What is it that we desire to see in ourselves, years after all the effort we exert to become better people, or at least, people more well aware of their shortcomings, and thus more capable of navigating them with minimal damage to those around them? Do we look at our parents and think, this is where they went wrong, and I’ll never be like them, but we only end up being faulty people in other ways that we’ve failed to anticipate? or do we look at those who we think are better, and somehow try to discern their road to improvement, only to find ourselves on a different road entirely? Who can truly tell? It does seem like there’s no one way, or some others may say that there’s no road at all.
Is it that life has never been easy, or is it that we make life more difficult for ourselves? The answer probably is that there’s an element of truth to each of those ideas. Every day a new door to awareness opens, and with it questions and anxieties that come cascading down the waterfall of our thoughts, and with age the boulders just become bigger and much less avoidable. But I also reject the idea that being a good person is somehow a challenge, or an exercise in difficulty, I refuse to think that decency is some sort of test that most people fail somehow.
People love to point to the concept that if there was no oversight, everyone would revel in mischief, and those who wouldn’t would become sheep amongst wolves, destined for consumption. And perhaps examples in everyday life do corroborate that idea; witnessing corruption take over entire establishments and countries, and people following suit. How can you not think that we are inherently awful?
But I would say that said awfulness is not inherent, but indeed learned through years of cruelty and laissez-faire attitudes that warp people’s minds into thinking that it is an eat-or-be-eaten world out there. It is not difficult to be decent, but it is equally easy to teach a child that taking things by force is the only right road, that women are inferior, that you always have the right of way, regardless of what you’re doing. When you live in a cruel uncaring world, reflecting that cruelty back at the world becomes a means of survival, without any consideration of what lies beyond that cruelty. Had there been an inkling of a desire for introspection, I do not doubt that one might realize that they wish to be decent, or at least not as cruel as the world made them to be. They just never get to choose.
Choice is indeed a luxury, and maybe what we ought to do is try to give everyone the choice we possess. What comes out of that might be a surprise, to us and — more importantly — to them.
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