The Good, the Bad and the Inefficient

"All good writers have some bad in them." -- Philip Larkin

I believe he's right because, if you want to make art, you have to really believe 'This thing should exist' and 'It has to be like this', but nobody can be so self-oriented only when they make art; they must be that kind of person all the time.

My next point will broaden the stage of this intrapersonal story quite dramatically, so to speak.

I think there is too great a concern with being good and being perfectly good. I think it's okay to be bad. The universe is fundamentally good (take 'good' to mean something like 'unified' if the word 'good' is losing its meaning at this point). The goodness or unity in the universe is strong enough to carry the weight of badness or disunity, and that may even be what it's for.

Let us take the politician as a case apart from artists. All politicians are at least partly bad because they all want to control the monopoly on violence. They all desire the right to apply force, to compel their fellow citizens to do things they would not otherwise do. (Authority in my view is a form of disunity or 'badness' because the only people who can represent that people is that same people themselves).

But, for one, this 'badness' of political actors may in the end achieve some good, suggesting that their badness may have been part of a goodness so great that it was difficult to perceive.

(As an analogy here, consider the inefficient but surviving business. It is inefficient because some of its activities do not convert investment into profit as efficiently as possible. But some of that inefficiency may yield an insight that increases the business's profitably. In that case, what was thought to be inefficiency was in fact an efficiency that could not be identified using the available methods. So it is with the good and the bad.)

And secondly, the necessary badness of individual politicians is tolerable because there is enough good to carry it.

But what if there is not? Shouldn't we say 'Badness is okay *as long as* there is enough good to carry it'? Let's try it. If a government becomes so subsumed by badness that its goodness collapses under the weight, much more suffering will radiate outwards from it to the rest of the people. But those people, being largely good, will carry the weight until a better time and better decisions. And if they are not, and they destroy themselves, humanity will live on around them to that better time. And if humanity is destroyed, the considerable remainder of the world will live on. And if the world is destroyed? The galaxy? The universe? Ah, the universe cannot be destroyed. There cannot be no universe. As long as the potential for existence exists, there will be.

And so, it is not necessary to say 'as long as' because there will always be enough good to carry the bad. It is just that there may not be enough good to carry the bad within a given identified container.

Having established this, we can now work backwards. If Earth doesn't need to be ripped apart as part of some powerful disunity (or some greater good so large it looks like tragedy to the human eye), it shouldn't be. The nation, the community, the individual should not be consumed by badness if there is an alternative.

I think identity exists so that we will struggle for it, but we have innumerable concentric identities: self, family, profession, sex, class, background, political outlook, society, nation, continent, planet, galaxy. A person who could align all of their identities and struggle towards unity in all of them would be the most powerfully good person. But because we cannot do that - none is sufficiently strong - and so each of us is necessarily somewhat bad, somewhat disunified.

As Plato had Socrates say in the Protagoras, "No one errs willingly". They who know right will do right. But knowing, for example, that it is right to give food to a person who is starving is not enough. We would also have to align our identities sufficiently to understand that we and the suffering person are of the same kind. Then we would automatically help them.

When we know how to preserve, how to be the good and carry the bad, we do so. And when we don't know how to be good, we must necessarily be bad and be carried.

This provides no assurance against personal destruction or that of our kind but, because the greatest reality is indestructible, even if our collective badness leads to the end of any good we recognise, some small part of us will live on until the end.