blackwire

Volatility

I don't rightly know why I'm feeling so angry right now. In fact, the whole day I was like a ticking bomb just waiting to explode. For some reason, a red mist has been colouring everything that I lay my eyes on.

Someone said today that we should all do "good", we should all do something good and valuable for humanity. She mentioned helping the poor, doing mission trips and stuff like that. These are the things that I've always said are worth doing, and felt like doing myself. And yet, I can't but help feeling fundamentally OPPOSED to what she said.

What IS "good"? I should think that there is some inherent and absolute conception of "goodness". Its generally held that murder is "bad", that rape is also "bad", that we should not unduly cause harm to another...and I do not dispute this. Far from it.

Yet, unfortunately - or in this case, fortunately - we rarely get into situations as clear-cut as those mentioned above (I'm making the assumption that they are clear-cut, although that may be easily disputed). One problem is when we try to "measure" "good"... If we say that we want to alleviate poverty, we must ask ourselves questions like; to what end? how do we define who's poor and who's not?

To begin with, I would hazard that it is impossible to totally eradicate poverty. There would always be a "class" (I'm not comfortable with this term) of people who are worse off materially than the rest of the society. In that case, our goals and aims are already limited. How then can we help them? By making them feel good? Feel loved? Why not a shot of cocaine every now and then then? They WOULD feel good. And we could just feeding it to them so that they'll NEVER feel bad. Or injecting them with some tranquilizers and then......well, get rid of them. They sure as hell wouldn't feel "bad". (Before I get totally and utterly slammed for this outrageous suggestion, let me say that I am TOTALLY against it. Its just an eg.) The whole point is that, feeling "good" is NOT a good way to measure or to qualify doing "good". In fact, it is a horrible , horrible way of qualifying things.

If we want to measure doing "good" by the do-er's intentions, then that is even more dodgy. Aside from the cliched "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", other more real things like abortion, euthanasia can all be argued to have good intentions. Yet, as much as we can understand the motivations in carrying out those acts, I can't help but feel that they are not quite "good" things.

Another person also mentioned something about being altruistic. I believe that there is no such thing as pure altruism. No matter whether it is to make oneself feel satisfied, or happy, there will be a certain degree of fulfilling some self-interests. As long as there are intentions, any action done in accordance intentions would be self-fulfilling already.

Not that this is a "bad" thing per se. Its just important that people realise this, and acknowledge the importance of doing things for themselves.