What is Goodness?

What is Goodness?

Goodness is like a grand buffet in a five-star hotel, offering hundreds of varieties to choose from. For starters, small but powerful acts could be greeting someone with a smile or tapping someone on the shoulder to appreciate their good efforts.

Complementary dishes could be acts like helping an elderly lady cross the road or removing something harmful from the street.

For the heavy main course, it could mean standing up for what is right in the face of tyranny or fighting for your rights when wronged.

There is no single act that can encompass the entire idea of goodness. But let’s try to understand it a little better.

Who Are Good People?

A person becomes a good person when he perform an act of kindness, an act driven or inspired by strong ethical and moral values. 

These values like empathy, integrity, honesty, fairness, patience, humility, truthfulness, self-discipline and compassion are not created but learned, developed, or instilled in a person at a very early age

These values are generally instilled through religious teachings, exposure to role models with high moral and ethical standards, or an education system that emphasizes the same principles.

The more a person possesses these values, the more they are inspired to do good. Conversely, the fewer these values, the more they drift away from goodness.

Why Are People Bad?

Just as the absence of light creates darkness, and light makes darkness disappear, it is the absence of moral values that makes a person bad.

Moral values act as a guide and motivation for doing good. When a person lacks these values, they become vulnerable to negative influences, bad behaviours, harmful habits, and the evils of corruption. 

As a result, they drift away from goodness, engage in negative actions, and eventually develop habits that define them as bad individuals.

Who Is to Blame?

It is the failure of society as a whole, through various influences such as the education system, parenting, media, social media, and digital spaces, that moral values are not given the importance they deserve. They are not taught, learned, or developed in individuals as they once were.

The reason is that today’s media glorifies unethical characters and behaviours. People are respected and praised based on their wealth, status, and power rather than their good character. Peer pressure pushes young individuals into bad habits. Cyberbullying has become the norm, abusive comedy under the guise of "roasting" is praised, and people have become disconnected from their true religious values and religion itself is often misused to harm communal harmony for personal gain.

This is the world we live in today, a world where each day, being good is becoming harder.

Conclusion

History has witnessed profound individuals who rose to the world stage and displayed impeccable character with unwavering moral and ethical values.

These individuals stood up for what was right, corrected society, led the world on the path of virtue, and left behind great examples for future generations. These great individuals were known as prophets, revolutionaries, and freedom fighters. We must remember them and reflect on their teachings. 

We should understand what it truly means to be good and why we should strive to be good. While harmful or evil actions may offer quick, easy, and immediate rewards, the impact of choosing goodness over convenience or indifference is immeasurable.

Imagine court proceedings based on truthfulness, news channels broadcasting news with integrity and honesty, the rich treating the poor with humility and compassion, governments passing laws based on justice and fairness, imagine a society built on equality, goodness, and communal harmony.