Travel to the Wild – Midnight Thoughts (What makes a person Good?)

This is not about my travel at all, just some midnight thoughts, but since you guys know me from my Travel to the Wild posts, I decided to keep it for anything I post while traveling.

Yesterday, we went to eat biryani at a place, and when we returned, one of the bunkmates said, “Banda acha hai, dil ka saaf hai” looking at me when we were talking about things that were not relevant enough to post here. The other bunkmate agreed as well. This was at midnight, yes, we can get biryani at midnight, get an auto to go, and come back. Something I could not have imagined when living in Kathmandu.

That aside, the talk got me thinking, “What makes a good person?” I remember watching a YT Short some time back where a guy said that, if you feel regret when you do wrong, then you are a good person. Even if I take that simplistic explanation of a good person at face value, the two bunkmates would not know if I indeed feel regret when doing bad. That explanation might be useful to personally identify if one is a good person, but not if someone else is a good person or not.

I did not talk much and entered my room. Trying to understand what makes a good person. First I thought, those who do good might be good people, and those who do bad might be bad people. But even this, I found extremely simplistic. People who are bad might do good things for bad reasons, and people who are good might do bad things for good reasons. So of course, that would not make sense. I tried decluttering my thoughts again.

The railway dilemma (trolley problem) came to my mind, “A railway has two tracks to go, you have the control. On one track, there are five people tied up, and on another, there’s one person tied up. If the train will go towards the one with five people if done nothing, would you change its track?” In this dilemma, would the person who changed the track be a good person as they saved accumulated 4 lives, or would the person who did not change the track be a good person as they didn’t play any role in whatever deaths happened?

Finding no answer there, I decided to look deeper into myself, in my own experience, and suddenly I was struck with a sentence I spoke years back, “She is not being nice because she regrets what she did, but because she has fear for retaliation.” And this is where I found my answer. Anyone can do good and bad things, but a good person or bad person probably depends on what their intention is. Do they do good things for no reason, or do they do good things because they are fearful of retaliation?

With that, I think I get the point of religion. Because bad people need fear of retaliation to do good things, the point of religion and an omni being might be the presence of an authority figure which will instill the fear of retaliation into them.

End of my rambling. Thank you for reading.

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