Quiddity #2: The shifting sands of good and bad

The president and his followers are one eloquent piece of evidence that people do not strive to be good or want to be good, beyond a lazy desire to own the concept. Nor, for the overwhelming part, do they want to be bad. I think that these states, and the descriptions of these states, are conscious and deliberate in only a very few people. These include hurt and angry children who want to be bad as revenge and message; neurotic crusaders (humanitarians); philosophers; and politicians whose notion of good, benevolence and rights is bastardized by the desire for power.

People are not good or bad. They are simply their history’s engine, misinterpreted by their rationalization and self-identification.

Birth, infancy, childhood pain leads to destruction, regardless of one’s humane ideas. Others, or self, are hurt directly and indirectly by unhealed injuries imbedded in us. So we may look to the country for goodness in the face of an undeniably poisonous president. But ambiguity about what’s good hobbles us. Depression, “unfinished business” and “baggage” sap our motivation, rob us of empathy. We can’t grasp giving our children the respect and attention that we never got. We are selfish now because we never could be. We are childish now because we grew up too fast. We value a universal minimum wage, but question forcing employers to pay it. We are ambivalent or dogmatic about a woman’s right to abortion, because we are not in touch with an organic morality of grace.

When we see that our country is shuffling into the dumpster, inspired by Pied Piper Trump, we are knowing developmental psychology. We are seeing, in a clear panorama, that millions of us are still children in the clandestine part of our heart. We are seeing that hurt often changes to hate, sometimes transforms to a sort of saintliness, typically becomes the muddled soul that does good and bad things most ignorantly. Mostly, we’re seeing that the unconscious runs our life.