There is a very philosophical discussion: Is a person inherently good, but the influence of the surrounding, the influence of the materialistic world, may bring a person down? And is the whole fight of life, I would say, to stay good? God created you a good person. Don't mess it up. Don't become bad. That's the fight of life.
Or there's another way to look at life, and it's the opposite. A person is inherently evil, bad, and if a person stays in his nature, he will stay bad. But life is about transforming ourselves into a good person.
So again, to summarize: Are we good, trying to be good? Are we trying to fight the bad and stay good, or are we bad, trying to transform ourselves and become good? There is a little bit of a difference between the two, because you would think, what's the difference? At the end of the day, you have to be good, to become good, or to stay good. But the goal is always to be a good person, of course. There is a difference between the two.
For me, I would look at it like this. If you have a company, a business that is working well, thank God, all you have to do is really maintain the business structure. It's good, everything is good. Make sure that it keeps doing well. That's one format. And then you have another format: somebody who's just starting, starting from zero. It's not doing well, or it's a business that is not doing well, and you have to transform it and get new techniques and new ideas to always make your business better, because it's not working well. So it is different. In one case, it's easier than in another to maintain yourself. It's easier, I think, to maintain yourself as a good person than to transform your nature from not good to good.
So I have bad news based on the Kli Yakar and the Gemara. Let's talk about the Kli Yakar. The Kli Yakar says, look at human nature and see from the beginning if there's at any point something good. So you should take a baby, right? A baby, any middah, any good middah, any good characteristic of a baby, other than being cute. Anything that you say, "Oh, this baby is so intelligent"—we can't say that this baby is so humble, this baby is so considerate, this baby is so not selfish. It's quite the opposite.
The whole world has two kinds of people: self-centered, egotistical people, and other people who are outgoing. They are there for the world. I think we could put babies in the category of people who couldn't care less if we had a bad night's sleep or if we're not feeling good or whatever it is. If they're hungry, they will let you know about that. Whatever they need, they only care about themselves. They're self-centered. It's not their fault. Understand that they were born like that. But that means that within the nature, Hashem, for some reason, God did that. The nature of the human being from the beginning is bad. It's not good. There's no baby who naturally shares. There's no baby who naturally thinks, "You know what? Before I scream, I'm gonna think about whether my mother had an x amount of time to..." No baby's hungry, the baby will let you know. So there is nothing you can do about it. You can't do anything about it. You can't do anything in middot that is good within human nature.
The Kli Yakar says, therefore, people start life as not good, and they have to transform themselves into good. It's the business that's not working. It's a bankrupt business that you have to make good. You have to be on your tiptoes all the time to make it good.
Now I'll tell you the Yiddish army. It's a pasuk (verse). Before, I have to be honest with you, the pasuk says, you know, when you read Parashat Noach, at the end of Parashat Bereshit already we see that the world is not working, I would say, as planned. People are already making a lot of mistakes at the end of Parashat Bereshit. And when God, after the mabul (the flood), in Perek Chet (chapter eight), pasuk Chaf Alef (twenty-one), the pasuk says, "I'm not going to curse the land again, because the inclination of the heart of the person is bad from from the beginning."
The Yerushalmi says that from the moment the baby starts moving, he's already here. The Yerushalmi tells you the person is born, and then God is saying, "Look, at the end of the day, I did that. I made people not good from scratch. Therefore, I promise I will never again, I will never again, I will never again, I will never ever again destroy the land."
This is incredible. That means that really, truly, we have to be innovative and try to become good people, to transform ourselves to be great. If you look around, people who don't work on their middot stay the way they are. It's really the same thing as the baby we explained, but replace milk and mothers and the immediate surroundings with money and people around them. Those who don't have it at shamai, who don't work their middot, who don't try to be honest—they don't care about anything. There'll be sharks in business. You know what sharks in business means? It means I'll bite and eat whoever is on my way. I don't care. Why? Because I want my milk whenever I need it, whenever I think I need it, and the more I get, the better it is. What is that? It's a baby you never grew. Instead of playing with milk, he's playing with people. That's the way it is. We've got to transform ourselves because we're not naturally good. We have to become good, and once you become good, you earn it, you stay good.