Interesting, this post mentions two views but glosses over what many (most? I don't know) Americans have always believed: That we humans are inherently corrupt and evil by nature and need to be taught to do good and need to have a spiritual rebirth (the term is "born again") to transform our nature. The "born again" part from what I understand is mainly evangelized by protest Christians but the rest is consistent across all denominations.

I know that the percentage of Christians has declined over the years, back in the early days of the country they used to even have mass at congress every Sunday. So, fair to say the amount of Americans who believe this has declined, but still a significant portion.

Nevertheless, Ben Franklin and the rest may have been famous but they by no means reflect the beliefs of the masses at the time. As much as Obama, AOC and Tom Cruise's beliefs don't reflect modern American's views.

It's quite the contrast. across societies, even people isolated from the rest of humanity for thousands of years, you'll find the same moral failures such as murder, rape, invasions and wars of aggression, prejudice,etc.. The view that "the world corrupts us" is hard to buy, even when we have everything we could possibly want (think healthy billionaire good), our moral character doesn't change, even when one is born into that life. Even without considering complexities like the meaning of morality, by a person's own accepted beliefs of morality and ethics, we fail by default. we do what is convenient over what we believe is right.

The title of "You are how you act" is sort of true, but it is more accurate to say "You are how you decide". If we're programs, a program is the instructions it executes. The input data it processes and the execution environment will decide which instructions it processes for sure, and most bugs are triggered by specific input, but that does not change the fact that the bugs exist as an inherent nature of the program. And for us at least, we prefer to execute the most efficient (convenient) instructions instead of the most correct.