Yep. Thomas Sowell makes this point very well in A Conflict of Visions. When you think everyone is good, you keep searching for the utopia. When you think people are bad, you try to mitigate it and deal with it (Capitalism and Christianity). https://twitter.com/TheAmishDude/status/1293047087580557313

This is an over simplified, of course, but Burke and Hamilton wrote about this. One side effect of thinking people are not good, is that you realize that modern western culture is, or at least was, pretty damn amazing.

Another corollary is that liberty is really a constraint on our leaders, which are often bad people. Conservatism is about constraining potentially bad people with power. Liberals always want leaders to do more, but are then outraged when tables are turned, like executive orders.

This is why liberals actually thought CHAZ might work, but when the rules are gone, people do bad things. Libs don't care about incentives because they think people won't abuse the rules, but anyone with a cursory understanding of history should understand this is nonsense.

Of course, "good" can be a relative term, so certainly some people are good relative to others, but imo, people VASTLY underestimate how quickly people, including themselves, will turn very bad under the right circumstances.