The Good
We’re so focused on beauty, so desperate for truth, we have forgotten the good entirely.
The Good is what makes us wrestle, alone, with our inner world. It breaks down our internal presumptions and barriers. It puts us in a place where we must choose for ourselves to become better — to swallow pride and presumption and disdain and rise above our lesser selves.
The Good questions our interior life and triggers internal conflicts that lead us to softer, more open hearts; where the words we think and speak come from a pure place, wishing no harm or ill intention on ourselves or others.
The Good is more closely related to truth than to beauty, because you must be willing to seek truth within yourself, to introspect, and to question your own thought patterns and external behaviours in order to eliminate hypocrisy and ill intent. It is to remove your ability to *cast an evil eye* onto others or onto yourself.
The Good is an internal process. It can flow out in words or actions, but only after a person has chosen good and chosen to pass it on in its own name — consciously or otherwise. Goodness is an interior reasoning that can be practised into a reflex, but it remains a decision that happens internally and can only be expressed after.
Truth and the Good are closely related because they are internal realisations, decisions taken, expressed only after a conclusion has been reached. Beauty does not require the same amount of thought, nor practice, to perceive. A bear can find a landscape beautiful — but can a bear speak the truth?
I don't know if the Good is independent of the human psyche. It kind of feels like maths. It could be — but it might just be a universal truth.
I hope it is.
A reaction to beauty is very instinctual. A reaction to goodness is not.
I'm convinced this generation is fallen because I live it. It is hard to find really good people. People who live to be good. People who keep bad, ugly, and false words and claims to themselves.
In the past, for better or worse, we were more prudent with sharing our thoughts and opinions. Many cultures still are.
And here, I live in a culture that organises its hierarchy by lowering others. So quick to speak poorly of others. People verbally spit foulness on those perceived as lower than themselves in their absence, not even in their presence — and if it is in public, it is always in the form of humiliation, of degradation, because people have little respect for those perceived as beneath them.
We have so few 'good' icons in this society. We no longer hold them up as exemplars to imitate, but we consume them as celebrities. How long would it take you to name five really good living icons from your country? Five living humans who are unequivocally good.
Yes, every age complains of its own rottenness — but here, I feel it is to the core. Rotten all the way down.
If I met a community of the good. If society chose to make icons out of good people. That would restore my hope.
We're not obsessed with the Good. We're obsessed with *appearing* good. Contemporary virtue is political aesthetic dressed to look like goodness — a costume, not a discipline. Goodness has been swallowed by Beauty, reduced to a look, a brand, a hashtag, or a hat.
If people really cared about asylum seekers in hotels, they would give money to the homeless on their own street. If people cared about the environment, they wouldn't buy from Amazon. If people cared about justice, they wouldn't sentence criminals to life. If people cared about mental illness, they would go visit their friend in hospital. If people cared about animal welfare, they wouldn't eat meat. If people cared about immigrants stealing jobs, they would read the statistics. If people cared about inequity, they would tax billionaires.
Political slogans are dress-up for goodness. Tote bags, lapel pins, and bumper stickers. Costumes that announces the wearer is one of the good ones, without ever asking the wearer to actually do anything good. The point is only to be seen. To virtue signal with nothing behind the facade.
You could counter that the culture argues about goodness constantly, but the bottom of the line is we don't agree on anything anymore. I would say fragmentation is real, and it is downstream of the aestheticisation. We no longer agree about what is good because we no longer believe Goodness is — goodness only exists as an image. Goodness is only what looks good.
Of course we’re fragmented.
Every faction has its own aesthetic. There is no shared substance to return to.
And against all of this performance, good people still exist. Those who do quiet charity, those who help their ill, those who do not gossip. The friend who shows up without posting about it. The good that does not advertise itself. They are not gone — they are simply syphoned into our blind spots.
From now on, I want my works to be good. I can't guarantee I'll succeed, but I can pledge to be open to change. I can only try my best.
I want to paint the good. Not things or persons at their most IG best — but just the moment I perceive them at their good.
Beauty will always be captivating, and this is why I will focus on this aspect last. After goodness and truth.
I don’t want to cause harm through my creations so from now on, I will strive to unite these three principles - the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in my work going forward. And In that order.