Why Does Good Always Win?

Good people and the ‘good’ societies/cultures/communities, they make up, treat other good people as they wish to be treated.  This good relationship is the foundation for the community.  One outcome of giving others the respect they deserve is that it makes it more likely the respected people will do as asked without their compliance being dependent upon coercion.  An additional benefit to being good to others within your group is that it adds to the cohesiveness of the group.  Cohesive members of a good community are easily motivated, with honest facts, to the support of a good cause.

If you lead as though others are replaceable objects or non-rational animals; beasts, if you will, your followers will only do what you want so long as they believe doing so affords them an advantage.  Dehumanized subjects will not do as you ask for altruistic reasons.  They may carry out your orders for a bribe or maybe they will do what you want just for the payment of services rendered.  Once you run out of rewards, people who feel objectified and/or disrespected (you are not treating them as you expect to be treated) have no further reason to do as you demand.  The same goes for trading their work or goods for promises of power or valuable objects, they will only trade their services or goods for what you can deliver not just what you promise.

The advantage objectified people see, in doing what you want, may be their continued good health; you may be able to threaten them or their loved ones with social ridicule, unacceptable levels of anxiety, injury, or death, to get them to comply with your wishes.  But if they find a more powerful overlord they no longer have a reason to do as you ask and they may even exact retribution for the threatened or actual harm you have done them.

Oppressed people may find incentive to do as you demand in the form of a common threat you make them aware of.  The threat can be either real or something you have imagined, and if all you have to control them is this threat, once the threat no longer exists, either because a real threat has been overcome or because a fictitious threat has been revealed as existing only in your mind, your coerced underlings will move on.

A group motivated by coercion often takes the initial advantage because it is quicker to buy or bully followers into supporting a cause then it is to gather followers through the spread of true information and good will.  But coerced groups are unstable and fall apart as soon as the perceived benefit is gone or the leader is removed.

Coerced groups are very expensive to maintain, consuming far more resources than a group of altruistic, true believers.  A group built on truth and mutual respect is stable and can easily grow with little cost. A group built on lies and coercion, misrepresented facts or fantasy, is impossible to maintain for long without a huge outpouring of resources.

Bribes, threats, lies, punishments all can coerce people into action but they cannot buy ongoing, altruistic loyalty the way truth and respect does.  Negative treatment cannot induce the altruistic sacrifice of one’s life.  Against a coerced group that has a temporary advantage, the fight of the ‘good’ people for their ‘good’ cause, can prevail even if their numbers never reach the level of their foes because the good people will willingly fight to their death in support of the truth.

If the leader of a coerced group is removed the next in line will be difficult to select because the old leader’s ideology will become fragmented as the old ideology is reinterpreted by others and the new rules are made clear by the new leaders.  Once the old leader is gone the group will break off into small factions and those factions will go their own way.  On the other hand, who the leader of the true believers is, to a certain extent, is inconsequential.  The group is not fulfilling the leader’s goals; the leader is helping the group to fulfill their goals, regardless of what the leader may want.  True believers merely need an individual to organize the cause and in fact there may be no individual leader of the true believers.  There may just be a group of people chosen for their individual skills that guides the group to its goal.

There has never been and can never be a large, cohesive, and homogeneous group that is based upon class, gender, race, religious belief, economic standing or regional affiliation.  There will always be outliers, dissenters, egomaniacs and people who merely feel marginalized by the leaders.  There will always be people who do not fully support the ruling members of these artificially defined groups.  And if these outliers are forcibly removed, others, who were marginally aligned with the ruling class but now question that alignment, will also leave.  They saw value in the people who were removed and they will shy away from the powerful because of their act of violence against people who some believe have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment.  As the ruling class becomes more cohesive this shedding of marginal members will continue until there is a full-fledged revolt or the ruling class may become the minority and then they can be removed or made irrelevant by the new power elite.

The only principles that will never disappear are those built on facts and the humane treatment of one person for another.  And to the extent that respect for each individual is extended to all of humanity the group following these principles will grow and prosper.  Think of it this way, if you belonged to a powerful group and the leader killed or at the very least, censured or banished someone that you felt close to.  Someone you knew was basically a good person, would you feel safe?  Wouldn’t you feel like you were also in danger of exclusion?  Would you follow or even want to belong to this group when you have every reason to believe that you could be next to be purged?  When one group of people or the leader of a group treats a good person as an object, it threatens everyone in the group, and no one can feel safe.

There are present-day examples of societies built on fear, like North Korea.  It is a totalitarian state where even the relatives of the leader are not safe.  And there are other examples of the abuse of good people, such as the LGBT community in Russia, India and Uganda, where they can be imprisoned or killed for their sexual orientation, or even their support of the LGBT community, it’s the law.  There are other examples of abuse in the Far East, Middle East and Africa, where women and female children are oppressed, abused, mutilated and murdered, legally, it’s the law.

My point isn’t that there are no, nor have never been any, abuses of human rights, or even that today, there are none in our country, I’m not so naïve as to believe that or that there will ever be a time when all individuals treat others inhumanly.  I am trying to build a case for the eventual demise of all inhumane leaders, groups and societies.  Slowly, very slowly, the oppression of minority beliefs, individuals and groups is withering under the global scrutiny of those who treat all humans with dignity, who treat all humans as they, themselves wish to be treated and then expect just treatment for others in return.  In this day of instantaneous, global, electronic media; local, abusive laws, rules and customs are coming under review by the free world and the oppressed are gaining recognition as people who are not being treated as equals.  The marginalized people within these communities are seeing that there is a path to freedom from oppression because they see others being respected and they are speaking out against their inhumane treatment and that of their fellow citizens.

When I treat you as I wish to be treated I give hope to every oppressed person who observes my actions.  And when the oppressed see my actions they begin to believe that they too deserve, and can someday get, respect and the opportunity to live in peace.  When our leaders speak out against inhumane treatment and support equal treatment for all, they give hope to all the oppressed who hear their voice.  And those oppressed people will fight for equal treatment for themselves and more importantly they will fight for equal treatment for their children and grandchildren.

The global expectation of equal treatment for all will come.  Not today or tomorrow, not this year or next year.  I do not expect it in my lifetime or my children’s lifetime or even during the lifetime of my grandchildren.  But humane treatment for all will come.  Before this happens many people will be imprisoned.  Many people will die.  Many people will be tortured.  Many, many people will be abused.  But this inhumane treatment does not go unnoticed and in the end, the good people who treat others with respect will win the ultimate battle as they always have won the lesser.  And in this new era where the humane treatment for all is expected and enforced, attempts to start new, abusive cultures, where one group treats another as objects, will not and cannot come into being, from the ashes of the old.

Everyone who reads this knows the qualities attributed to the angles from above.  And most have been asked to respond to the ‘angles of their better nature’ if not by Lincoln then by someone.  This means you become a calm, joyful person, who turns to the person next to you and then you treat them as you wish to be treated.  This is all it takes to be a good person.  It is simple, but it is not easy.

All life is not sacred.  Cows are not sacred.  Trees are not sacred.  But your life must be sacred, to you.  A person who respects their own life is powerful.  The relationships you make and maintain ARE sacred and stronger than any bonds that are coerced.

If you want to protect a tree from being removed climb it and live in it.  Your relationship to that tree demands it.  If you find a stray and you want to save its life.  Do so, and have a relationship with that stray that demands that you now honor your relationship.  If you go to war and you want to save the person next to you even though it puts your life in danger of paying the ultimate sacrifice, do so, how you feel about yourself demands it.  We must honor our own life and what we choose to do with it but we can’t impose our life’s needs on others.  Each of us must find the best use for our time on earth.

Good people always win, because they have mutually observed, sacred bonds with others.  Bonds built on trust and value.  Value your life.  Value the life of those around you and you will be on the side of the good.  And you will help good win.  If you break sacred bonds you will be alone.  No one will trust you.  And you will be lost.