Who is good?

When I asked my brother to pick up a movie to watch together about three weeks ago, I knew he was not going to waste any time thinking about it, and when he handed me the 'seven pounds', I knew it was probably because it was the first one he had seen on the scattered mess of DVDs in his drawer. A little discouraged, I watched the movie, checked the new words and searched the internet for reviews. I had decided that I did not like the movie very much.

We watched about thirty minutes of the movie, then paused and started to talk about it. My brother asked me what I thought about Ben, the man who was going to donate some parts of his body to a few good people as some sort of penance, and I told him that I did not like this man at all. Naturally my brother asked me the reason, and I surprised myself with my reply. I told my brother that I did not like the way he chose the good people, because how can you tell if somebody is good? Do you even have the right? My brother gave me his idea of a good man, but I was unable to answer the same question.

Who is a good person?

Can you reel off some apparently positive characteristics from mind and whoever possesses them, or at least has some of them, is good and the others who lack them would be considered as bad? As in an honest, kind and merciful man is good, and therefore a lying, unkind and unmerciful person is bad?

Are there any preventive-directive approaches toward being good? Can anybody claim that there is an unchanging way that if you follow, you'll turn out good, and if you don't, you unavoidably turn out to be bad?

Is goodness something absolute and unconditional? Can we presume that goodness is the same in every country, every city and every home and it has been the same since the time of Adam and Eve up to the twenty first century? Can we assume that no matter what changes, good people will always stay the same?

Can we measure goodness, or can we claim that somebody is better than another? Between a martyr for his country and a mother who has given her heart to her child, which one would you pick, or would you claim that both of them had their own selfish reasons and do not pick at all?

Well, all these questions made me wonder. I personally believe that goodness is conditional. It changes all the time, and the only thing constant about it is that it is based on conditions.

Let us presume that cheating is bad, that is, it is not good. Now imagine yourself in this position: You have a classmate whom you consider a knowledgeable person who always tries hard to get what she wants. You know her mother has passes away a few days ago and she has had no chance to study. You also realize that she desperately needs that grade. Would you still consider cheating bad, or would you be willing to bend that rule a little?

Lying is bad, right? But what if a doctor lies to a committee to get his dying patient the liver he desperately needs? Lying doesn't look so bad now, does it?

This quality of goodness is why it makes it so difficult to possess. Everything changes all the time, and it takes more than following a common definition of goodness to make you a good human.

But then if this is true, then how do you know who is good and obviously who is bad, or worse, how do you try to be good?

I personally believe that there is more to this world than we see, and whatever we do and whatever we say will have an impact on the world, and consequently on us. The effect we will have on the world will be the cause of another effect and that is how important we are, and if we do not know what goodness is, we not only harm ourselves, we'd do the same to the universe.

A good man is one who tries, really at least tries, to rise above the tangled web of superficialities that we have made. A good man is one who sees there is more to this world and does whatever he can to be human, and that is not as easy as it sounds.

In order to be good, you don't have to be a bundle of joy or a ray of sunshine. You do not have to spend all your income on the abandoned children. Really, all you have to do is to be good in what you have a gift for. It doesn't matter if it's saving lives, writing a story or fixing a pipe. You can be as grumpy as you want. It wouldn't really matter as long as you save a dying girl whose only left hope is you.

My version of goodness may sound a little radical or even a little selfish, but I truly believe in the greater good. That is if you have to lie to your slow-witted boss to get the money you need to spend it where it's truly needed, then there is nothing wrong with it, because everything is relative, and everything is a tool which can be used either for a right or wrong reason.

My version of goodness means that sometimes you will do what is right and inevitably you'll make mistakes, but then you can die contented and say with a smile: 'at least I tried.'

Being good at what you do makes life much easier and all the more difficult, doesn't it?

And The Truth Shall Set You Free.

An analytic truth is a statement which is true in all possible worlds or under all possible interpretations.


I was young and stupid, and I wanted to please everybody, and I was gifted; I could tell what people wanted to hear, and I always told them what they wanted to hear, and that made them happy, as if it was the only thing that mattered, and I always got what I wanted, which was all that mattered to me.


He was a different story. I could not read him, not because he was difficult, but because there was nothing to read. How do you read a blank paper? How do you read somebody who always tells the truth?

The things he said weren't always nice. I stayed away.

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Truth is persistent. Once it catches a glimpse of you, it never lets you go. I tried to stay away; I really did. I wanted things to go back to normal. I tried to pretend the truth didn't exist, but every corner I turned to, it was there, waiting to find me and torment me. I didn't want it in my life, but the truth left me no choice.

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I was angry at the truth; I was angry at him. It was him who spoke it all the time. It was him who had disturbed the stillness of my life and brought the chaos, and he had to lose, because I wanted him to lose.

But how do you defeat something that is already perfect?

By something equally perfect.

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Truth is ugly and painful, and it leaves scars on your soul that even time cannot heal, but it stands above everything else. It surpasses everything, and in the long run, it is the only thing that matters.

I was defeated, but I was thirsty for more. Truth was like sea water to me. The more I drank, the thirstier I became. I was hurt, but I wanted more.

"Why do you need to know?" He once asked and I knew he didn't mean the question in the book.

"I don't need to eat chocolate, but it makes me happy."

He opened his mouth to say something, stared at my eyes for a moment, then turned around and answered the question in the book.

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The term was over, and everybody was happy. Everybody can tell the truth, but nobody wants to be told the truth. To them, it was a good riddance. To me, it was a great loss.

He was sitting at his desk, putting all the papers in his worn out black bag. He was like a spicy food to me. You eat it, and it burns your tongue and you'll think you'll never want to eat it again, but you wake up the day after, and you want to taste it all over again.

He looked up, stared at my face, looked down on the floor and looked up again.

"If your friend did something wrong, would you tell her so? Would you tell her the truth?"

"Yes," I replied without hesitation. I knew I would.

"So you think you should always tell the truth, and what will be, will be."

"What will be should be."

"What if she's not wrong? What if it's you who's mistaken?"

"The consequences beg to differ." I answered. "You tell the truth all the time. Why shouldn't I?"

He hesitated before answering, "What I tell them is my subjective understanding of reality. I know they always choose what others have defined for them, and I shove their wrongness to their face."

"You think truth is subjective? You think it's constructed?"

"You think truth is absolute?"

I closed my eyes and tried to think. "Maybe it's out there, maybe it's not, and even if it's not, we know how it should be. Why not at least try to get there?"

"Why do you need to know?" He repeated the same old question.

"It makes me happy."

He gave me a sad smile. He looked apologetic, as if he had brought something dreadful in my life. I thought the opposite.

"When you know the truth, it means two things: you'll always be right, and you'll never be happy. You see the world as it is, and you see it as how it should be. You know it'll never be right, and you'll always be miserable. "

"Somebody has to be miserable. Somebody should be upset."

"What you are searching for, you may never find. What you are looking for may not even exist."

"Then we have to make one."

He sighed and gave me a weak smile. I saw pain in his eyes, and I didn't know if it was his or mine reflected in his.

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I'm still young and stupid; I still tell people what they want to hear, but now I have a different reason. Now I know not everybody needs to know the truth, or maybe it's because I, myself, don't know the truth yet.

Somebody once told me 'ignorance is bliss.' No one can argue with that. You don't want to spend your life searching for something you doubt even exists. You don't want to feel this tightness in your chest every time you laugh, but deep down inside, you know you have no other alternative.

Ignorance is bliss, but as Clarence S. Darrow has said it, the pursuit of truth will set you free, even if you never catch up with it.

And I just want to be free.
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