What If There Is No Such Thing As A Bad Person?6 min read

If you were a cockroach your greatest nightmare will not be humans with insecticides but a fellow insect, the emerald wasp.

You (the roach) might be going about your business looking for trash to stick your face into when suddenly a pregnant emerald wasp finds you. You, sighting her, will try to run for your dear life but she is faster and will catch, and manage to sting your little head.

This will hurt like hell but will subside after a few hours. But those few hours will be the only hours you will ever be really in control of your body. Because unknown to you the wasp had injected a poisonous substance into your head that will slowly turn you into a “zombie”. 

Within a few hours, you will mindlessly follow the wasp into a borrow as it controls you using its antennas.

In the borrow it will climb on you and lay its egg on your abdomen. This will feel strange but things will even get weirder quickly. Given a few more hours the egg hatch and the true horror begins.

The hatched larva will start feeding on you for 4 to 5 days straight before chewing their way into your abdomen then proceed to live inside of you. You won’t be dead, yet.

Over 8 days, the final-instar larva will slowly feed, initially on your fluids, and later on your non-vital internal organs. You will still be very much alive but in excruciating agony.

Thankfully, death will come, however it will be painfully slow.

And after you’re very dead a vibrant well-fed wasp will emerge from inside you and will now go after your next of kin.

What makes someone a bad person?

We talk a lot about “good” and “bad”, but most people conceptualize the idea like little kids -i.e in a limited or biased way.

In the book “The Courage To Be Disliked” by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi, the Philosopher said:

“The Greek word for ‘good’ (agathon) does not have a moral meaning. It just means ‘beneficial’. Conversely, the word for ‘evil’ (kakon) means ‘not beneficial’. Our world is rife with injustices and misdeeds of all kinds, yet there is not one person who desires evil in the purest sense of the word…”

If you look up the Greek etymology of the words – ‘good’ (agathon), and ‘evil’ (kakon) – you will find that he is right.

Please note, “bad” and “evil” both have same Greek roots, “Kakon”

…

Imagine a stranger moved into your neighbourhood. He introduced himself to you, you even offered to show him around, and you both ‘zinged’.

Soon you became close friends. You started doing each other favors and you pretty much began to trust this person deeply.

Needless to say if someone comes and asks you about this person you’d tell them that he is a good person. Because he has been nothing but “beneficial”.

But guess what happens if after a few months of being friends you discover this person has been sleeping with your wife?

Perhaps he still likes you very much (and also likes your wife) but he will cease to be seen as good to you because he has been the opposite of beneficial to you even though he has remained beneficial to himself (and your wife with the multiple orgasms he gave her).

It is the benefit (or lack thereof) of the acts of people (as it affects others) that make them good or bad (in the eyes of the affected).

Who is a good person?

There is a famous story in the Bible about a man who was robbed and left to die on the road.

In that story, people who were typically termed good, including clergymen, abandoned this man to die (maybe because they didn’t want to be stained). While a Samaritan who was typically termed “bad” ended up taking the man to the hospital and paid for his treatment.

The story helps us see goodness in a different light. The Clergymen thought obeying laws (of maybe not soiling your holy hands) was good but “the good Samaritan” understood that it was all about being of benefit to others.

Most people that claim to do good things, are doing them so they can get something in return, or not to get punished. They are only good because it benefits them.

It is the reason it isn’t so hard for them to switch up and do something really bad to someone else especially when it benefits them too. They are being good persons in a sense (except that it is only for themselves and at the expense of others). 

Heck, it is hard to see someone who does something without thinking of the benefit it will bring them or someone else.

The point is, it is not easy to be good because goodness requires being of benefit to others, and to be beneficial to others often demands giving away something you value (be it time, money, or effort).

And it is easy and tempting to label others as “bad” or “evil” without seeing ways in which they might have thought their self-serving actions good.

This is not to say that there are no people who will go out of their way to make life miserable for others. Perhaps it’s for the benefit of their ego (and there is no limit to the degree of twisted desires the ego can entertain).

A good person, however, is someone who continually strives to benefit others – through their words, acts, possessions, etcetera.

In conclusion: Am I a bad person?

This content was written to help you forget about the unreliable frameworks of what a good or bad person is, but rather think more about how your actions affect others.

If you feel like a bad person, perhaps there are ways you’ve been the opposite of beneficial to others. Perhaps you should change your ways. But I would never call you bad or evil, and neither should you.

Furthermore, I also hope it helps you better understand those who seem bad to you. 

It is only when you understand the other person that you can negotiate, deliberate, and maybe find a solution or reach a compromise.

Always remember that even the wasp only wants to raise her young ones. She and her offspring think of her as “good”.

In the animal kingdom not all creatures are parasitic like the wasp. Sometimes different species work together to make life better for each other. Sometimes it takes millions of years of evolution. And other times it takes just ten minutes of dialogue.

So do good and also show others how to do the same.

P.S: This content does not justify nor encourage bad behaviors (including killing, cheating, lying, mind control, etcetera). It only illustrates “how” and “why” they occur, and proffers a different perspective. It does not also aim to teach how to be a good person, although you can learn to be a little less “not beneficial”.