The Harm of Doing Good A Study of Us

You may not think that once you’ve finished your morning coffee you are about to establish a new social order; one that will swell and grow, accumulating followers, fans and fanatics, ultimately resulting in a peaceful coup that finds you sitting aloft some kind of ornate throne in charge of a small country. You’re probably only halfway to the kitchen with an empty mug at this point, and that may come as some small relief. But we are also, at all times, those followers, fans and fanatics. We willingly allow, encourage and participate in, orders at all levels of society, particularly if we deem them peaceful, and clearly if we will derive benefit from them. We can accept the flaws in our routines if the routine itself is not dismantled, and confirmation is received that we’ll be safe even if it is. For order is ours to command. It always has been. We are stewards of it, and can be terrible and tyrannical with it.

It is only when we revert to what we know to be the simple things, the sensible things, the rudimentary benchmarks of our now cluttered, crowded and confused continuance, that we may find within ourselves, and inherent in the world around us, a sense of calm, quiet order that is indispensable to our health, mental health, and other forms of health that we so erroneously and egregiously deny even exist. We seek order as much as we yearn for peace, and almost as much as we confuse the two.

For we don’t have to float around on clouds, clothed in pure white garments, thrumming on harps and singing sweet eternal melodies to a nebulous, unknowable deity to be orderly, or peaceful. We’re not very agile when it comes to extrapolating one from the other. We can waft as many purifying scents in our direction as we want, but they’ll either knock us out or agitate our allergies, with maybe some milder reactions between those extremes, but beyond rewiring our brains through the hardest and ugliest of substances, we’re not able to separate body and soul quite so conveniently. We can’t find order simply by trying to be virtuous or ascetic or peaceful, and we’ll only find chaos if we cross the line without a plan to come back – physically, mentally or spiritually.

The Harm of Doing Good: A Study of Us examines the state of our minds, the causes of our actions and the meaning of our words. It lays bare our frailties and fallacies, and points ever more determinedly towards the light. We are all heading that way anyway – might as well open our eyes to help us get there.