I'm not in a terribly optimistic frame of mind, but with that disclaimer, I'll tell you what I truly believe:
we are intended to work together, and love one another, and cooperate.
we can choose instead to work against one another and compete where competition makes no sense at all.
people who pick the first way are people who see others as human beings, as their equals before God and one another when it comes down to it.
people who pick the second way are people who see others as inferiors, or even as appliances and commodities. And need to see them that way.
Martin Buber called this "I-Thou" relating, versus "I-You" or I-It" relating. He felt that I-Thou was the ideal level, but that most of us who care, and think about what we do, cannot manage I-Thou all the time everywhere - it takes too much out of us. So we do some I-thou, and most I-you, but we try not to cause harm in our I-you relating.
He felt that there was no justification for I-It relating at all. It leads to things like the Holocaust.
I think many many people don't really want to work very hard mentally or otherwise, and don't want their precious selves compromised in any way, so they head for the second way, the I-It paradigm, from the minute their little bitty feet hit the ground.
Most sound childrearing seems to me to be focused on making the children aware that the I-Thou and the I-You ways exist, and then persuading them not to pick I-It.
I've never in my life seen a single person who had to be taught selfishness... but I've seen many who have never learned empathy.
You might like "I and Thou"... he was a marvelous philosopher and theologian. He is the one who wrote, "All true living is meeting." And he's a lot more optimistic about the human condition than I am
