My life experience is one where I have confronted the fact that the universe itself is quite terrible. Disease, death, destruction are all inherent parts of a universe that depends on the increase of entropy in order to provide us with the fleeting pleasures of life.

Two experiences bring me here.

Firstly, losing several children before birth made me realize that the universe is not some happy place filled with goodness. By its nature, it tends toward destruction and disorder. The byproduct of such things is suffering and it is omnipresent. Like entropy, overcoming suffering (which is permanent and the normal state of things) requires the expenditure of energy and effort and even then the results are localized and fleeting. Sometimes, by sheer luck, spontaneous bursts of order arises as when all the particles in a fluid in Brownian motion once in a while align in their trajectories. But, suffering and disorder is normal and happen without reason. Only order and goodness and beauty need reason and effort to occur in a prolonged state.

Secondly, my visit to my parents home country as a five year old. Going from a pretty safe suburb in America to the abject squalor of that place, with death and sickness all around and poverty everywhere made me understand that the good society we have in america is abnormal in the grand history of the universe. Good society takes effort and is easily destroyed.

Humans and our behavior do not escape from this system of chaos. It is only through constant expenditure of energy that life itself is able to impose order on small parts of our universe.

Human society is no different. We have been handed down how to use energy to have a good society by generations upon generations of humans who have succeeded in doing so and whose processed has been homes by natural selection. Our current technocratic society has little trouble accepting Darwinian natural selection producing life saving instincts, while simultaneously rejecting the notion that cultural tradition has been similarly honed by natural selection for human survival.

By our own hubris in deciding to undo lots of traditional behavior and values just because, we now find ourselves once more lost, trying to explain to ourselves why this is happening. But we miss the obvious because we don't want to see, which is that the squalor we are currently in is a byproduct of having thrown away and ignoring the results of the very process that gave us the thing we valued.

Edit: reworded some things

Edit2: I'll also add that none of what I said makes me think most humans are not noble or dishonorable. To the contrary, my religious convictions teach me that human beings are naturally driven towards the creator of the universe, who is the source of all order. Most humans are still mostly drawn to that. It's just that when we abandon that drive and refuse to acknowledge it, then the marginal change in our behavior is enough to tip the fragile scales of order into the direction of chaos.

That is to say, even though most humans are good, and no one can be perfect, there are varying degrees of perfection. no need to let perfection be the enemy of good enough

Edit3: the two philosophies are not equally valid. Mine, which acknowledges our universes fallen nature and tendency toward eventual absolute chaos, is backed by empirical observation.