric I might add) deteriorate back to a primal state.  Only after celebrities step in to say something do people take a stand, and in those instances I would say that people’s willingness to stand alongside them are an aftereffect of groupthink, not an actual activation of any sort of moral compass.  There are very few people who are sincere and can maintain their sense of integrity once it is tested.  I’ve witnessed it.  I believe that people have no hope of being good if they are not encouraged to be so and find that goodness within them, but I disagree that it’s our natural state of being.  I just don’t see how it can be when we are capable of destroying each other the way we do, often not realizing what we have done until years later.  Believe me, I would love to be proven wrong, but after the amount of ignorant, and worse, complacent within their ignorance, people I have met in my short years, it would take a lot to convince me otherwise.  What I do believe is that most people desire to be good.  Most people believe that they are good.  But few will act to better themselves, and even fewer will hardly fight to remain good under pressure.  We are creatures of community, and good is defined by the communities we associate with.  If the community says go to church, we go to church.  If the community says Jews are a disease that needs eradicating, then we eradicate them.  I know the Holocaust is an exhausted example of what human beings are capable of, but what it demonstrates to me more so than a certain depth of depravity is how easily swayed our morality is.  I don’t doubt that there were truly good people that went along with creating such a tragedy, but if at our most basic core we are naturally good, how on earth are we capable of straying so far from the good itself, and even believe it to be the true good?  Is it possible to look at the reality of human kind and truly accept that we are intrinsically good?