Doing good or "doing" good

The last few weeks of travelling have brought about some different perspectives. One of the things is that I realise that there are two types of people or ideal types. One type of person aspire to be good which means that they want to do only good things regardless of the consequences- believing in divine intervention in the course of live. Another type of people aspire to be useful. This means that they are agnostic to beliefs and believed that being useful and utilitarian in their belief should be a way of life. That means they disregard superstitions, traditions and culture and believed that the furthering of human good should be the only criteria. To them seeing is believing.

I used to belong to the latter group. This means that I have almost no regard for norms so long as they useful for myself or for the general good. I am not narcissistic in the sense that I only care for my own welfare but I also consider the general welfare or good of other's in general as well. Take for example, I would sometimes put my relationships with other's in jeopardy if I feel that telling them in a strong way would have a better effect than a soft approach.

But as I grew older, I begin to realise that maybe I was wrong in assuming that my point of view would be the correct one. And I begin to take a softer approach. I would begin to be more tactful in my ways and do not assume anyone who does not see my point of view are simply dogmatic in their ways.

At the same time, my belief in myself as the controller of my destiny began to be questioned in that I began to see that there are certain things not within our control and sometimes, the world can conspire in a way which would reward those who did good and punish those that have done bad or evil things. These are things that we cannot see nor foresee and the universe has a way of making things right and I began to believe in "divine" intervention- not that God has a hand in the things but rather the universe has it's way of righting the wrongs and rewarding the righteous. This was something that was not knowable to the human mind.

But such an approach was such a passive one that it leaves one quite not in control of one's lives and leaves one quite out of touch with reality sometimes. At the same time, having approaching things from the perspectives of working for my rewards, at times, it goes against my instinct of working for things. But at the same time, I begin to realised that my life has been cleansed in the sense that life was much less complicated and I do not chase for the material things that I was so used to be going after. I can feel the effects of both sides.

I think the lesson we can take away from this is that for the intelligent, who believed that self-hood is the one only way to good, one might take a step back and see that sometimes, simply doing good is simply a direction towards self-enrichment. To those that thinks doing good was the only way forward, perhaps seeing alternatives would already be a way of doing good in itself.

As for myself, I am still trying my best to internalize both perspectives and hopefully I can come up better out of this.