WHY DO GOOD PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS?

A rabbi wrote a famous book called “Why do Bad Things happen to Good People?” Here’s a harder question: “Why do Good People do Bad Things?” Even to the people they know and love? Even Saint Paul puzzled over why he did things he didn’t want to do.

BRAINSTORMING:

1. They aren’t in their right minds: drunk, high, asleep, brain-damaged, in an emotional storm.

2. They don’t understand the situation, the person or persons they hurt, the nature of what they are doing.

3. They were hurt badly by other people and pass it on in that strange way that traumatized people do, a kind of repetition compulsion.

4. Greed: doing bad things is the only way they know to get what they want, which they think they must have.

5. Everyone else is doing it. (“Everyone whips children.”)

6. A moral judgment, a punishment, maybe meant to distance the punisher, maybe because they sincerely believe doing bad things to others will change behavior they don’t like, that it’s deserved.

7. The culture enforces it, even a vicious torture like clitirodectomy or the often traumatic custom of English upper classes sending children off to boarding school.

8. Iphigenia syndrome: sacrificing one to save the rest or maybe a cause.

9. Concern for appearances overwhelming authenticity: violent and oppressive means taking control for the sake of the end, particularly when there is overinvestment in “fitting in,” as in immigration or in matters of class or when dealing with signs that are censored and demonized by the larger culture. (Drugs, sex)

10. Special unrecognized vulnerability. Parents might behave towards a child in a way that could be effective and reasonable for some kids, but totally backfires on one who is different. For instance, my father on trips had a bribe/reward system worked out, which he pretentiously defended as “operant conditioning.” He marked an index card clipped to the sun visor for each of we kids: a tally if we did something he considered “wrong” and a tally for every thing we did “right.” As the oldest, all the good stuff I did was ruled “expected and not exceptional -- therefore no tally” and all the bad stuff I did was mostly just annoying. At the end of the day he gave out coins. I got the nickel. My middle brother got the quarter. The other brother got the dime. Over and over and over. I STILL resent that more than I did the unnecessary spankings. It taught me to resist operant conditioning, both awards and punishments. But it didn’t affect my brothers.

11. I’ve wondered about those cases where someone superior ORDERED a good person to do a bad thing and they did it. How often does that happen? MUST good people buckle to bad authority figures? Some folks seem to think so. Where is the fault then? This happened to me most clearly when I was teaching and principals insisted that I do bad things, or at least things that were not good for the students. Unreal restrictions, order at any cost.

12. A good person is deceived by a bad person into doing something bad to a good person -- an Iago sort of dynamic. It’s not enough to be good -- one must be perceptive and recognize deception.

13. The good person is only good through effort and occasionally badness breaks through.

14. The good person is confused and does something bad by mistake. It’s not really anyone’s fault, or at least intention.

15. The victim somehow invites the good person to do something bad to him or her, maybe out of confusing the acceptance of damage with some kind of martyrdom or to gain control (you owe me because of what you did to me).

16. The good person signals vulnerability which the opportunistic person uses to entice them into bad behavior, maybe even frivolously for the “fun of it”.

Of course, this whole thing falls apart when one tries to define “good” or “bad.” Who are all these “good” people? Isn’t everyone mixed, with their behavior moving towards what is effective? If something is effective and vital (stealing bread when you’re starving) isn’t that good no matter what the rules? Isn’t that why the New Testament is wise in moving us away from commandments towards principles? But what ought to be the principles of “good” people? Doesn’t it depend on the circumstances? Is there any way out of situation ethics? The Golden Rule?

Mostly “goodness” appears to be a matter of setting the welfare of others above one’s own welfare, up to a point. How can we require people to destroy themselves for the greater good? But we do it all the time. Take a look at Iraq, at BOTH sides. Aren’t our soldiers killing children for good reasons? And aren’t those suicide bombers destroying themselves to serve the greater cause of militant Islam? (They might do better to imitate the Buddhist monks whose protest takes the form of self-immolation since that doesn’t kill other people. But isn’t it still a bad thing?)

Trying to be good by withdrawing, staying out of trouble, being an isolationist, seems in the long run to be ineffective if not bad. A good person who was trying not to be bad might try to find another culture or a circumscribed group where the “bad” things to which he was prone were NOT considered bad -- say nudity. If you don’t wear clothes in the middle of an African tribe that never wears clothes, is that bad? (Take sun screen.) But being able to evade “badness” by changing cultures implies that “badness” is a cultural question and not universal at all, thus undercutting religion which represented as absolute.

There is a large component of our society that tries to eliminate all killing, all death, all pain -- not just human but for all living beings -- and thinks this will make them and the society “good.” They NEED to be good in this way, though it is a fool’s pursuit since all living things die or the cycle stops. They despise aggression of all sorts. Today (now yesterday) a story in the paper suggests that aggression “bad” enough to cause a person to be put in prison is linked to high childhood levels of lead paint in those persons. If they never ingested lead, if they never were aggressive, if they never went to prison, would that mean they would be immortal?

Is the willing pursuit of these difficult questions what makes us good?