Good People
Still Exist

If you have lived long enough, you have had the suspicion. It arrives quietly, often after the news, after the betrayal, after the small cruelty that no one seemed to notice. It is the suspicion that goodness — real, durable, unselfish human goodness — has left the building, and that what remains is a world of transactions, of cynicism, of people looking out for themselves and calling it realism.

This book begins there, because that suspicion is where many people now live. And it begins by taking the suspicion seriously rather than dismissing it, because the suspicion, like all strong feelings, is trying to tell us something. The question is what.

The Cynical Moment

We are living through a cynical moment. The structures that once carried trust — institutions, professions, neighbors, the idea of a shared project — have, in many places, eroded. The information environment rewards outrage and punishes nuance. The economic environment rewards extraction and punishes care. The social environment rewards performance and punishes sincerity. It is not imaginary. There are real forces, in the present, that make cynicism feel like the accurate response.

And yet. The cynical conclusion — that goodness is gone, that everyone is self-interested, that the kind are merely the cunning in disguise — is not the accurate conclusion. It is the conclusion that the environment rewards, because a cynical population is easier to manipulate than a trusting one. The cynicism is, in a sense, the product being sold, and we are buying it, and the buying is the problem, not the seeing.

Why the Suspicion Persists

The suspicion that goodness is gone persists, in part, because of how the mind processes evidence. Bad behavior is vivid, memorable, and narratively compelling. Good behavior is quiet, ordinary, and easy to overlook. The betrayal is a story; the kept promise is not. The cruelty goes viral; the kindness does not make the feed. The mind, fed a steady diet of vivid bad and invisible good, concludes — wrongly — that bad is common and good is rare.

This is the negativity bias at work, amplified by an information environment that exploits it. The bias is ancient; the amplification is new. And the combination produces a population that lives as though goodness were exceptional, when the evidence, examined honestly, shows that goodness is the rule and cruelty the exception. The exceptions are louder. That is all.

The Cost of the Suspicion

The suspicion is not free. It costs us, individually and together, in ways we do not always count.

Individually, the suspicion costs us the willingness to be good. If goodness is gone, then goodness is for suckers — and so the person who believes goodness is gone becomes, by that belief, less good. The suspicion is self-fulfilling: a world that believes goodness is gone produces fewer good people, and the absence of those good people confirms the belief. The cynic, in the name of realism, helps build the world the cynic fears.

Together, the suspicion costs us the social fabric on which everything else depends. Trust is the invisible infrastructure of a functioning society. When it erodes, the cost is not only emotional; it is practical. Markets depend on it. Institutions depend on it. Neighborhoods depend on it. The repair of nearly everything broken in the present runs through the repair of trust, and the repair of trust begins with the willingness to believe that goodness — real goodness, in real people — still exists.

The Project of This Book

This is a book about that willingness, and about what the willingness is built on. It is not a sentimental book. It does not ask you to believe that people are good because it would be nicer to believe it. It asks you to believe it because it is, on the evidence, the more accurate belief — and because believing it changes how you live, and how you live changes what you build, and what you build is the world the next person will look at when they decide whether goodness is gone.

The chapters that follow examine what goodness actually is, where it comes from, how to recognize it in others, how it survives hardship, and how to cultivate it in yourself and help it multiply in the people around you. They are written from the conviction — earned in fifteen years of clinical practice, sitting with people at their worst and at their best — that good people still exist, that they are more common than the world lets on, and that seeing them clearly is the first act of joining them.

Good people still exist. Not as an exception. As a fact. This book is about how to see that fact, and what to do with it once you do.

Before we can talk about whether good people still exist, we have to know what we mean by good. And this matters more than it might seem, because a great deal of what gets called goodness is not goodness — it is performance, or compliance, or the absence of visible bad, or a style of speech that sounds kind without costing anything. If we do not know what goodness is, we will look for the wrong thing, and we will conclude, wrongly, that we cannot find it.

Goodness Is Not Niceness

The first confusion is between goodness and niceness. Niceness is a social lubricant. It is the avoidance of friction, the smooth surface, the agreeable tone. Niceness is useful, in its place, but it is not goodness, because niceness can be entirely self-interested. The person who is nice because niceness gets them what they want is not good; they are strategic. And the person who is nice because they cannot bear conflict is not good either; they are avoidant.

Goodness is willing to be un-nice when the situation requires it. Goodness tells the hard truth, holds the difficult boundary, refuses the convenient lie. Goodness is not the absence of friction; it is the presence of integrity, and integrity sometimes causes friction. The conflation of goodness with niceness produces a culture in which the nice are mistaken for the good, and the good — who are often less smooth — are mistaken for the difficult. This is one of the reasons good people are hard to see: we are looking for nice, and goodness is often not nice.

Goodness Is Not Compliance

The second confusion is between goodness and compliance. Compliance is obedience to the rules, the norms, the expectations. Compliance is often socially useful, but it is not goodness, because compliance can serve evil as readily as good. The person who follows the unjust order because it is the order is compliant, not good. Goodness sometimes requires non-compliance — the refusal, at personal cost, to go along with what is wrong. The good person is not the one who never breaks a rule. The good person is the one who knows which rules are worth breaking, and breaks them for the right reasons, and pays the cost.

A culture that equates goodness with compliance produces a lot of obedient people and very few good ones. It also mislabels the good — who break the rules that deserve breaking — as bad, and the compliant — who would break any rule if ordered — as good. The history of the last century is, in many ways, the history of this mislabeling, and the cost of it.

Goodness Is Not the Absence of Bad

The third confusion is between goodness and the absence of visible bad. The person who has not been caught, who has not had the opportunity, who has simply not done the harmful thing — is not, by that absence, good. Goodness is not the null state. It is a positive quality. The person who has done nothing is not good; they are blank. Goodness is what you do, not only what you refrain from.

This matters because it sets the bar. If goodness is the absence of bad, then almost everyone qualifies, and the word means nothing. If goodness is a positive quality — a pattern of choice and action oriented toward the good of others and the world — then it is rarer, more specific, and more worth recognizing.

What Goodness Is

Having cleared the confusions, what is goodness? In the clearest sense I can give it, goodness is the stable disposition to take the good of others into account in one's choices and actions, even when it costs, and even when no one is watching.

Notice the parts of that definition:

Stable disposition — goodness is not a mood or a moment. It is a tendency that holds across situations. The person who is good when it is easy and bad when it is hard is not good; they are weather. Goodness is the pattern that holds when the conditions change.

Take the good of others into account — goodness is other-regarding. It is not self-sacrifice to the point of self-erasure, but it is the genuine inclusion of others' good in one's own calculations, not as a performance but as a real weight.

Even when it costs — goodness that costs nothing is not goodness; it is convenience. The measure of goodness is partly what one is willing to pay for it — in time, in comfort, in reputation, in opportunity.

Even when no one is watching — goodness is not for the audience. The good act done for the audience is performance. The good act done when no one will know is the one that counts, because it is the one that is actually about the good and not about the appearance of good.

Goodness and Imperfection

This definition does not require perfection. The good person is not the person who never fails, never harms, never falls short. The good person is the person whose pattern, over time and across difficulty, tends toward the good of others — who, when they fail, recognizes it, makes repair, and returns. Goodness is compatible with error. It is not compatible with the refusal to recognize error, the refusal to repair, or the use of one's errors as proof that goodness is impossible and therefore one need not bother.

This is good news, because it means goodness is available to imperfect people, which is to say, to all of us. The good people who still exist — and they do — are not flawless. They are the people who, imperfect as they are, have built a stable disposition toward the good of others, and who tend it, day by day, choice by choice. They are more common than the cynics believe, and they are worth knowing how to see.

One of the most important things to understand about goodness is that it is not an imposition on human nature. It is, in significant part, an expression of it. We are not, at our base, self-interested atoms who must be coerced into caring about each other. We are, at our base, creatures built for and by cooperation — and the goodness we see in the world is, in part, the working of a nature that was shaped, over a very long time, to care.

This chapter is not an argument that humans are uniformly good. We are plainly not. It is an argument that the cynical premise — that humans are uniformly self-interested and that goodness is a thin cultural veneer over a selfish core — is not supported by the evidence, and that the evidence, in fact, points the other way.

The Evolutionary Case

The evolutionary case for goodness is this: for most of human history, survival was not an individual project. It was a group project. The individual alone, on the savanna or in the forest, did not survive. The group did. And the group that survived was the group that could cooperate — that could share food, defend each other, care for the injured, raise the young collectively, and coordinate action toward common ends.

This placed a selective pressure on the capacities that make cooperation possible: the capacity to read others' emotions, to feel what they feel, to track reputation, to punish cheating, to reward contribution, to bond, to trust, to repair. These capacities were not luxuries. They were survival technologies. And the humans who carried them were the humans whose descendants we are.

The implication is that the hardware for goodness is not foreign to us. It is us. The impulse to help, the pain at another's pain, the satisfaction at another's relief — these are not cultural inventions imposed on a selfish animal. They are the working of a nature that was built, over deep time, in the context of mutual dependence. We are, in the most literal sense, built for each other.

The Neural Case

The neural case reinforces the evolutionary one. The brain contains structures — most notably the mirror neuron system, the insula, the anterior cingulate cortex — that are specifically involved in the experience of others' states. When we see another person in pain, our own pain circuitry activates, attenuated. We do not merely understand that they are in pain; we feel an echo of it. This is not a metaphor. It is a measurable phenomenon, and it is the substrate of compassion.

The brain also contains reward circuitry that activates not only when we receive but when we give. The act of helping another person, under many conditions, produces measurable reward. This is sometimes called the "helper's high," and it is not a sentimental invention. It is a neurochemical fact. The brain, in many of its operations, treats the good of others as, in part, its own good.

None of this means we are automatically good. The hardware makes goodness possible; it does not guarantee it. The same brain that can feel another's pain can also override that feeling, rationalize it away, or redirect attention elsewhere. But the hardware does refute the claim that goodness is unnatural. It is, on the evidence, one of the more natural things we do.

The Developmental Case

The developmental case is, in some ways, the most striking. Infants, long before they can speak, show preferences for helpful characters over harmful ones. Toddlers, before they can be taught to share, share. Young children, before they have internalized the rules of their culture, respond to others' distress with their own distress and with attempts to comfort. These are not learned behaviors. They are the early workings of a nature that was built to care.

This does not mean children are angels. They are also, plainly, capable of selfishness, of cruelty, of exclusion. The point is not that humans are uniformly good from birth. The point is that the seeds of goodness are present early, before instruction, before culture — which is exactly what we would expect if goodness were, in part, innate, and exactly what we would not expect if goodness were only a cultural veneer.

The Cross-Cultural Case

Finally, the cross-cultural case. Every human culture, examined closely, contains norms of fairness, of reciprocity, of care for the vulnerable, of punishment of the exploitative. The specifics differ; the presence does not. There is no human culture in which care, fairness, and reciprocity are entirely absent, just as there is no human culture in which selfishness and exploitation are entirely absent. The universal presence of these norms, across enormously varied cultures, suggests that they are not arbitrary inventions but expressions of a shared nature.

Why This Matters

Why does this matter? Because it changes the question. If goodness were unnatural — a thin veneer — then the cynical suspicion would be the realistic position, and the good person would be the exception, the oddity, the one fighting against their own nature. But if goodness is, in part, our nature — built into us by a long history of mutual dependence — then the good person is not the exception. They are the expression of a deep tendency, and the question becomes not why goodness exists but why it sometimes fails, and how to help it succeed.

This is a more accurate question, and a more hopeful one. It means that when you see goodness, you are not seeing a miracle. You are seeing the ordinary working of an ordinary nature — a nature that, like any nature, can be nurtured or neglected, strengthened or starved. And it means that the cultivation of goodness is not a fight against who we are. It is the tending of who we are, so that who we are can show up more fully in how we live.

Good people still exist, in part, because we are the kind of creature that produces them. That is not a small thing. It is the ground on which everything else in this book stands.

If good people still exist, the next question is how to tell them apart — from the nice, the compliant, the strategic, the well-spoken, the people who look good without being good. This is a practical question, and the answer matters, because a great deal of harm is done by people who were trusted on the strength of their appearance rather than their pattern.

This chapter is about the signs of goodness — not the halo of charm or eloquence, but the quieter, more reliable indicators that a person's stable disposition actually tends toward the good of others.

Look at the Pattern, Not the Moment

The first rule of recognition is: look at the pattern, not the moment. A single good act can be performed by anyone, for any reason — including the reason of being seen performing it. The single act proves nothing about the person. The pattern, over time and across situations, proves a great deal.

So the question is not: did this person do a good thing once, that I know of? The question is: across the time I have observed this person, and across the situations they have been in, what is the tendency? Does the tendency hold when it costs? Does it hold when no one is watching? Does it hold toward people who can do nothing for them?

The person whose goodness is real will, over time, show a consistent tendency across varied situations. The person whose goodness is performed will show goodness when it is visible and something else when it is not. Time and varied situations are the tests, and there is no shortcut around them.

Look at How They Treat People Who Can Do Nothing for Them

The second rule is the one most worth internalizing: look at how a person treats people who can do nothing for them. The waiter, the subordinate, the stranger, the person in a weaker position, the person who will not be believed if they complain. How a person treats those people, when there is no consequence for poor treatment and no reward for good treatment, is one of the most reliable indicators of their actual disposition.

The person who is charming to the powerful and dismissive to the powerless is not good. They are strategic. The charm is a tool; the dismissal is the truth. And the dismissal, seen clearly, tells you what the charm is for.

This is not a minor point. A great deal of harm is done by people who passed the charm test and failed the waiter test, because the people around them observed the charm and did not observe — or did not credit — the dismissal. Credit the dismissal. It is the more honest data.

Look at What They Do When They Are Wrong

The third rule: look at what a person does when they are wrong. The person who, caught in error or harm, acknowledges it, makes repair, and changes is showing something important about their disposition. The person who, caught in error or harm, denies, deflects, blames, and attacks the messenger is showing something important too — and what they are showing is not goodness, however good they may appear at other times.

Goodness is compatible with being wrong. It is not compatible with the refusal to be wrong. The person who cannot be wrong has placed the protection of their self-image above the good of the person they harmed, and that ordering, repeated, is the opposite of goodness. The capacity to be wrong, and to repair, is one of the clearest signs of a disposition that actually tends toward the good of others, because the repair is where the cost is paid and the disposition is revealed.

Look at the Quiet, Consistent Care

The fourth rule: look for the quiet, consistent care, not the dramatic gesture. The dramatic gesture — the large donation, the public stand, the moment of visible generosity — can be real, and it can be performed. The quiet, consistent care — the checking in, the remembering, the showing up for the unglamorous need, the year after year of small reliability — is almost never performed, because it cannot be seen, and because it is the thing that would be too tedious to fake.

The good people I have known were, almost without exception, people whose goodness was more visible in the small, consistent things than in the large, visible ones. They were the people who remembered the difficult anniversary, who brought the meal without being asked, who sat with the person no one else sat with, who did the unglamorous work, year after year, without announcement. Their goodness was not a show. It was a habit. And the habit, seen over time, was the sign.

Look at Whether They Tell the Truth

The fifth rule: look at whether a person tells the truth, including when it costs them. The person who is reliably honest — not cruelly, not recklessly, but reliably — is showing that they value the other's access to reality over their own comfort. That ordering is close to the core of goodness.

The person who lies easily, who shades the truth for advantage, who says different things to different people — that person may be many things, but they are not good in the sense we are using the word. The pattern of honesty, especially costly honesty, is one of the most reliable signs of a disposition oriented toward the good of others, because honesty is a service you cannot perform for yourself.

Look at the Direction of Their Attention

The sixth rule, subtler than the others: look at the direction of a person's attention. The person whose attention, in conversation, actually goes to the other — to how the other is, to what the other needs, to the other's life as it is actually lived — is showing a disposition. The person whose attention always returns to themselves, even when the situation is about someone else, is showing one too.

Attention is scarce, and where a person spends it is one of the truest indicators of what they care about. The person who spends their attention on others, consistently and without being asked, is not doing it for show. They are doing it because their attention, like their disposition, tends toward the other. And that tendency, seen over time, is a sign worth trusting.

What Recognition Is For

Recognition of goodness is not for the purpose of judgment. It is for the purpose of relationship, and of repair. If you can tell the good people from the well-spoken, you can build your life around the good ones, you can become one of them, and you can help them multiply. You can also, when necessary, protect yourself and others from the well-spoken who are not good — the ones whose appearance of goodness is the cover under which harm is done.

Good people still exist. They are, in many cases, the people you already know — the ones you may not have credited because they were quiet, because they were consistent, because they were not nice in the way you were looking for. Learn to see them. They are worth seeing, and seeing them is the beginning of joining them.

One of the most important questions about goodness is whether it survives. A person who is good in easy conditions is not yet known. Goodness is known in the conditions under which it could be lost — in hardship, in betrayal, in loss, in the long grind of difficulty — and the question of whether it survives is, ultimately, the question of whether the good person remains good when remaining good costs them everything.

This chapter is about that survival: why some people, in hardship, become more good, and some become less, and what the difference is. It is among the most important chapters in this book, because hardship is not optional. Everyone meets it. And what hardship does to goodness is, in large part, what determines whether good people will still exist tomorrow.

The Two Directions of Hardship

Hardship does one of two things to a person. It either opens them or closes them. It either deepens their capacity for compassion or erodes it. And which it does is not random. It is, in significant part, a function of how the hardship is met.

The person who meets hardship by doubling down on connection — who, in their own pain, becomes more able to recognize others' pain — is opened by it. Their suffering becomes a widening. They come out the other side more, not less, able to care.

The person who meets hardship by contracting — who, in their own pain, becomes less able to recognize others' pain, because their pain is now the only pain that counts — is closed by it. Their suffering becomes a narrowing. They come out the other side less, not more, able to care.

Both responses are understandable. The contraction is, in a sense, the more natural one — pain focuses attention on itself, and the focus on self can become a habit that outlasts the pain. The expansion is, in a sense, the more remarkable one — it is the response in which pain is metabolized into compassion rather than into self-protection. And it is the response that, over a life, produces the good people who are most worth knowing: the ones whose goodness has been tested and has held.

Why Some Hardship Deepens Goodness

The deepening of goodness through hardship is not automatic, but it is more common than the cynics expect. The reasons are worth understanding.

First, hardship teaches the texture of suffering in a way that comfort cannot. The person who has been genuinely hungry understands hunger differently than the person who has only read about it. The person who has been genuinely alone understands loneliness differently. This firsthand knowledge, if it is not turned into a competition ("no one suffered like I suffered"), becomes a bridge: the suffering person can recognize the suffering of others with a precision the fortunate cannot match. And that recognition is the raw material of a deeper compassion.

Second, hardship teaches dependence. The person who has been through real difficulty knows, in their bones, that they did not survive it alone — that someone brought the meal, someone made the call, someone showed up. This knowledge, if it is not denied, produces gratitude, and gratitude, sustained, produces generosity — the sense that one has received, and that the receiving creates an obligation to give, not out of guilt but out of the recognition that the giving is how the receiving is honored.

Third, hardship teaches what matters. The stripping away that hardship performs — the loss of the things that seemed essential and the discovery that the essentials were fewer and different — often leaves a person with a clearer sense of what is worth caring about. And a clearer sense of what is worth caring about is, very often, the precondition for a more concentrated goodness. The person who knows what matters can care for it directly; the person who does not scatters their care across everything and therefore across nothing.

Why Some Hardship Erodes Goodness

The erosion is also worth understanding, because it is the danger, and because understanding it is the precondition of avoiding it.

Hardship erodes goodness when it is metabolized into grievance. The grievance is the story that one has been uniquely wronged, that the world owes one for the wrong, and that the debt justifies a withdrawal of care from others until it is paid. The grievance feels like justice — it has the shape of justice — but it is, in fact, a protection racket run by the self against its own compassion. The grievance says: I cannot afford to care about others because no one cared about me. And the saying, repeated, becomes true — not because the original wrong was not real, but because the repetition of the grievance burns down the capacity the grievance claims to be protecting.

Hardship erodes goodness, too, when it is metabolized into cynicism — the conclusion that the suffering proves the world is bad, that people are bad, and that goodness is for suckers. This conclusion feels earned, because the suffering was real. But the conclusion is a theft: it takes the real suffering and uses it to justify the abandonment of the one thing — goodness — that could make the suffering mean something other than waste. The cynic who was made by suffering has let the suffering win twice: once in the event, and once in the conclusion.

The Choice Inside the Hardship

The difference between the deepening and the erosion is, at bottom, a choice — not always a conscious one, and not a fair one, but a choice. The hardship is not chosen; what is done with it is. And the choice, repeated, becomes the disposition.

The choice is, roughly, this: will this suffering make me larger or smaller? Will it connect me to others or separate me from them? Will it teach me compassion or teach me contempt? Will it show me what matters and let me care for it, or will it convince me that nothing matters and that caring is foolish?

There is no formula for making this choice well. Hardship is not a curriculum, and the people who suffer most are not automatically the people who become most good. But there is a practice, and the practice is this: in the midst of the hardship, to ask, repeatedly, not only "why is this happening to me" but also "what is this teaching me about others, and about what I want to be." The second question is the one that keeps the hardship from closing the heart. It is the one that allows the suffering to become, however slowly, a widener rather than a narrower.

The People Who Survived

The good people I have known who survived hardship — and most of them had — were not people who were unscarred. They were scarred, sometimes deeply. But the scars had not closed them. They had, in some way the cynic cannot quite explain, become part of the compassion. The person who had lost a parent was the one who showed up for the person who just lost one. The person who had been broke was the one who quietly paid the bill. The person who had been alone was the one who noticed the alone one in the corner.

Their goodness was not in spite of the hardship. It was, in part, through it. The hardship had taught them what care costs and what care is worth, and they had decided — in the hardship, and again after it — that the worth was greater than the cost. That decision, repeated, is the survival of goodness. And the survival of goodness, in the people who manage it, is the reason good people still exist — not because they were spared, but because they were not, and they chose, and choose, to remain good.

The final chapter is about the practical question: how to be a good person, and how to help good people multiply. Everything before this has been about seeing goodness. This is about doing it — about the cultivation of the disposition in oneself, and the conditions under which it grows in others.

Goodness Is a Practice, Not a Trait

The first thing to understand is that goodness is not a fixed trait you either have or lack. It is a practice — a set of dispositions and habits that are built, maintained, and strengthened over time, or neglected and weakened. This is good news, because it means goodness is available. It is not the property of a special class of people. It is the result of a practice that anyone can begin, today, and that compounds, like all practices, with repetition.

The practices that build goodness are simple and not easy. They are the subject of the rest of this chapter.

Practice One: Notice the Good

The first practice is to notice the good that already exists. This is not sentimental; it is corrective. The mind, as we have seen, is biased toward the vivid bad and the invisible good. The practice of noticing the good — deliberately, regularly, on purpose — is the practice of correcting that bias, and the correction changes what you see, and what you see changes what you believe is possible, and what you believe is possible changes what you do.

Concretely: take time, regularly, to notice the good people around you and the good acts they do. The neighbor who shovels the walk. The colleague who credits others. The stranger who stops. Name them, to yourself and to others. The naming strengthens the seeing, and the seeing strengthens the belief that goodness is real and common, and the belief makes you more likely to be good yourself — because we become what we believe our kind is.

Practice Two: Do the Small, Consistent Things

The second practice is to do the small, consistent good things, and to trust the compounding. Goodness is not built in the grand gesture. It is built in the small, repeated choices — the checking in, the showing up, the telling the truth, the making the repair, the treating the powerless person with respect. Each of these, on any given day, is small. Over years, they are a life. And the life, built of them, is the life of a good person.

Do not wait for the dramatic opportunity. It may never come, and if it does, you will meet it with whatever disposition the small choices have built. Build the disposition in the small things, and the large things, if they come, will find you ready.

Practice Three: Be Willing to Cost

The third practice is to be willing to cost. Goodness that costs nothing is not goodness; it is convenience. The measure of the disposition is, in part, what one is willing to pay for it. This does not mean seeking suffering. It means that when the good choice costs — in time, in comfort, in reputation, in money — the willingness to pay is what makes the choice good.

Start small. Be willing to cost a little, regularly, and the capacity to cost more, when it is asked of you, will be there — because the capacity is built by the practice, and the practice is built by the small, regular costs you have already paid.

Practice Four: Repair Relentlessly

The fourth practice is to repair. You will harm people. You will be wrong. You will fall short. This is not the failure of goodness; it is the condition of being human. The failure is not the harm. The failure is the refusal to recognize, apologize, and change.

Make repair a habit. When you have wronged someone, say so — clearly, without qualification, without the apology that is really a defense. Make the repair. Change the behavior. The person who repairs is not the person who never fails. They are the person whose failures do not accumulate, because the repair clears them. And the repairing, over time, is one of the most powerful forms of goodness there is — because it is the goodness that costs, and that everyone can see is real.

Practice Five: Protect the Conditions of Goodness

The fifth practice is to protect the conditions under which goodness grows — in yourself and in others. Goodness grows in conditions of enough: enough safety, enough rest, enough connection, enough meaning. It erodes in conditions of deprivation, exhaustion, isolation, and pointlessness. This is not a moral point. It is a practical one. If you want to be good, and to help others be good, protect the conditions.

For yourself: sleep, rest, connection, and a sense of meaning are not luxuries. They are the soil in which your goodness grows. Neglect them, and your goodness will wither, however sincere your intentions. Tend them, and your goodness will have what it needs to show up.

For others: the support of the conditions of goodness — the help, the inclusion, the fair treatment, the institutions that make enough possible — is itself one of the highest forms of goodness, because it is the goodness that multiplies goodness. The person who protects the conditions helps not one person but all the people those conditions will allow to be good.

Practice Six: Help Good People Multiply

The sixth practice is to help good people multiply. Goodness is contagious, but not automatically. It spreads when it is visible, supported, and joined. The practice is to make it so.

Visible: credit the good. Name them. Let them be seen. Goodness that is invisible does not spread, because no one knows it is happening. Goodness that is named gives others a model, and the model gives others permission.

Supported: help the good people keep going. The good are often tired, because goodness costs. The practical support of the good — the help, the thanks, the relief, the standing with them when it costs them — is what allows them to continue, and the continuation is what allows the goodness to reach the next person.

Joined: be one of them. The most powerful way to help good people multiply is to be one, visibly, consistently, in the small things. The good person who is seen being good is an invitation, and the invitation, accepted, is another good person, and another, and the world, slowly, becomes what the cynics said it was not.

A Final Word

Good people still exist. They are not the exception. They are the working of a nature built for care, cultivated by a practice available to anyone, surviving hardship that would have closed a lesser disposition, and multiplying wherever they are seen and supported and joined.

You will not fix the cynical moment by arguing with it. You will fix it by being, visibly, the counter-evidence — by doing the small good things, by repairing when you fail, by protecting the conditions under which goodness grows, by helping the good people around you be seen and supported, and by being, yourself, one of them.

The suspicion that goodness is gone is not refuted by words. It is refuted by lives. And your life, tended in this direction, is one of them. The next person who is deciding whether goodness still exists will look at the world, and the world they look at will include you. Be the evidence. Be the good that still exists.

— Dr. David K. Lubega, LICSW, LCSW-C