Are imperfect people evil?

   

    By now, you know I’m an unemployed arm-chair philosopher. That’s no big accomplishment. If you live long enough the title naturally confers itself on you. To be sure, I like to write about philosophers.  Plato is the ancient Greek philosopher who gave us the opposing concepts of “perfection” and “reality”.  He  believed that there is a perfect essence to everything.  And everything that we see, feel, hear, taste and smell is an imperfect variation of that perfect essence.  That was about 2500 years ago and we’re still getting tripped up by his thinking.  We’ve adopted it in everything we do. 

    For example, many of us measure our children by some essential criteria as to what is the perfect child?  Or what about the perfect mate?  Does he need to be over six feet tall, lean and muscular, with a full head of hair and attractive eyes?  Does she need to be slim, have smooth skin, flowing silky hair and attractive bulges in all the right places?  Okay, maybe these are not your criteria for the perfect mate but I would bet that you have your own. 

    It may be a stretch but I think it is at the bottom of our current reign of incivility and polarity in our country.  We have a set of criteria for perfect people that exists in our minds.  That criteria varies from person to person.  When we see someone who doesn’t meet our criteria, we think of him or her as flawed or imperfect.  And guess what?  We are right.  There is no essentially perfect person that matches the criteria we have in our minds. 

    What there is are imperfect people like you and me.  Some of those folks make mistakes and are probably not the evil demons that we think they are.  I would bet that most are decent people caught up in a life that shaped them to be the way they are.  I heard a wonderful radio segment that made me think.  The point was that we often judge people as evil when they don’t meet our expectations.  And maybe we should give them the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe we should think of them as imperfect people and that they are trying to do their best, but not meeting our criteria.  Maybe, just maybe, they are like you and me. 

    I doubt any of us wake up and say, “I think I’ll make as many mistakes as I can today.” None the less, we often do.  Most of us don’t meet our own criteria for perfection.  We muddle through life, getting some things right and some things wrong.  But that doesn’t make us evil.  Now, to be sure, there are evil deeds done in the world.  But I’m not even sure the perpetrators are always evil.  They are often misguided, misinformed, mentally ill but not always evil.  Am I being Pollyannaish?  No, I don’t think so.  Because we have the innate capacity to distinguish real evil from benign personal failings. 

    A good example is our belief about politicians.  It’s so easy to jump to the conclusion that this or that person from the opposite party is evil.  For goodness sake, how could he or she not see the correct political position ? They must be evil.   

    Well, I want to dispel Plato’s myth of perfection.  There is no perfect essence for human beings.  We are the way we are.  And until we can accept this, we’ll use a lot of energy in denial.  Here’s a different thought;  Perfection is the state in which people and things are as they are and are not as they are not.  That’s reality folks.  If we apply that definition, we can ditch the idea of essential perfection that no one meets. 

    And when we quit denying that we don’t meet a state of imagined essential perfection,  we can focus on improving ourselves.

Robert DeFilippis