Possibly no other single issue molds our life more than whether we feel people are basically good, or not. Scholars have spent lifetimes theorizing, arguing, defending, and attacking this question from all sides. There really is no need for any of us to spend the next decade researching whether the evidence points more convincingly towards good or towards bad. My gut says that people are basically good. This seems to make sense and fit personal firsthand experiences. Even if it isn’t true, the downside from constructing a world view predicated on this truth is so much smaller than the potential upside. Let us bravely yet confidently proclaim that “People are basically good”.
But, what about the holocaust, Rwanda, DDOS (distributed denial of service internet hacking), serial killers, infanticide, and the Yankees (okay, I’m a Red Sox fan)? There are more atrocities throughout human history than we would have space to simply list in this book. True, but, they are insignificant in comparison to the thousands, millions of kind deeds offered in every moment of every day. A whole lot of Yin does not preclude its requisite Yang.
While it is true that humanity is basically good, there are also a number of factors working against this goodness, breaking it down, attempting to corrupt it. The most significant of the numerous challenges to innate goodness is without doubt, fear. Fear is the gateway to hatred and greed. Fear feeds the cancers of society. Fear is the most pernicious damaging thought in existence. For, without fear, the nearly boundless energy and love and healing of our collective goodness can percolate throughout every space we walk. Living fearlessly is difficult. But, living fearlessly needs to be a conscience choice that we make day after day. We may be able to go a few days or weeks if we are fortunate without having to battle the dark lure of fear and all that it promises. We may find ourselves trapped in a vast sea of fear for months or years on end. It may seem that the fear is the only thing keeping us alive, our only life preserver. But, fear is not the life preserver; it is the black waters that we find ourselves in at times when we knowingly or otherwise stray too far from the path we know is possible and best. But, just like a rising sun, our innate goodness can cast away the darkness of fear, if we feed the light and not the dark.
More powerfully than all of this is what a world of basically good people portends for the future, for a trip to the store, or a yet-to-be-met acquaintance. It is a world where, despite storms and periods of darkness, the light will always come out, has always come out, and will for evermore come out. People are basically good! Even the most despotic that our mind can conjure was on a virtuous path at some point, destined to offer to the world their basic goodness. It is unfair, untrue, and dangerous to think that the “Hitlers” and “Ted Bundys” of this world are really any different. Through a series of path choices, conscience or otherwise, these fallen souls have strayed so far from their innate goodness to have lost any hope of ever finding the way home again. Through unfortunate genetic resources and life events and yes, personal decisions some of us will stray so far from who we are as to be effectively forever unrecognizable. But, these “six sigma individuals”, these examples so far from common experience, should not occupy much of our thought, should not inform our life view on humanity.
While it may seem that the world may be losing some goodness, and thereby increasing its proportion of fallen souls, this is simply “ebb” in the eventual flow. Life never occurs in a vacuum. We make structural decisions either consciously or tacitly on many levels. We decide to try heroin or drive while intoxicated or troll internet comment sections. We also structure trade deals between nations and place value, or not, on communal resources like air and water. We build the topography of life that leads to climate change and money flowing from poor nations to rich ones. We erect barriers to impede the natural flow of goodness. We may increase the scale or duration of the black periods. But we also tear down those barriers like “white only drinking fountains” and church abuse cover-ups. The saving grace, the peace to be had when we close our eyes, is that your goodness, our goodness is always there in the background, like a happy dog, tail wagging, waiting for its master to return. Goodness wins always. We are basically good at our core, way down inside, all of us.
