What ever happened to the idea of doing good merely for the reason that it is ‘good to do good’?
We are living in a world where it seems normal and acceptable to have ulterior motives for all the good that one does. It seems like we have reached at a point where we will never do good unless there is some benefit tied to it.
Many of us only do good so that we can be seen by others, believing that it is some kind of investment for some future returns. We expect that our being good today will one day pay off and so we do it whenever there is an opportunity to be in the limelight of the public eye. This norm is similar to the analogy of depositing funds into a bank or an investment account with the expectation of it yielding returns in the near future.
If you look at doing good from a business angle, a huge number of corporates are privy on this. What better way to market your brand, services and goods by ‘doing good’ in the public eye. The real reason marketing and PR firms thrive is because there is the need to shape and maintain the image the world has of them.
In order to reap the most benefits, we strive to tell the world how good we are by recounting all the good that we have done, or that we are currently doing. By doing so, we hope to shape the opinion of ourselves as a vantage point to our audiences.
Never mind the fact that we may be total opposites of what we preach to the world- nonetheless, the good acts serve as the bridges that galvanize our damage control narratives.
Were we as good as we would want the world to think of us, there would be no need to blow our trumpet on rooftops as a way of wooing people to ourselves. Would not the world simply gravitate towards us simply because we are good and not because we have told them that we are? After all, even the worst of persons can recognize a good person when they encounter one.
I wonder if it is possible to find individuals who are willing to do a good deed away from the public eye and throw it away into the sea and simply be happy to live with it as a secret. The world needs such people. And those people could be you and me!! Only if we look at doing good from a different moral paradigm shift.
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