People are good. At least in general and for the most part. People are socially virtuous. Given a chance, most people most times won't beat or rob you, nor lie to or betray you.
And not principally because they wish to avoid the retaliation of yourself and your allies, but simply because they don't want to do such things, and wouldn't enjoy them. They find that there's no personal profit in such anti-social activities. And the man of quality or noble soul is far better when it comes to this than the hoi polloi or massman discussed above. At the least, this is my current best evaluation of the two separate human species known as the masses and the elite.
Still, people are scum. All of them. Every last one. I don't like or respect any of them.
Aristotle should have found a way of being a public atheist. Or at least in his writings. It was so intellectually obvious and so societally needed. But he didn't.
Ayn Rand should have found a way of being a non-cultist intellectual leader. At least after she became famous and had a split with her top protégé. It would have been so simple and was so societally needed. But she didn't.
Both philosophical giants were slain by the essentially infinite evil of religion. These were sad and inglorious defeats of considerably contemptible figures. Future humans need to do a lot better.
Society is to blame for most of these two failures above. Human nature is evidently flawed and weak. Human beings are basically low animals. Mere monkeys and wretched repellent apes. And Aristotle and Ayn were way way ahead of their rather bestial times.
If the social milieu had been better -- if culture and civilization had been far more liberal in those eras -- then Aristotle and Ayn Rand would have found it quite easy to obtain the proper social status and assume the correct social station. Aristotle could not have been happy pretending that some "god" thing existed. Rand was not happy being a charismatic, cult-of-personality, philosophy leader devoid of peers, honest critics, and supporters and enemies she could respect.
If philosophical and cultural progress continues at its current rate, humans will likely ascend to a New Enlightenment and era of virtually pure liberalism in a century or so. In this period magnificent beings, but also mediocrities, like Aristotle and Ayn, will far better flourish, and much more intellectually teach, morally inspire, and spiritually ennoble all of us.