Good People

When we use the expression "he is good people" we mean to say that "he's a good person", and I believe, because I'm an optimist, that we all want to be "good people". Maybe that's why more and more people are increasingly unsatisfied with their lives; this post is about how modern western society makes it difficult, almost impossible to be "good people".

_{source: YouTube}

In yesterday's post, Crisis Of The Real, I already touched upon the many contradictions modern capitalist society imposes on us and how they cause increasing mental illness in the form of stress and depression. Like I said in the introduction, I do believe we all want to be good persons, we want to make the right, the morally good choice when confronted with a fork in the path of our lives. This choice is the stuff that our heroes are made of; in every story the protagonist is confronted with a choice that defines his or her heroism. This usually is the difficult choice to make, to take the path of most resistance, and often involves the hero to sacrifice something of personal value, sometimes the ultimate sacrifice. We admire those heroes who sacrifice their lives, make a moral stand and not give in to the temptation of evil. And we all want to be heroes, we all want to do the right thing...

But can we? Capitalist realism has made us define "the right thing" as something purely individual and purely economical. We're all taught, every minute of every day, that we have to "do right by ourselves", to "take care of number one". And our modern real life heroes are for a great part those individuals who have been most successful at just that; Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are admired by large swaths of people, even when their success contradicts the classical notion of a hero. We admire Steve Jobs to this day and simply ignore that he made much of his billions by exploiting child labor. Wearing Nike sneakers is a teenager status symbol, ignoring the fact that they're made in sweat-shops under inhumane circumstances. We admire Gates for his extensive charitable endeavors, when they are in fact a convenient tax write off. Elon Musk has been dubbed our real life "Iron Man" when he hasn't invented a thing in his life and got started by the millions he inherited from his father; hardly a "self made man".

And we're all participating in all of it. Here's a quote from the video I share with you today:

"I think it is fair to assume that we all walk around with this fake, mostly docile awareness of the evils that surround us, and more specifically of the evils that we ourselves participate in or that we are, in some way or another, connected to. We buy products, consume media, enjoy events, with much of it, especially nowadays, seeming to be intrinsically linked to the exploitation of workers, mistreatment of animals, pollution of the environment, the creation of disproportionate waste, crimes against humanity and the general degradation of the moral fiber of our society and of ourselves."

I couldn't agree more. However, I'm an optimist and truly believe we all have the capacity to do good, to be good people. But I also know that to be good people we need to create for ourselves an environment that makes it possible to make the right choice, to do the good thing. We are products of our environment and we collectively create that environment; that's our unique spot in the evolution of life. We're the only species that doesn't have to wait millions of years to adopt to changing circumstances through natural selection; it it's cold we don't have to grow fur, we just create and wear a coat, build a house or make a fire. Collectively we stumble over yet another contradiction caused by the pervasiveness of capitalist culture; where our popular stories tell tales of heroism and moral goodness, and we're taught that there's no greater good than personal responsibility, we suffer from collective cowardice and organized irresponsibility. This is what the video is about, "the banality of modern evil", and it's a perfect follow-up to my recent posts. We, as a collective, stand before a fork in the path of humanity; let's choose to not advance on the road to the capitalist dystopia depicted in so many of our modern stories...

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, keep safe, keep healthy!

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