Some Notes on Goodness

What is Goodness? Goodness, to my mind, is the full integration of Virtue and Honor, of Respect and Compassion, of inward growth and discipline, thoughtfulness, and charity.

Honor encompasses: Courage, Honesty, Generosity, Hospitality, Perseverance, Self-Discipline, Self-Respect, Industriousness, Self-Reliance, and Fidelity.

Virtue is more outward, encompassing: Patience, Kindness, Justice, Thoughtfulness, Forgiveness, Respectfulness, and Humility.

In the old days, people learned honor from their families. These are the qualities taught to children to be used as the tools to providing security for themselves and their families in the future, of making boys into men, of making girls into women. Honor builds strength.

Virtue builds healthy relationships and opens the door to joyful and emotionally fulfilling lives. Virtue stands as a guard against those emotionally crippling vices bred of insecurity, fear, and resentment by focusing our priorities on love (a positive intention for ourselves and others).

Honor without Virtue is a cold and shallow strength. It gives the individual the ability to create great wealth, power, security, and to produce all kinds of great works, but without purpose and direction. The individual becomes selfish and annoyed by other people, tending toward cynicism and solipsism.

Virtue without Honor tends to be misguided and toxic, breeding a kind of emotional selfishness that seeks rewards from their virtue. Our rewards come from our honor, not our virtue, from what we earn for ourselves through good habits and industriousness. Our honor is what allows us to earn the qualities and resources that enable us to give unto others. All the fine and sympathetic feelings we might feel for others, all the good intentions, all the acts of kindness, mean very little if we are not ourselves grounded in the firm soil of self-discipline, self-respect, and self-reliance.

A lack of self-discipline breeds chaos and insecurity - these too we give to others along with our kindness and sympathy. A lack of self-respect breeds all kinds of bad habits that do not merely affect us. A lack of self-reliance, both materially and emotionally, creates neediness and anxiety, which burdens our loved ones as much as it burdens ourselves. We can try being good to others, but if our lives are chaotic, mired in all kinds of vice and excess, neediness and stress, we are really not providing for the good of others. The path to uselessness is paved with good intentions.

Charity without wisdom is a waste of resources.