This year I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of good vs evil. Right vs wrong. And I feel like many times, we operate under this vague idea that everyone, everything, every circumstance in the world falls into one of two categories: black and white, left and right, good and bad, right and wrong.
Logically, we know this is false. There are innumerable gray areas that fall between black and white.
But lately I’ve been asking myself: why?
Why does someone have to be good or bad? Can’t they be neither? Or both?
In writing, a common piece of advice tossed around is this: know your character’s flaws.
As in, people aren’t perfect, and your characters shouldn’t be either. And perfect people are boring to read about.
Another piece of advice is this: the best villain is a well-rounded villain. Meaning that villains shouldn’t just be pure evil—they should have a ‘why’: as in, why are they who they are? What happened in their life to bring them to this point? This idea, of course, operates under the assumption that all people are inherently good from the start, and only become bad because of some trauma that occurred (and which is often portrayed as a disability, which, FYI, is highly problematic in myriad ways).
And the main problem with these ideas, of the main character being “good” and the villain being “bad,” is that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are just social constructs which vary from culture to culture, idea to idea, and person to person. And ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aren’t just social constructs—they are vague, fluid, and entirely unhelpful.
And yet they shape our storytelling. Our views about ourselves and other people. Our politics. Who we feel sympathy for. Who we root for to win. The way we interact with the world around us.
If I ask you this question: “Are you a good person?” most people are going give a knee-jerk reaction of “Yes!”
“Of COURSE I am a good person. I am the hero of my own narrative. Thus, I must be the good guy. Sure, I make mistakes. I’m not perfect. I’m a typical flawed hero. But I AM the hero. And heroes are good people.”
And the reason people give this answer is because the only other category is bad.
Here’s an example: Racism is bad. I think that most people would agree with that. And people would also say that a racist is a bad person.
But if you say something racist, and I call you out on it, your immediate reaction is, “No, I’m a good person and good people aren’t racist. I can’t be racist, because racists are bad people and I’m not a bad person.”
And so there’s no room left for nuance. There’s no room for a person to say, “Actually, I did just say something racist, but it doesn’t make me a bad person. I’ve learned not to say that, and now I’m a better person than I was before.”
Or perhaps a simpler example. Let’s say you are a member of a particular faith. And one of the rules you’re supposed to follow is, “Do not tell lies.” But you are visiting your grandmother, and she makes a terrible pie, but you tell her you like it anyway. Because you don’t want to hurt her feelings, and it ultimately doesn’t matter if you like the pie or not.
But your reasoning doesn’t change the fact: you lied.
You can’t say, “No, I’m a good person and good people don’t tell lies; only bad people lie, therefore I didn’t tell a lie.” It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever!
Does that automatically make you a bad person?
In most (if not all) cases, the good/bad binary is stupid! It’s irrational, it doesn’t make sense, and most importantly, it’s not useful. It obscures potentially valuable nuance with rigid rules and boundaries that often cause more harm than good.
I’m not a bad person. I know that. But I also know that quite a few people in the world believe that I am going to spend my entire eternity burning up in the fiery lake of hell anyway. So, you could make the argument that I’m not ‘good,’ either. So what am I?
Good, bad, or neither?
(For a related perspective, read this Wikipedia article about the criticisms of Mother Teresa.)
*****
So are we good people or bad people? How do we figure it out? What’s our measure?
Enter: religion.
Many people use religion as their meter for good and bad.
“Am I a good person? Yes. How do I know? Because I follow this specific set of rules and guidelines. And the ones I don’t follow, I know I’m forgiven for, because I [went to confession, apologized, am born again, fill in the blank for whatever allows you to atone for your sin].”
But remove religion from the picture, and what do you have left?
A big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey, existential despair. Vague platitudes. A general concept of good and bad which is less than helpful, completely arbitrary, and rife with possibilities for misunderstanding and causing significant harm to other people.
My favorite is example is actually borrowed from a Bible verse, which (roughly) says: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
For example:
I’m an introvert. When I’m sad or angry or upset, I want to be left alone. Josh (spouse extraordinaire), is an extrovert. When he’s upset, he wants a hug.
So, ‘good’ people “do onto others,” right? If I’m sad, should Josh give me a hug (what he would want) or leave me alone (what I would want)?
This is a pretty easy one to figure out. But as soon as you start adding in culture, ideologies, opinions, personalities, and every possible variable the world has to offer, you could start doing real damage to other people (and entire cultures, subcultures, and groups of people) by making assumptions about what they do and don’t need, and what they do and don’t want. All in the name of trying to be a ‘good’ person.
If you do something ‘bad’ when you’re trying to be ‘good,’ are you a good person or a bad person?
Like Mother Teresa: if you forcibly baptize a Hindu or a Muslim on their deathbed into Christianity, because you’re honestly concerned for their souls, but are completely denying, ignoring, and disrespecting their own belief systems, are you a good person or a bad person? And if you spend the rest of your life tending for the sick, giving to the poor and needy, and living your life with complete devotion to serving others and your faith, how does it balance out?
If you murder someone once, but spend the rest of your life doing community service, helping others, and attempting to atone for the harm you’ve done, are you a good person or a bad person?
If you run dog fights in your free time, but spend the rest of your time healing kids from cancer, are you a good person or a bad person?
If you spend all your free time learning about anti-racism and helping people who are oppressed, but say something racist without thinking or from a place of ignorance, are you a good person or a bad person?
If you believe one thing, but do the opposite unintentionally (or intentionally but for a ‘good’ reason), are you a good person or a bad person?
The problem with this is that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are two-dimensional constructs, and we are four-dimensional people. We exist not only in the current moment, but also in the prior moment and in the moment that is coming next. And all of our actions, thoughts, and elements of existence add up to equal the whole sum of ourselves.
Which means that we can’t possibly know if we are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people until Osiris weighs our hearts. Or St. Peter meets us at the Pearly Gates. Or our spirit wakes up in another body. Or maybe when we die, we’re just dead and none of it really matters in the context of eternity.
Regardless of eternity, it does matter right now.
And that’s where the problem lies. If we want to be ‘good’ right now, if we want to put more positive energy into the world than negative, if we want to help others and not harm them, then how do we determine whether or not we are actually doing that? How do we measure our goodness/badness right this very moment?
Enter: pain.
*****
I know Benjamin Franklin said the only two things in life which are certain are death and taxes, but he was wrong. The other thing which is certain is pain.
Everyone experiences pain. Physical pain, emotional pain—there is always something about life that is uncomfortable.
Now, for the sake of this thought experiment, I want to use the broadest possible definition.
The technical definition of pain is this (dictionary.com):
pain (noun)
1. physical suffering or distress, as due to injury, illness, etc.
2. a distressing sensation in a particular part of the body: a back pain.
3. mental or emotional suffering or torment: I am sorry my news causes you such pain.
But I want to broaden this definition to also include all forms of discomfort and discontent.
So, for example, maybe you took a test and got an A- instead of an A. It’s still a good grade, but you wished you’d gotten better, which creates a particular form of mild discontent. Or maybe you have an itch you can’t scratch. Not painful, exactly, but uncomfortable, annoying, and distracting. Or maybe your kid is singing loudly and off-key in the other room. They are happy and you don’t want to stop them, but at the same time, it’s distracting and irritating. Not technically painful. Definitely uncomfortable. Not to mention, there may be some mild guilt for even wanting them to stop in the first place.
So when I talk about pain, I am including: physical and emotional pain, physical and emotional discomfort, guilt, irritation, discontent, ennui, depression, sadness, regret, itches, something stuck in your teeth, fluttering eyelid, shirt’s too tight, envy, fear, worry, sleeplessness, stress, rubatosis, racing thoughts, dizziness, a vague sense of something being ‘off’—pretty much anything that makes your life or your existence worse, as opposed to better.
I think discomfort and discontent are far more common than actual, true pain. And discomfort is frequently talked about at social and cultural levels. Think Garfield and Mondays. Calvin & Hobbes. Pretty much every cartoon ever.
Dilbert (c) 2011 Scott Adams
Pain and discomfort are around us all the time, every day. Many forms of discomfort we learn to ignore to the point that they become unnoticeable as we go about our day-to-day lives.
In fact, we oftentimes seek out pain for various reasons—sometimes for pleasure, for entertainment, or to distract ourselves from bigger, more unyielding sources of pain. Or, we may seek out pain for the good that comes from it, like lifting weights and suffering sore muscles in order to get stronger. Or working long hours in order to get wealthier. Or having a baby. We suffer pain now to reduce pain later.
But in most cases, we would equate pain = bad and no pain = good.
And so, in this way, we can use pain as a measure—a scale of sorts, to weigh whether or not we are doing good, bad, or neutral as we go about our lives.
As we make choices, we have to ask ourselves: “Will this action cause pain? How much? And to whom?”
Let’s go back to our “do unto others” example.
I am sad, and Josh is trying to decide what to do. Josh believes he is inherently a good person, and he wants his actions to be consistent with his beliefs about himself to avoid cognitive dissonance (another topic we should talk about but I’ll save it for a different blog post lol).
Josh thinks to himself, “I want to help Ariele feel better. If I were sad, I would give her a hug. Therefore, I will give her a hug.” But then Josh pauses. “Ariele doesn’t like hugs, though. So, if I give her a hug, I will make her pain (sadness, in this case) worse. So I will not give her a hug.”
In this case, doing nothing is better than giving a hug.
However, Josh believes he is an actively good person. He doesn’t just want to not cause more pain, he wants to help reduce pain. So he begins to brainstorm. And he ends up deciding to bring Ariele a basket of snacks, because he knows snacks make Ariele feel better. He leaves them near where she is being sad, tells her to let him know if she needs anything, and leaves her alone.
In this instance, he has not only managed to not cause more pain, but also helped to reduce her pain. (It is important to note that Josh cannot know the outcome of his choice until he has made it. For example, what if he gave Ariele snacks that she was allergic to, and she ended up having to go to the emergency room, thus causing more pain? This is a key weakness of thinking about the world like this. It requires a great deal of experimentation and learning, and there is no guarantee of always being right.)
Or think, for example, of a mother who has decided to birth a child. She has (hopefully) willingly agreed to suffer extreme pain, but she is doing it because she is giving life, offering another human the opportunity to experience pleasure and live a full life. However, if that child turns out to make choices that actively harm other people, it could still introduce more pain into the world. (Think about Hitler’s mother.)
Normally, our questions of right and wrong are not simple. There are often many people involved in a problem, and pain is shared by them all.
When you expand the question of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ into much larger social and cultural issues, you have to recognize that you cannot eliminate all pain (a quick reminder that I am using ‘pain’ in the broadest sense of the word, including discomfort, guilt, etc.). And so instead, we can hopefully shift the pain around to be a more equal burden, as opposed to falling primarily on one group of people.
Think about slavery (which I think we can all agree is bad). Enslaved people were/are forced to bear pain and suffering with the ultimate result of reducing the pain of their enslavers. They do work, suffer beatings and humiliations, in order to make life more comfortable for those who keep them trapped. So, by freeing those who are enslaved, we force their enslavers to take on the pain of having to do their own work, of having to admit they were wrong to do what they did, of having to spend their money to pay people to do the work, but we reduce the pain of those who were enslaved by giving them back their agency, allowing them to work on their own terms, etc. The net equals significantly reduced pain for the majority of the people involved the situation.
But that is the big picture view.
From the perspective of the enslaver, their pain increased when the enslaved people were freed. So of course they fought back. Of course they struggled and argued and manipulated and tried to control the government. Because they wanted their mostly painless lifestyle back, despite the pain it caused others.
This example outlines one of the biggest challenges inherent in this way of thinking: we prioritize our own pain over other people’s (most of us). And this makes sense. Because we feel our own pain directly, it seems like it must hurt more than anyone else’s pain. And from a rational perspective, we can see that certain types of pain hurt more than others, like losing a loved one hurts more than losing our phone.
And so if we are comparing our own pain (I lost my phone) to someone else’s (they lost their spouse), we can logically understand that their pain is greater than ours. But we can’t feel it. And that means, sometimes we get it wrong the other way too. Sometimes, we assume their pain is greater than ours when it actually isn’t. Your neighbor’s car gets robbed, and you assume they are traumatized, but then you find out they didn’t lose much of value and used to live in a tough neighborhood and this is the eighth time it’s happened, so it doesn’t bother them as much as it would bother you.
This brings up another question: whose pain is the most important to reduce?
This is important from a cultural and social perspective, but also from an individual one.
In another example, two different groups of people are in pain: one group is being racially profiled by police, and as a result dying at high rates without cause; another group is being profiled by their physical appearance, and as a result being mistreated by health professionals, and also dying as a result.
If we can only help one group, who do we help?
And if we have to help them one at a time, who do we help first?
Luckily, it’s a big world with lots of people who are willing and able to do the work, and we are capable of helping lots of different people with their pain simultaneously.
This concept is not a solution to anything, just to be clear. It’s just one way of looking at a series of super complex problems in society.
But the first step is learning to listen.
If someone says, “I’m in pain,” you say, “Tell me more.”
Because we can only know the best way to move forward after we understand what the pain is, who’s experiencing it, and where it comes from. And we do it together. Not one person making choices on behalf of another. But one person willingly saying, “I am willing and able to take on part of your pain, to make your life easier, even if my own life gets a little harder.”
For example:
I am willing to pay more money in taxes if it means other people can have access to food, water, housing, healthcare, and education.
I am willing to volunteer my time doing difficult work, if it will enable someone else to eat, live, or learn.
I am willing to put my own priorities aside and focus on another person or group’s priorities for the time being (think: therapy).
I am willing to acknowledge that I am wrong, if it will help you heal.
I am willing to stand strong and NOT concede defeat, even if you think I’m wrong, because I believe that standing strong in this will best reduce pain in the world at large.
I am willing to stay home indefinitely if it means fewer people will die from Covid.
Please don’t assume this means I think we should all be pushovers. Quite the contrary. Sometimes, standing strong is the most difficult thing of all. Imagine if all women decided not to have babies because it hurt too much. Or if all therapists quit their jobs because the emotional load of helping others deal with their problems was too intense.
It’s a balancing act in which those with more privilege need to take on some of the burdens of those without. And here’s the thing: we all have privilege in some areas, and not in others. A poor person might not be able to donate money to a non-profit, but they might be able to stand up for a Black person being racially profiled at work. A woman might not feel safe walking the streets of Baltimore at night to hand out food to homeless people, but she can donate time sending emails or texting for a political campaign.
Like I said before: we’re all multi-dimensional people.
So, before this essay gets any longer, I am going to end it with this.
I believe that our ‘good’- and ‘bad’-ness is on a spectrum that we move along through the course of our lives. Sometimes we are heading toward the red, sometimes toward the green. And while we may not ever know exactly what our heart will weigh on Osiris’ scale, we can know which direction we’re moving in.
Also look, I made a picture lol:
(That yellow line is me, and the red and green lines imply being past the point of no return, so to speak.)
Ultimately, I think each of us knows at least one thing we could do to move toward the green line. If we really wanted to. Sometimes, it doesn’t mean doing the biggest thing, but the smallest. One day at a time, one step at a time, for a lifetime, until our heart is as light as a feather.
*****
A few things I’m still actively considering:
Should it be a scale of pain to no pain or pain to pleasure, with no pain being a neutral point? If it was that, it would probably be a loop, not a flat line.
What role does bias play in understanding our own pain vs understanding other people’s pain?
Is it possible to entirely remove the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ from our vocabulary?
What are the benefits of having bucket terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’? (Like, evolutionarily speaking, it might be useful to point at a poisonous plant and say “Bad!” and an edible plant and say “Good!” but that’s not entirely relevant in modern culture, because we have the word “Why?” available to us).
What other things, besides pain, could we use as a measure of good vs bad?
What about when you imagine someone else’s pain so vividly that it causes you actual pain?
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