How Good Are You?

“I am bad and that’s good, I will never be good and that’s bad, but if that little kid likes me, how bad can I be?”
-Quote from ‘Wreck It Ralph’

Are you a good person? How good are you? What defines your goodness? What are its parameters or what is the scale that measures the goodness of someone?

Have you ever thought about these questions? I know you haven’t but I did.

I have observed that the goodness of a person is always relative. It always needs a reference. There is no set scale for measuring someone’s goodness. Most of the times it depends upon the behaviour and the attitude of the person in question, towards the observant; and in other cases, it is in comparison to someone else.

All this happens because we form a perception of someone based upon their outer habits, in our minds and then we are stubborn enough to resolutely refuse to come out of it. We ‘presume’, and that is where the whole problem starts. Our presumptions do not let us to think clearly and look beyond the false prejudices that we have formed. These may someday prove fatal to human relationships. We have to come out of our presumptions and break the prejudices, so that we can comprehend the goodness or badness of a person from a morally neutral standpoint.

I believe that the goodness of a person is an absolute characteristic of their nature. If a person is good, then they are good no matter what. Period. Simply because someone does something that you do not like, it does not make them bad for no reason; they might repel you, and that's perfectly fine. You may not like every other person you meet, but still they aren't bad, are they?


The goodness and badness are a matter of soul and not your perception.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Art, Artist, and Are They?

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” ―  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov The democratization of technology has made tools once exclusive to professionals now accessible to everyone. Anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection can become a photographer, a musician, a painter, an artist, an author, or a poet. The barriers to entry have been dismantled so thoroughly that the true essence of being an artist has been diluted to the point of absurdity. Gone are the days when art required peer review and validation by credible authorities. When people understood the concept of being rejected and accepted the idea of not being good enough. The self-serve platforms have effectively obliterated the need for hardened training to excel in any craft. Instead, we're drowning in a sea of self-proclaimed artists who possess the tools but lack the discipline and skill honed through years of dedication and critique. The result? An overwhelming flood of what can only be descr...
Read more

Welcome to the Machine

  “One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion” ―  Voltaire Perhaps one of the most famous thought experiment ever devised is the trolley problem. It is said to be the classic representation of the clash between the two schools of thought in the western philosophy  - utilitarianism and deontology. The problem states that a trolley is running down a track and on the track there are five people tied up and unable to move. There is an alternative track on which a single person is tied up. You are standing at a lever that can change the direction of the trolley to the alternate track. Your choices are to either do nothing and let the trolley kill five people or to pull the lever and divert the trolley where it kills one person. The dilemma here is that which is the more ethical option? Upon facing the situation, I assume, many people would choose to pull the lever. I myself might end up doing the same. However, t here are m...
Read more

News - facts or story?

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” ―  Thomas Jefferson In the times that we suppose are unprecedented, it is not the ubiquitously luring dangers of the pandemic that scare me the most but it is the news; something that we are more exposed to than the disease itself.  Open any news channel at any time (although maybe when they are actually reporting a piece of news and not discussing celebrity hairstyles or hooking up actresses with cricketers or reporting an Instagram video to be the best thing on the internet today) or read any column of any newspaper and you will find the tone of the report to resound that of someone telling their plight or sharing their joy or venting their anger or ranting their frustration. This may not seem a much of a problem as doing all that is the job of a reporter but it is a huge problem. And that is so because when a news report sounds like a story, it means that the reporter has...
Read more