A Road Most Traveled

We all know the adage, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions".

There's a new book out which is definitely getting put on my "to read" list, "When Good People Do Bad Things". An obvious take off on Rabbi Kushner's book, "When Bad Things Happen to Good People", which I recommend if you haven't read it.

Dennis Prager has written an article on the ideas of author James Hollis. The thesis is that evil is in the world not so much because of evil intent, but "... evil does not emanate from the bad parts of human nature but from the good parts".

Prager: "Most evil is not committed as a result of unbridled lust or greed. And the sadistic monster who revels in inflicting excruciating pain on other people is relatively rare.

Good intentions cause most of the world’s great evils."

The thought here is evils visited on humanity, Communism with all its horrors of death, slavery and destruction, Nazism, North Korea, supporters of Stalin and Mao, and even the current evils; the people that support these things don't revel in the suffering of others. Prager: "Were all these Westerners [supporting Nazism/Communism, etc.] bad people, i.e., people who reveled in the suffering of others? Of course not."

Rabbi Wolfe Kelman [speaking to Prager]: “I pretty much have my bad inclination [‘yetzer hara’ was the well-known Hebrew term he used] under control; it’s my good inclination [‘yetzer hatov’] that always gets me into trouble.”

I think it was Eric Hoffer who said, protect me from someone that wants to help me. Truly, if I want help I'll ask for it. From friends or from the government. I don't give unsolicited advice [most of the time I don't even give solicited advice], and I ask people first if they need some help before I try and help them.

Prager:

When it comes to personal relations and even more so to formulating social policy, intending to do good is largely worthless. Given how much evil has emanated from human idealism, the heart is an awful guide to doing good.

In order to do good personally, and in order to support social policies that do good, what humans need even more than a good heart (as beneficial as that can be) is wisdom.

Lots of intellectuals force their "help" on others. Usually we get an evil result. This is intellect without wisdom. One last observation from Prager:

The wise — as opposed to most of the highly educated — know, among many other things, that when you give people something for nothing, you produce ungrateful people; that when you obscure the differences between men and women, you end up with many aimless men and angry women; that when you give children “self-esteem” without their earning it, you produce narcissists who enter adulthood incapable of handling life; that if you do not destroy evil, it will proliferate; and that if you are kind to the cruel, you will be cruel to the kind.

If you really want good to prevail, the key is wisdom, not the heart.

Given what's going on today in the world, we are repeating government and social policies that have failed in the past, and will always fail. We continue to travel the road most traveled, that of good intentions, the road lacking wisdom. We must follow the road less traveled, emotions guided by intellect, and the heart guided by wisdom.