Qualities And Their Potentials

When a good person experiences suffering, she will want to keep others from suffering similar things. When a bad person experiences suffering, he will want to make others suffer similar things.

Sometimes the position of the latter is not altogether evil. In some cases he wants people to understand things that he understands and that they do not. If someone has been through war, he may want to make people who are used to peace have a sense of perspective. Even in less difficult situations it often benefits for people to see how life is experienced by someone else; and it benefits more for them to have an external perspective.

It most certainly is beneficial for people to understand one another. And that means among other things teaching good people what bad people are like. When a lady who was a wonderful person was saying that she was a bad person, I told her that a bad person would not care what kind of a person he is. Some places set unrealistic standards for character and behavior, and it takes seeing someone who is genuinely bad for people in those situations to realize how good they are.

Now I do not claim to be a good person – although some do – but I definitely know some very good people, and some of them have been attacked by others. Often a quality can be seen as good from one perspective and bad from another. A person who's kind to others can be seen as either good or naïve. A person who's not always good to others can be see as either mean-spirited or perceptive. Both qualities can work for good or for ill. A kind person can do good, but naivete can lead people to misjudge character and make frequently bad mistakes. A meaner kind of person can be bad to be around, but he may see what others do not and do the dirty work that others would not.

Sometimes the two make a good team. One practices soft power and the other practices hard power. We see this in politics, where the diplomats act nicely while the military does not. We see Jesus revealing Himself to Paul, who seemed to be not a very nice person, and Paul used his intellect and obsessive focus to become a great moral teacher of Christ.

Sometimes people see potential virtues as flaws. A person who is an engineer or a manual worker may see potential people skills as deception or manipulation. A businessman or a lawyer would see such qualities as intelligence. Similarly, a jock type may see academic intelligence as being arrogant or effeminate. In fact you want such qualities in a scientist or an engineer. The correct solution is to nurture the qualities into positive manifestation and directing them toward endeavors where they stand to do good.

The rightful solution is to see the qualities for what they can be and guide them toward what they can be. That is the case whatever the attitudes of others around the person. Often people have a negative attitude toward potentially positive traits and attack them or snuff them out in those around them. This is a bad idea. A quality that is not valued in one place may very well be valued in another place. The correct solution, once again, is to see the qualities for what they can become and guide them toward that direction.

Sometimes doing such things can be socially disruptive. People are often attached to their beliefs, and when they believe potentially positive qualities to be negative qualities they are not likely to be good to people who have them. If such a person does good, this refutes their beliefs, and that can violate their sense of right and wrong. Also there are many people who want a Confucian type of arrangement in which the son does what the father does, and if he does not then he is seen as bad for society. However society actually benefits when people contribute the most of what they have to give; and this is the case with people who have people intelligence but are born among those who see such things as deception or manipulation as much as this is the case with people who have academic intelligence but are raised by salesmen.