The Core of Value
What creates the difference between a "good" person or a "bad" person? Considering that question may bring us closer to the sacred core of what a life is.
Have you found yourself watching the news lately and asking yourself, “how can anyone do that?”
It may be news about a murder or a brutal attack. Perhaps someone harmed a child or a small animal. Or perhaps people voted for someone who you cannot imagine anyone voting for.
Were those people wrong? Were they bad people? Don’t be too quick to answer.
In the Eye of the Beholder
The person who harmed a small animal may have felt the animal threatened the health and safety of their family. The voters may be wondering how you could vote for the candidate you voted for.
Who is wrong?
You probably can’t imagine how they could think you voted for the wrong person, but aren’t you thinking the same thing about them?
My point is that it just isn’t that simple. People do things for all kinds of reasons. Some may not be at all justified in your view, but you don’t necessarily know what motivated them. Wrong is relative. Just like beauty, wrong is in the eye of the beholder. What’s wrong for one may be right for another.
Where Do Good and Bad Live?
People may be “bad” people because they were raised in a terrible environment. Or they may have suffered trauma. Or they may come from a culture that is radically different from your own.
So how do we determine if someone is a good or bad person? How do we tell right from wrong?
I believe the answers to these core questions will help us to understand the core of values, and the true nature of what a life is.
Intentions
In many classic movies, when a young girl’s date arrives to take her to the prom, her quintessential father asks him, “what are your intentions, young man?”
And that is a very good question! Dad could have asked “are you going to put hands on my daughter?” but that would have been shocking. Asking “do you have condoms with you?” would be way too suggestive. Dad chooses instead to ask “what are your intentions?”
People can be coerced to do bad and wrong things, they can be forced to do so, threatened, or otherwise persuaded to do them. Underneath that, however, we need to determine what their true intentions are.
A man blows up a bridge. Awful. How could he do that?
Were you to ask why he blew up the bridge he’d explain that his intention was to keep horrible attackers away from his family, tribe, or other group of loved ones. He blew up the bridge with the intention to prevent mass slaughter.
Do you still see the bomber as a bad guy?
When a parent inflicts corporal punishment on their child, many would see that as bad parenting. What if the child had disappeared and scared the daylights out of their parent. Some parents, upon finding the child, might overreact and punish the child for disappearing. That punishment may become excessive. The parent is wrong in delivering punishment that far outweighs the child’s actions, but does that make the parent a bad parent? Perhaps they just overreacted to their own fear at the thought of losing their child.
Right and wrong, bad and good are not simple. There’s nuance. It’s just not easy, nor usually appropriate, to judge.
But when we examine their intentions, we may get closer to the elusive “truth.” If that parent’s intention was to convince the child to never disappear again, that’s not a bad intention. In fact, it’s a good one. But it stimulated the wrong action. It is altogether possible to be wrong but not bad, or good but not right. It’s all a matter of the underlying intentions.
This is Something We Can Change
People do all kinds of bad, awful things. They compromise their health and the health of those around them by smoking cigarettes. They sometimes drink to excess and do stupid, harmful things. They leave the milk out.
We could try to focus on each of those symptoms but we’d be very busy for a very long time trying to correct each and every “bad” behavior.
But the source of those bad actions is the intentions of that person. They could be persuaded to revisit and revise those intentions. They could, in fact, invest time and effort in examining their own intentions and ask themselves if their actions align with them.
If anybody has the ability to change all those “bad” actions, its the person who takes the time to become introspective, examine their own intentions, and determine how true they are behaving according to those intentions. Are they living their intentions? Do they have reason to feel really good about themselves, or do they have adjustments to make?
This is Why I Ask “What Do You Want?”
Our intentions are driven by what we want, what we desire, what we hold valuable, worthwhile, and appropriate.
The challenge we all face is being true to our intentions, aligning our actions with them, having a deep internal level of integrity to our intentions.
And this begins by examining them.
Each week we ask another “What do you want…” question. The purpose is to help you, the reader, to examine your own answers. What do YOU want? What are YOUR true intentions? From there, you can explore the question, “Am I living my intentions? Or is someone or something else calling my shots?”
The Core of a Life
Ultimately, I feel the definition, the meaning at the core of our lives lies in the intentions that we embrace, the things we do to express those intentions and the alignment of those acts with them. It begins with our intentions.
One eternal argument is where life resides. Do we each have a soul that survives beyond our physical body? Does “life” reside in the mind, or the heart?
My answer has always been that life resides in the information we share with others in the things we say and the things we do. Our bodies are a convenient vessel to contain all the necessary parts that process all that information, but it is the information itself that we need to concern ourselves with.
As such, we can leave some of ourselves behind in the things we write, the people we serve, and even in the children we raise.
My students once gave me a lovely plaque with the inscription, “A teacher affects eternity. They never know where their influence ends.”
We can all be teachers.
As always, an incredibly insightful article. Nice job, Howard. Can it be shared on LinkedIn? If so, please send me the link so I can do so. Thank you!
Love the thoughts. Thank you.
I've always believed: We judge others by their actions, but we want to be judged by our intentions.