People

Quite frequently you see people say, “There are still good people in the world,” as if they’re sparse. Are there really so few “good” people, or are we just bombarded with negative images so often that we discount others?

And how do you even objectively identify a good person?

My English teacher said in class this week that he wouldn’t trust someone with the same ease he would have thirty years ago. He said he used to think people were inherently “good”, but his stance on this has changed over the years.

I see where he’s coming from, but does this necessarily mean that people have become more “bad”?

I really dislike dichotomies like this. Good and bad, right and wrong, moral and immoral, sexual preference, gender identity, and so on.

What about circumstance? Isn’t so much of the human experience circumstantial? Consider for a moment the drastic differences between our socioeconomical situation now as compared to thirty years ago. Or fifty. Or a hundred.

Circumstances now push our populations in further divided social classes. Help is harder and harder to come by for people in the lower class. It’s even frowned upon.

People are more and more divided as technology keeps people indoors. Even within the same house or sitting right next to each other, people aren’t connecting.

This idea that resources are scarce forces prices higher and higher as wages remain stagnant and our lower classes are practically forced to work as slave laborers. Even as we fill our landfills with 200 to 300 million phones every year…

Is it so surprising that a person might pick a wallet up off the ground and take the money instead of turning it in?

Is it so strange that someone would lie to get a little extra aid from the government?

Is it so outlandish that a man or woman would sleep with their boss to get that raise or promotion to help support their family?

Are people actually “bad” or are they just trying to survive in a society that has pitted them against one another and told them they’re not good enough to have their needs met? Are they “bad” or have we all been conditioned by an individualistic society to be narcissistic instead of other-oriented?

Even without reason, does doing something objectively immoral once in a while make a whole person “bad”? Do a few blemishes demarcate a person from a common good?

I’d like to think that, yes, people are inherently good. I think that circumstance causes people to do things that would normally be considered bad, immoral, or disrespectful. It may say a lot about their character, and I’m also not saying there are not bad people.

But I think people are good. I really do.

And I hope other people see it too…