Sunday, February 19, 2012
On Good...or Good Enough
What makes a person good? I've talked about evil before and it's sometimes fairly obvious why something is evil, but even then it's all really subjective and based on the point of view at the time. So what makes someone a good person, if there is such a thing? Maybe it's in the things they do. People are often judged by their actions so it's the most apparent indicator that someone is good. Maybe it goes deeper than that. What if the actions are only what's on the surface? It could be that true goodness is tied to intent. I've talked about cheating before. Some people think that cheating really only occurs when sex is involved, or at least physical contact. I personally think it's something more. If you enter a situation with the intention of cheating, but something prevents it from happening then you're still a cheater. Just because you didn't or couldn't act on it doesn't change what you intended to do. Some may think that's a little harsh and if you were to apply those kind of standards to other aspects of life then we have a lot of cheaters, killers, and thieves walking around who simply haven't acted on what's in their hearts. That actually brings up the question of: Is good just the absence of evil or is evil simply the absence of good intention?
If you were to ask the average person if they thought they were good, most would probably say for the most part they are. They may say that they're a bit of an asshole at times, but most people have moments where they're not exactly nice. More to the point, most people think what they're doing is right, or at least justified. So to them their actions, and in turn themselves, are good. Or at least good enough. Now for the most part there are some general accepted forms of being good. Helping people, thinking of more than just yourself, and actively trying to spread love/joy/happiness to the world around you. In most societies those things are considered to be virtuous. However, to someone who would rather see the destruction of a people, place, or thing would the good person really be good for them? For them it would likely run contrary to what they ultimately want and while you may not be able to go as far as to say for them good is evil, you couldn't exactly say that a good person is held in good standing. This goes back to the argument that maybe good and evil is only in the eye of the beholder.
Still it doesn't really answer the question of what makes a person good. It also kind of circles the point of what makes us different from the animals or a machine that could emulate our behavior. One might say what differentiates us is the fact that we use rational thought and logic. That we sense the world around us and understand our place within it. I can tell you right now if that's what separates us from the animals or a machine then I'm next to failing as a human because I rarely know my place in the world and am even less likely to use rational thought. One may also say that rational thought isn't enough to set us apart. It takes something more. It takes love, compassion, or empathy to be a truly good person. Without these traits then we're no better than some reptile or robot.
I won't get too much into love because I've talked about it before, but I will talk about empathy. I'd like to believe that most people are at least somewhat empathetic when it comes to people around them. Now I know it's hard with so many people on the planet and life moving so fast. If you allow yourself to empathize with everyone and everything you'd drown in a sea of emotion. Still with the people closest to us we understand how they're feeling or how something impacts their life. It's when we use that understanding to guide our own actions that we start to get closer to the idea of being good. Now before I get too far I want to mention something. When a child is growing up the first few years of their life they're in their own little self-contained world. They have no real comprehension of the people around them. They can only really understand their own experiences and needs. This can be a hard concept for some people to accept because for an adult it looks like the child is being selfish. And in a way they are, but they have no idea that there's anything else out there that matters. As they get older they start grasp the concept that the world isn't all about them, but they are a part of something larger. Now it's true that some people never really learn this because they still somehow believe that the most important thing is themselves. To be fair, for the strictest sense of survival, they're right. Assuming we only get the one body and one life then you should always be the most important thing in your world. If you cease to exist then your world also ceases to exist and all the other things you care about go away, at least as far as you can perceive. So if a child for the first five or so years lacks empathy what does that mean as far as the whole good thing is concerned? Most people would argue that a child is innocent and thereby good by default until something causes them to stop being good.
I've read a bit about Asperger's and some of the main traits with it are a lack of understanding social cues, extreme self-involvement, and a lack of empathy. If you tweaked things a little bit one way you'd have someone that would be considered a sociopath. One of the things several people with Asperger's have done to help them fit in and behave more 'normal' is to copy what other people are doing. It may not ever enter into their mind to ask how someone's weekend was, but after awhile they may train themselves to ask because they know it's kind of a social awareness that many people have come to expect. So for the person with Asperger's they're not asking how the weekend was because they want to know, they're asking because they know they should want to know. You can't throw out a blanket statement that says anyone who lacks empathy isn't a good person because someone with Asperger's or a child couldn't rationally be held to that standard. Still it does bring up the question though what is the standard?
We've all seen movies or read stories about someone who started out with the best of intentions and somewhere along the way they paved their own road to hell. I said before a cheater is based largely on their intention. So what happens when the intentions were good, but somehow the actions get corrupted? Arlo said there aren't any good guys. There aren't any bad guys or innocent guys. It's all just a bunch of guys. Meaning no one can be really classified as good or bad. Everyone is just sort of doing whatever whenever. It's almost cynical to think about, but probably not that far from reality. So you may think of yourself as a good person and maybe on most days you are, but if you're honest with yourself, you know there are days when that goodness takes a backseat and you do something that isn't even in the same zip code as being good. Does that make you a bad person? Not necessarily. There's an old question about if people are mostly good and sometimes do bad things or generally bad and occasionally do good things. How you judge the world also shows a bit about who you are. I'd like to think that if a person tends to try and do good and be good and has generally good intentions towards the world that we could go ahead and say they're a good person. Still my standards for what is 'good' may be different than yours so maybe there is no real way to know, except what's in our own mind. Then again, maybe that's all that ever matters.
If you were to ask the average person if they thought they were good, most would probably say for the most part they are. They may say that they're a bit of an asshole at times, but most people have moments where they're not exactly nice. More to the point, most people think what they're doing is right, or at least justified. So to them their actions, and in turn themselves, are good. Or at least good enough. Now for the most part there are some general accepted forms of being good. Helping people, thinking of more than just yourself, and actively trying to spread love/joy/happiness to the world around you. In most societies those things are considered to be virtuous. However, to someone who would rather see the destruction of a people, place, or thing would the good person really be good for them? For them it would likely run contrary to what they ultimately want and while you may not be able to go as far as to say for them good is evil, you couldn't exactly say that a good person is held in good standing. This goes back to the argument that maybe good and evil is only in the eye of the beholder.
Still it doesn't really answer the question of what makes a person good. It also kind of circles the point of what makes us different from the animals or a machine that could emulate our behavior. One might say what differentiates us is the fact that we use rational thought and logic. That we sense the world around us and understand our place within it. I can tell you right now if that's what separates us from the animals or a machine then I'm next to failing as a human because I rarely know my place in the world and am even less likely to use rational thought. One may also say that rational thought isn't enough to set us apart. It takes something more. It takes love, compassion, or empathy to be a truly good person. Without these traits then we're no better than some reptile or robot.
I won't get too much into love because I've talked about it before, but I will talk about empathy. I'd like to believe that most people are at least somewhat empathetic when it comes to people around them. Now I know it's hard with so many people on the planet and life moving so fast. If you allow yourself to empathize with everyone and everything you'd drown in a sea of emotion. Still with the people closest to us we understand how they're feeling or how something impacts their life. It's when we use that understanding to guide our own actions that we start to get closer to the idea of being good. Now before I get too far I want to mention something. When a child is growing up the first few years of their life they're in their own little self-contained world. They have no real comprehension of the people around them. They can only really understand their own experiences and needs. This can be a hard concept for some people to accept because for an adult it looks like the child is being selfish. And in a way they are, but they have no idea that there's anything else out there that matters. As they get older they start grasp the concept that the world isn't all about them, but they are a part of something larger. Now it's true that some people never really learn this because they still somehow believe that the most important thing is themselves. To be fair, for the strictest sense of survival, they're right. Assuming we only get the one body and one life then you should always be the most important thing in your world. If you cease to exist then your world also ceases to exist and all the other things you care about go away, at least as far as you can perceive. So if a child for the first five or so years lacks empathy what does that mean as far as the whole good thing is concerned? Most people would argue that a child is innocent and thereby good by default until something causes them to stop being good.
I've read a bit about Asperger's and some of the main traits with it are a lack of understanding social cues, extreme self-involvement, and a lack of empathy. If you tweaked things a little bit one way you'd have someone that would be considered a sociopath. One of the things several people with Asperger's have done to help them fit in and behave more 'normal' is to copy what other people are doing. It may not ever enter into their mind to ask how someone's weekend was, but after awhile they may train themselves to ask because they know it's kind of a social awareness that many people have come to expect. So for the person with Asperger's they're not asking how the weekend was because they want to know, they're asking because they know they should want to know. You can't throw out a blanket statement that says anyone who lacks empathy isn't a good person because someone with Asperger's or a child couldn't rationally be held to that standard. Still it does bring up the question though what is the standard?
We've all seen movies or read stories about someone who started out with the best of intentions and somewhere along the way they paved their own road to hell. I said before a cheater is based largely on their intention. So what happens when the intentions were good, but somehow the actions get corrupted? Arlo said there aren't any good guys. There aren't any bad guys or innocent guys. It's all just a bunch of guys. Meaning no one can be really classified as good or bad. Everyone is just sort of doing whatever whenever. It's almost cynical to think about, but probably not that far from reality. So you may think of yourself as a good person and maybe on most days you are, but if you're honest with yourself, you know there are days when that goodness takes a backseat and you do something that isn't even in the same zip code as being good. Does that make you a bad person? Not necessarily. There's an old question about if people are mostly good and sometimes do bad things or generally bad and occasionally do good things. How you judge the world also shows a bit about who you are. I'd like to think that if a person tends to try and do good and be good and has generally good intentions towards the world that we could go ahead and say they're a good person. Still my standards for what is 'good' may be different than yours so maybe there is no real way to know, except what's in our own mind. Then again, maybe that's all that ever matters.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
On Jobs
I've had a lot of jobs in my life. Notice I didn't say career
because while many of the jobs were in related fields, I don't really
think of myself as having a coherent career. That could be because each
job was simply what I did at the time. Sure many of them involved a
computer and built on the knowledge I may have learned from school or
even the previous job, but they were connected to each other in the same
way that hand-gliding and riding in a commercial jet are related. The biggest issue I've found with my jobs is that
they don't really matter to each other. My previous experience helped
me get the job I have now, but I could have done this same work ten
years ago with little difference in overall performance. What does that
say about my so-called career that my jobs are all interchangeable?
Now I know several people who were fortunate enough
to find a job they enjoyed early on and turned it into a career. It
seems with my generation it's becoming more likely that people will not
only switch jobs, but change fields. Sometimes it's out of necessity
and other times it's forced upon them. Thirty years ago it would have
been strange for someone my age to have as many jobs as I do. It used
to be you find a job that pays you well enough and stick with it until you were too
old to work anymore. Twenty to thirty years later you called it a day
and collected your pension. The idea of me working anywhere long enough
to generate a real retirement fund seems unlikely. Not just because of
the economy, but because of who I am. I tend to have the attention
span of a puppy when it comes to work.
For much of the time since I graduated from college
the economy has been in a recession and in some cases I think it's been a
depression. I'm not an economist or anything. I just know that for as
long as I can remember people have worried about layoffs, downturns,
and unemployment rates. One has to wonder if the trend for the last ten
to fifteen years has been overall negative then maybe it's not a trend,
but just the way things are. Of course everything is cyclical and I
have to believe that eventually things will turn around. I've just
never seen it since I've been old enough to really care about it. There
are people graduating from college that can't find a job. It's not
because they are unqualified, well some of them are, it's because
there's simply not enough jobs to go around anymore. The whole
situation is strange too because there's still work to be done. I know
several industries that are swamped with work, where their people are
working well over forty hours a week.
One of the most hated phrases thrown around in corporate America is "do more with less", which is really just a buzz worthy way of saying that they expect the same level (or higher) of service but don't want to pay for it. The company just laid off three hundred employees because they couldn't afford to keep them on anymore. That doesn't mean the work those people were doing goes away. Instead it gets redistributed to whoever is left standing. Often times those people still with a job are just thankful they still are working and will take on the new responsibilities because if they don't, they too may be out the door. Eventually though it just becomes standard operating procedure for people to keep taking on more work. Their salaries or benefits don't go up because the company is trying to save money. I get that a company's primary function is to make money. They may make computer software, or shoes, or save babies, but they need to make money in order to continue doing whatever it is they do. So I don't think that most companies set out to screw over their employees by taking from them and giving nothing back in return. That's not usually their intention, at least not at first. What probably happens is that the higher ups see that they've been able to save X number of dollars after "trimming the fat" and that overall productivity and/of quality hasn't gone down, so they figure everything is fine. What they most likely don't ever see is that the person who was already swamped with their own work now has to take on extra work from one of the people who were walked out the door. The employees do this because what's the alternative? If they aren't able to meet the new demands they know that the company has no problems with letting people go. Essentially the employees are held hostage in their jobs because the other option in a recession is to join the unemployment line. Companies know this and have a tendency to take advantage. Like I said, things haven't been good for as long as I remember, so they know that it's unlikely there will be a sudden explosion of new jobs that people could flock to.
I think my fundamental issue with jobs is that I just don't understand how our society has gotten to the point where we're defined by what we do for a living. My job is just the thing I do to make money so I can buy food and pay my bills. While I'm not some kind of anarchist who thinks we should do away with jobs and bills, I do wonder why is it that we think we're so advanced and yet we still behave like ants or cavemen. Many people think it's an unreasonable dream to do a job that you love. They believe that you should be happy just being able to make money to survive. What if you want more than to survive? What if you wake up one day and realize that this is the only life you're going to get and spending forty hours a day doing a job that you loathe is a waste of your life? Are you supposed to just accept it and sell more widgets because anything more is just a dream? There are people out there right now who have their dream jobs. They wake up in the morning and get excited about going to work. They don't even think of it as work a lot of the time. If they can do it then why can't others? There has to be more involved than just blind luck. Maybe it all comes down to personality where one person simply will not accept tedium for their life. Everyone eventually gets to a point in their life where they start looking back and wondering if it's been spent wisely. The jobs we've had should be footnotes in the story of our lives, not the defining moments.
One of the most hated phrases thrown around in corporate America is "do more with less", which is really just a buzz worthy way of saying that they expect the same level (or higher) of service but don't want to pay for it. The company just laid off three hundred employees because they couldn't afford to keep them on anymore. That doesn't mean the work those people were doing goes away. Instead it gets redistributed to whoever is left standing. Often times those people still with a job are just thankful they still are working and will take on the new responsibilities because if they don't, they too may be out the door. Eventually though it just becomes standard operating procedure for people to keep taking on more work. Their salaries or benefits don't go up because the company is trying to save money. I get that a company's primary function is to make money. They may make computer software, or shoes, or save babies, but they need to make money in order to continue doing whatever it is they do. So I don't think that most companies set out to screw over their employees by taking from them and giving nothing back in return. That's not usually their intention, at least not at first. What probably happens is that the higher ups see that they've been able to save X number of dollars after "trimming the fat" and that overall productivity and/of quality hasn't gone down, so they figure everything is fine. What they most likely don't ever see is that the person who was already swamped with their own work now has to take on extra work from one of the people who were walked out the door. The employees do this because what's the alternative? If they aren't able to meet the new demands they know that the company has no problems with letting people go. Essentially the employees are held hostage in their jobs because the other option in a recession is to join the unemployment line. Companies know this and have a tendency to take advantage. Like I said, things haven't been good for as long as I remember, so they know that it's unlikely there will be a sudden explosion of new jobs that people could flock to.
I think my fundamental issue with jobs is that I just don't understand how our society has gotten to the point where we're defined by what we do for a living. My job is just the thing I do to make money so I can buy food and pay my bills. While I'm not some kind of anarchist who thinks we should do away with jobs and bills, I do wonder why is it that we think we're so advanced and yet we still behave like ants or cavemen. Many people think it's an unreasonable dream to do a job that you love. They believe that you should be happy just being able to make money to survive. What if you want more than to survive? What if you wake up one day and realize that this is the only life you're going to get and spending forty hours a day doing a job that you loathe is a waste of your life? Are you supposed to just accept it and sell more widgets because anything more is just a dream? There are people out there right now who have their dream jobs. They wake up in the morning and get excited about going to work. They don't even think of it as work a lot of the time. If they can do it then why can't others? There has to be more involved than just blind luck. Maybe it all comes down to personality where one person simply will not accept tedium for their life. Everyone eventually gets to a point in their life where they start looking back and wondering if it's been spent wisely. The jobs we've had should be footnotes in the story of our lives, not the defining moments.
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