Good for You

Here in the fiction section I'm having a tough time finding an author. Shirley Jackson. They have every other Jackson except Shirley Jackson. She was a great writer of fiction. Much of her work has been adapted for television and you may have even seen a few of her stories on shows like The Twilight Zone. I thought I should mention her again, since last time I only called her by her last name. (As for Hawthorne, I meant Nathaniel Hawthorne.) Losing faith in humanity depends on experience, education, and attitude. Anne Frank wrote in her diary while hiding from the monstrous Nazis that she still believed in the basic goodness of people. How was this possible? Some of what used to lie in the spiritual domain has since fallen into scientific territory. The evil spirits Jesus is reported to have cast out might today be diagnosed as some form of mental illness. And there is a spiritual element in Freud's analysis of the human mind, with its description of the id as entirely selfish and horny. We are driven by base and evil impulses. How does that make us basically good? We cannot analyze in the usual way, in order to arrive at a positive conclusion, with respect to humanity's goodness. We must look past what appears to form our essence. We must look at the whole person, not just at his components. While thoughts may originate from a dark and sinister place, they can be refined through processes of self awareness and conscience. In order to believe that people are good, it is necessary to believe that they want to be good. I tend to believe the inverse; that they don't want to be bad. I'm with Jesus on that one, who cried out to God to forgive his killers 'for they know not what they do.' Ignorance is not a sin unless it is deliberate. I think our conscience makes us good. What's the primary observation they make of sociopaths and psychopaths? No conscience. They feel nothing as they tear their victims to pieces. As long as psychopaths and sociopaths form the minority, I believe in the basic goodness of people.
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© 2010. Statements by David Skerkowski. All rights reserved.