Why good girls and nice boys won’t save the world

The desire to be “good” is so strong in our culture.

It’s built into our mythology (heroes and villains), our religions (saints and sinners), and our modern culture (good allies, bad allies)

The story goes that if we could all just become good enough, moral enough, virtuous enough we would save the world.

That the path to ending suffering lies in us identifying and banishing all parts of ourselves that do not hold up to moral scrutiny so that we are left with only the “good”. Lock up our bad thoughts in hidden corners of our mind. Lock up our “bad” people, so that only the good survive.

The jig is there are always more bad thoughts. And there are always more bad people. Because ahem.. maybe we are all bad people *at least in part.* And maybe bad isn’t so bad after all.

And anyway no matter how much locking up we do, the world remains unsaved.

I noticed something really eye opening the other day. My baba Ocean is 10 months old, he poos himself 3 times a day, regularly shovels handfuls of soil into his mouth and falls over when he tries to walk. In short, he really doesn’t have any concept of the “rules of life”.

And yet I notice how often people (including me) are quick to comment on how “good a boy” he’s been.

What does that mean? Well what I’ve realised is “he’s been such a good boy” means “he was quiet and placid today and didn’t bother me that much” or “he’s such a good sleeper or eater” means “he sleeps and eats the amount that makes me as a parent feel good”.

What I am uncovering is that a lot of the time when we say “good” we actually mean “compliant”. We mean someone who goes along with what works for us and our narrative about what we and/or the world needs.

And that’s actually pretty dangerous. Not just on the individual level, encouraging our kids to believe that we have to be a certain way to be seen as good.

But on a collective level. This is the very criticism leveled against the political left. Rigid views on what is morally right and wrong and a public shaming or cancelling of anyone who does not do this.

The irony is this urge to control, often comes from well meaning people seeking to create a more just world but who don’t recognise that forcing compliance from a place of fear, is actually one of the quickest ways to create an unjust one.

Only a brief look at history tells us that the people who radically altered the course of history for the better were most often not the compliant ones, not the ones seeking to preserve their goodness in the eyes of others. Who didn’t care about goodness so much as they cared about Love and Truth and Liberation.

Big societal shifts are inextricably linked to big shifts in consciousness. Awakenings. The realisation that what we were doing before no longer felt right for who we were becoming. Even if these shifts only happened amongst a few more conscious citizens who dragged the rest kicking and screaming, it was an unquestionable prerequisite. That it no longer felt right to own another human. To make decisions for your wife etc.

The thing about a shift in moral consciousness is that it necessarily requires you to see all the ways your thinking and actions have been wrong up til now.

Or if we want to take the judgement out of it. You were making decisions from a place where you had less information. Now you have more information, you see a different way, a better way.

So we might think about the distinction less as bad/good and more incomplete/more complete. Or simply evolving.

When we are attached to our goodness and afraid of being seen as bad, we become rigid and immovable. We become so desperate to prove to ourselves and others that we are good now, that we don’t open up the possibility that we could become more good or more whole. Our goodness becomes the thing we fight to protect, not the hope of a better future.

The beautiful thing is that when we move from good / bad to evolving there is no blame and shame, there’s no judgement there’s actually just movement. And that’s what creates change, healing transformation.

Huge paradigm shift. But it’s the truth. Want to heal the world? Let go of your attachment to your goodness.

Love xxx