There are different aspects to humans
If a person walks away from other humans after a while they will likely feel very unsettled....'FEEL' unsettled.....their heart is telling them that they need human contact
If however there is someone who they admire and that person tells them to go away from people for a while then they are listening to their HEAD because they think they should go away for a while...'THINK' they should go away
If what our heart and our head tells us are not in alignment then we experience COGNITIVE DISSONANCE and we become unbalanced and experience anxiety....too much anxiety leads to mania
This is why ghandi said: ''Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.''
What he is talking about here is aligning your heart and your head with your outside world
If you can get those three things aligned you will find peace
How many humans have aligned those things? Not many and here's why...
Humans are being TOLD things by other humans all the time. This leads to people THINKING things all the time and doing what they THINK they should do instead of listening to their heart
This then causes anxiety which then leads to confusion and conflicts and imbalanced behaviours
As Leary said: ''to do good people need to feel good''
So you can't ask the question ''are humans inherently good or bad'' without looking at their current culture because culture is the stuff that is being put into their head...its what they are being told or taught to THINK and it affects how people FEEL and therefore it affects how they behave towards each other (if they feel better they behave nicer and visa versa)
So if their culture is out of alignment with their heart but their head is trying to keep them in alignment with the culture then the head and the heart will not be in alignment and the person will experience anxiety
Our current system deals with this by medicating people to alleviate that anxiety. The system does NOT encourage people to align their heart and their head because if people were to live more in alignment with their hearts as social animals then the current culture of competition would end and the people who rule our society do not want that game to end
So people i'd say are capable of competition and cooperation but they are being taught to THINK in terms only of competition within a culture (a manmade mode of thinking) that throws many people out of alignment with their own human nature which is more about cooperation
Humans are inherently social creatures or they would have become extinct...but now they are being conditioned to compete with each other whether for jobs, mates, sports or on the large scale in wars for resources and land etc....this is destructive and is causing unhappiness and untold damage