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There’s a deeply cynical and misanthropic thread among some people on the left that posits people are too *bad* in some way to live together in a way that is better than what we have now.

Too greedy, too aggressive, too shortsighted, too parochial, too irrational, too stupid, too petty.

(Never the observer, of course; they’re part of the enlightened elite who can see us as we really are, and—if they’re not too cynical—will be in charge of forcing the ignorant masses into a better world.)

It’s paralleled by a similar argument on the right, that people are genuinely terrible and so a better world is impossible because this world of hierarchy and abuse and exploitation is the best of all worlds.

Both probably owe quite a bit to the deeply Christian idea of the Fall, of people as fundamentally broken and in need of heroic redemption.