Is Anything Actually Good, Actually?

.........especially people?

I have a riddle for you today. 

Say there was a man, and someone was telling you about this man’s life. 

Say this man got many opportunities handed to him early in life - like cushy government positions arranged by his fairly successful father - but this man had so little ambition that he could barely hang on to these even as a clear nepotism hire. Say this man fell upon some difficult times and instead of bearing the brunt of them and making sure he remained strong for his family, he cracked under pressure and fell into substance abuse and abject panic. Say he left his wife and child to struggle alone in impossible circumstances. Say he failed to abandon his vices no matter how his family implored, succeeding in getting clean only when it was his own health in immediate jeopardy. 

Say he eventually decided to make something of himself and took the Bar exam, only to become the least profitable lawyer in the history of legal practice, routinely not even making enough to cover his taxes (lawyers’ taxes are set high where this man lives, because there is an unwritten understanding that your practice will make you money, but this man somehow managed to be the one exception to this rule, leaving his poor wife to beg him to close the practice that, instead of helping their house budget, was actually depleting it further). Say the man’s wife eventually got ill and died an untimely death, driven, perhaps, in part by all these frustrations she had to live through at this man’s side. 

Would you say this man was a good man?

Now say that one day, as an old man, after his wife was already gone, he had mentioned something to his one child about a case he had finally won, after years of complicated litigation. Let’s say the now grown daughter started asking him some questions about his cases, and heard some interesting stories.

One case involved a family who was in the process of purchasing a house when said house burned down due to gross negligence of the seller. The seller was insisting the contract was still binding and the purchase must still go through, which would force the family to hand over everything they had for an unsalvageable charred ruin. The case took 7 years to close.

One case involved a blue collar worker who had been granted use of a company-owned apartment while the previous occupant had been given a larger apartment in its stead. The worker had continued to live in the apartment - a mold-ridden one-bedroom - as the company - and the country - disintegrated in various ways, changing many laws along the way. At a certain point, the previous occupants decided that there is no reason why they shouldn’t try to take the tiny apartment back for their now grown son, on top of keeping the larger one they were given, which would put the man and his large, extremely poor family, on the street. At the point when the man we are following took this case, it had already been in litigation for over 11 years, and he led it for 9 years more. 

Another one was about a different factory worker who got injured at work due to lack of adequate safety measures, but since the company didn’t want to pay him severance they proclaimed the injury was his own fault, claiming he was drunk on duty. The injury prevented him from finding other employment and the accusation left him without right to even unemployment benefits. The case was kicked around various appeals courts for the better part of a decade.

The man had taken, and won, all of these cases, and more like them. He had never made any money off of them because the people he was representing mostly had no money to give. They would have been hard pressed to find another lawyer who would be willing to even consider taking them on. In each case the clients ended up recovering something that was literally a lifeline. Their only home, their only means of income. A couple had openly told him he had saved them from suicide. Most of them were poorly educated blue collar workers, with a poor grasp of the legal system - in many cases they didn’t even know their own rights. The sort of people who would have been run over and discarded by the machinery of modern society without anyone really giving them a second thought. If he hadn’t accidentally stumbled across them, mostly in run-down local bars.

So let me ask you again - would you say this man was a good man? 

Poison dart frogs - good or bad?

I’m sure you don’t need beating over the head with this obvious reveal, but the man is my father. Somehow his photographic memory and impeccable command of all existing legal provisions had miraculously proven unassailable by decades of extensive alcohol intake, which is more than I can say for any of his other faculties. After many years of trying to come to grips with the question of how to reconcile his Erin Brokovich-lookin’ ass with the absolute chaos he wreaked in our lives, his life finally led me to a somewhat perpendicular conclusion - it’s not that he was a good man, or a bad one. It’s more that asking whether someone - or something - is ‘good’ means absolutely nothing at all, if not followed by a qualification. ‘…Good for what?’

The longer I persist on this earth, the less I believe in calling people ‘good’ or ‘bad’. We are all onions with way too many layers for such a simple, stubby three-letter word to be able to properly define us. I do believe our individual actions can be labeled as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, though sometimes (not always) we should be ready to qualify the question as above. You saved a baby goat from a wolf pack? Good for the goat, bad for the wolves. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ often depends on who’s telling the story.

When we are trying to determine how we feel about political and cultural events, it’s also often helpful to remember this qualification. ‘Cui bono?’ (‘For whose benefit?’ Or, more literally, ‘For whose good?’) is a question often raised when someone invites us to analyze a political event with more nuance. Who is telling this particular story, through the amplified voices of our governments, or our media? Who are we invited to identify with in this particular case? 

One particular case where I have found this question illuminating is any situation where we are tempted to dismiss the decisions or actions taken by powerful people as ‘stupid’. 

‘The government is so dumb!! Like even I would have better ideas on how to improve our education system! The measures they are proposing make absolutely no sense. They’re clearly all idiots.’ 

‘What they are doing with housing right now is beyond stupid. They’re saying housing prices have to stay high to ensure the investments of the older generation, but they also have to come down in order to be affordable for the younger people. Can those dumbasses not count? Don’t they realize those two things are in direct opposition??’ 

‘I can’t believe this administration was so stupid and got us into this horrible prolonged and unnecessary war on totally bogus evidence. Are they all brain dead??? It’s been a useless money drain for years and now they’re scrambling haplessly to get out of it. What a bunch of dum-dums.’

Green mambas - good or bad?

The first thing I like to check for in these cases is signs of obvious manipulation. Making you feel smart and superior is a great way of deflating your anger at being majorly shafted. First, you’re super smart! Look at you, you bright little thing! Nothing gets past you! You would NEVER get shafted. You’re way too clever. 

Second, even if you are getting somewhat objectively, like, a little bit shafted, like say by all your tax money being sent on a little merry-go-round ride from your government’s budget to some foreign country’s budget to your own country’s private weapons manufacturers, without passing ‘Go!’ or collecting 200 dollars, well you see it’s only because those government people are big old stupid-heads. They just keep falling for the same old tricks, over and over again. 

You’d think they’d learn. *Insert eye roll, then go get a fresh cup of coffee and move on to the next story.

Instead we could reach for that little question - cui bono? Is this an all-round loss for all parties involved or does someone benefit from the ‘dumb’ decisions made? …and suddenly we have a completely different scenario. 

Playing stupid is a solid PR tactic. And with some public figures, there is definitely some potential overlap between the pretend-stupid and the genuine stupid. But I find it challenging to believe that people who mostly got their education at super-prestigious universities and have had every access to understanding the levers and mechanisms of power just happen to have such poor grasp of basic economics, socioeconomics, history, science and technology, political theory, medicine, or pedagogy. And furthermore, that all their hapless mistakes just happen to consistently and unfailingly enrich their already obscenely rich friends. 

Someone might be dumb here, but I’m not convinced it’s them. 

Maybe we should take more care to remember what onions we are, when we argue about the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of things. It is definitely possible to be good for your clients, but terrible for your family. It is possible to be good for your wealthy friends but terrible for your constituents. It’s possible to be good for the economy but terrible for the planet. 

So if we add those two little words - cui bono? - to our analysis of any situation, we are likely to come up with a more insightful assessment of what’s going on. 

We could still be wrong.

But it’s somewhat less likely. 

Getting someone this print and helping me raise funds for Gaza is good without question :)