Can We Still Believe People Are Basically Good?
- karenegeemaine
- Jul 8
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Opinion, Portland Press Herald, July 7, 2025
Karen Levine, Ph.D.
A Psychologist’s reflections
This era can shatter our beliefs about human beings.
For the past 35 years, until my recent retirement, I worked as a child psychologist with young children who had disabilities and who also struggled with anxiety, anger, or depression. With each child, my goal was to build connection—discovering what troubled them, but also what made them giggle and what sparked their curiosity—and, together with their families, to nurture their core selves. I believed that every child carried connectedness, kindness, and goodness at their core. My patients did not disappoint.
I thought I knew something about humankind. I believed we were basically decent—people who help each other and show kindness. One neighbor takes in our garbage can when we’re away; we bring food to another when they’re sick. That, I thought, was simply what our species does. Yes, some people go terribly awry, sometimes because of abuse or severe mental health issues that obscure empathy and reasoning, but I believed those were exceptions.
Now I’m not so sure.
Seeing Trump reelected, despite his well-known cruelty; watching his cabinet of bad actors regain power; the Supreme Court essentially granting him immunity; people cheering on ICE snatching students and parents off the streets; cutting off food and medicine from USAID, causing children to die—it all makes me lose faith in humanity. I had thought people were basically good. Could half the country really not be?
Of course, there have been other times in history—and still are in some countries—when evil took over entire societies, the Holocaust perhaps the best-known example. I knew such horrors happened, but they felt long ago, far away, somehow, like tragedies that couldn’t happen here. It is profoundly disillusioning now, seeing our own neighbors, our own family members, pulled into the cult-like fervor that Trump and his circle promote. To walk my dog around the neighborhood and see Trump signs in yards, knowing all he stands for, feels shattering.
So, was I wrong about our species?
Historians, philosophers, social scientists, and others have grappled with the question of how humans become swept up in cruelty, especially under certain leaders. Cults like Jim Jones’s People’s Temple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples_Temple show how people can transform so completely that they’ll even kill their children and themselves at a leader’s bidding. The Milgram experiment https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1964-03472-001 revealed how ordinary people could administer what they believed were painful shocks to strangers simply because an authority figure told them to.
Yet Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who witnessed humanity at its worst, said:
"I still believe in man in spite of man."
People can be drawn into cruelty through a mix of their own vulnerabilities and the voices around them. The danger of a leader like Trump isn’t just in his policies; it’s in how he amplifies cruelty through his megaphone, legitimizing hate and drawing others into an in-group energy of hostility. People who might never have acted cruelly otherwise, can be swept along.
That’s why taking a stand—activism—matters so much. If we want the good in people to win out, we have to give it voice and power. We need a bigger, louder megaphone—one that amplifies kindness, truth, and democratic values. This louder voice can reach those who are on the fence, can be contagious, and can drown out the cruel and hateful noise.
So, I don’t think I was completely wrong. Many, and maybe even most people, are capable of goodness. But that goodness can be hidden or manipulated. Just as I worked to bring out the best in my patients, it’s up to all of us to listen for, and help bring forward, the good in our fellow citizens. Advocacy—raising our voices and standing together—is how we make that happen.
Maine has many state and local advocacy groups always looking for volunteers.