Doing good in a complex world?
Before trying to do good the most important caveat on everything I am about to say is, first “do no harm”, how important it is to keep in your mind, is directly proportional to how good you think you are and how ambitious you are in your goals. There is no-one more dangerous than a person with good intentions and the desire to change the world, especially as everyone thinks they have the best of motives, and we have an astonishing ability to ignore what is bad or inconvenient. However it is the unintended consequence that are some of the most damaging, that end up harming and killing people in their millions, no one gets out of bed wanting this, though that is exactly what has happened repeatedly, so learn this lesson first before trying to do good, do no harm.
Doing no harm is a derivative of the mind your own business guideline which protects us from trying to help those around us to be as good as us (a standard that if we are honest we fail to live up to most of the time ourselves). No one means to be rude, but that is what unasked for advice about how we cross the road, or fail in our tolerance, say one word out of place or whatever wrong we have committed, strangely people never like to have this pointed out, no matter how well meant or lovingly said. We only deal with our faults when we are ready, there is no rushing it, we find our teachers when we need them, teacher do not go out and bully anyone into learning (least of all in school). This why we mind our business because we have learnt that the only welcomed advice is the sort that is asked for, and it should be limited to the actual question asked and ideally limited to three takeaways, though one is better.
So what should you do with those good intentions, and it is without doubt a great starting point, the wish to improve the world, well, that do no harm part is not just a passive action. If you are honest about your life, you are probably doing a great deal of harm without realising it already, it is hidden because you are already doing it, it is in your habits, behaviours and choices. It is a brave (dangerous) person that says they have no sin and they are perfect, some one who does not know that they are wrong about most things, their actions will always benefit from self-reflection, that is some one who is dangerously blind to their own fault and lack the imagination to see that there is a better version of themselves.
However if you insist on trying to make the world a better place, start with your own actions, what is in front of you. There is a whole world of problems out there, seven billion lifetimes worth, you are going to have your hands full, the good news is that it is not all down to you, luckily there are about seven billion people to sort out their own problems if they are given the chance, opportunity and knowledge to do so, which is not a given. It is always locally that we can have the biggest impact, in our corner of the world where our actions can have the largest effect, if you want to change the environment change yours first. What those action are is up to you, but do no harm, forcing change on others never goes well, but changing your behaviour is powerful as people are drawn to examples not preachers who do the opposite to what they say. You have to live the change not jet in and tell people not to use jets, that just causes harm all round.
Silence is a powerful weapon (which is the action of not telling people what to do and listening) it allows others to fill that gap with their own thoughts and once they start thinking about how you are happier, healthier, wealthier in knowledge that is demonstrated by your posture and stance in the world, not just physically but in your attitude. That is when people will start listening because you have listened first, you took the first step in minding your own business, you minded your actions and habits, that is how you change the world, by changing the quality of your relationships, because that is what the world is, the interactions and relationships between people. Government is what happens in the world due to those relationships, and they are only necessary in so far as our personal relationships fail to produce good results in the whole of our society, and they have greater power in our lives today because of the complex nature of our relationships with people who have never met.
A simple catalog of the things you own, will show you that we are linked n so many ways, woolen jumpers from Peru, African mangoes, Japanese laptops, Swedish phones, American television, Russian vodka. The ideas we hold come from ancient cultures, an hour of our time is a Babylonian invention, the Indian zero, an Egyptian phobia of ladders, every idea is second hand and they improves with time. We have the art of war, the Buddha's art of sitting and the art of caveman all still with us despite the separation of thousands of year, we tell stories because people want to listen and learn from the mistakes of others, so find the mistakes in our own life, that is wisdom that is really worth having.
It is in concentrating on our small problems that the big ones get sorted, by being the example you stop needing to preach to others, because you stop having to preach to yourself, you move away from that internal voice that tells you that you should not be doing that and move into your adult voice of what you want to do which is in your own best interests. You do not hurt others because it is good, or you because you should not, but because it is what you want, you are a good person as it feels good to do good, not because it feels bad to be bad, that is how action aligns with your values and sense of who you are.
It is when doing good becomes simple, when you do the things that feel good which happen to coincide with things that do good, they tend to be smaller, less ambitious things, but in a complex world small changes can have a large impact, and the standard that you have to live up to is do no harm and once you do that the smallest good is good enough, especially if you do it most of the days of your life, and there are not many who live up to this standard, but all it needs is for more than half of us to do so and then the world can not help but become a better place, no matter how complex it is.
