So you think you are selflessly ‘Good’?

“What you lookin’ at? You all a bunch of f***in’ assholes. You know why? You don’t have the guts to be what you wanna be? You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your f***in’ fingers and say, “That’s the bad guy.” So… what that make you? Good? You’re not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie!”

-Tony Montana, SCARFACE(1983)

Tony Montana, from Brian De Palma’s acclaimed film Scarface, who is a patriarchal, paranoid, avaricious drug-king, delivers this anguished monologue after a breakdown, realizing that he’d been investing himself in money rather than the people around him. Even for a “bad guy”, Tony has a point.

You will not find it hard these days to spot a person, who cares about the equality of genders (all three), the need for a just socio-political platform and quality education for everyone or even the problems behind the Amazon Rainforest issues. If you happen to go back 100 years, you will be stranded amongst people who might think otherwise. Even though “good” may be a subjective matter, we could try to explore the drive behind human behavior.

Sapiens is the only species of the genus Homo(Humans) to exist today, outliving the extinction of her fellow species like the Neanderthals, Erectus, Habilis and Rudolfensis. One of the major reasons that buttressed our survival was our acquired skill to co-operate in large groups. We used many tools like languages, myths, and stories to achieve this. A group is found to be more co-operative when they believe in common myths and stories. They talk about it with each other and bond over it. This, over time, evolved into gossip. There is a theory in anthropology called The Gossip Theory which claims that our ability to gossip was one of the major factors that propelled the onset of human civilizations. The most important information that needed to be conveyed among these groups were, who in the group hated whom, who was honest and who was a cheat. So to preserve their rank within the band/group, each individual had to be “good”, behaving towards the common good of the band, i.e their survival. But this theory only works for groups under 150, called the Dunbar number. Though not many people today have a social group greater than 150, and this can still hold, let’s just raise the bar and go beyond the Dunbar number.

For social groups greater in number than the threshold, societal order was maintained with the help of fiction and myths, the pinnacles of human imagination. Initially, these common beliefs were religion. Later, these imagined orders became the more complex constitution and judiciary systems, holding hands with religion. Thus each individual yearned for the groups’ opinion, and to avoid punishment from the greater imagined order. If you break a rule, you get fined or imprisoned, which the greater order of the society doesn’t approve and looks down upon it. A “good-child” always obeys his/her parents to earn their approval and to avoid punishment.

One could argue that the modern, educated, self-thinking man of today would never fall into the trap of societal conformity and that he/she would perform “good” deeds guided by their moral compass. In such a case the individual would be seeking the approval of one-self. The act of Reciprocating Altruism, in which one individual does something beneficial (materialistically or emotionally) for another individual belonging to a common imagined order in hopes that the other will have to return the favor, can be considered as a mechanism for the individual to identify himself as “good”.

As the numbers in the groups grew larger, we had to seek new ways to understand the social world we inhabited and keep the people sane. One such device is the Social Identity Theory, which involves individuals categorizing the world into social groups, identifying themselves with some of them and the most important of all, the comparison of their group with other relevant groups. Thus the social identity becomes more important than the individual identity and can influence the individuals’ interaction with other groups. So, it becomes a matter of ‘them’ versus ‘us’. People would rather talk about ‘how bad the opposition is’ and not ‘how good (or bad, maybe?) we are’. Social evils like sexism and racism are born out of such imagined differences. You cannot identify yourself as a law-abiding citizen if there aren’t people who are not. So if we all are trying to get rid of our conceptions of ‘bad’ in the society, then it becomes pretty obvious that we’re playing a zero-sum game and we aren’t moving forward.

When people realize that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are just the notions of our collective imagination, it could lead to an even more disastrous outcome. What would you do if you found in the middle of a game that the rules you’ve been playing by the whole time turned out to be a ruse? There is a possibility that people would develop an indifferent attitude towards the imagined order, opening Pandora’s Box. So it wouldn’t be a wise decision to force people to see things as they are and abandon these social compulsions altogether. Instead, we could think, analyze our deeds, change ourselves to be more utilitarian to each other and move forward, together.