I’ve been busy with all of my math classes, so I haven’t done a journal in a while. This blog post will be about the contents we talked about two weeks ago, which were the Tao te Ching and about Mencius.
Of all of the Tao te Ching poems, 49 was one that stood out to me because the middle section explains how people should act towards others. “People who are good, I treat well. People who are not good, I also treat well. Trustworthy people, I trust. Untrustworthy people, I also trust.” I think this is important to understand because you should treat others the same way you would want to be treated. We shouldn’t treat people differently based on how we perceive them. What is the true definition of “good”? Everyone has a different meaning, so I may think people are good while others don’t. We should treat everyone the same way even if they aren’t “good” because nobody is perfectly good. People have their ups and downs, and people aren’t just naturally untrustworthy or not good. There’s good in everyone, and that’s something that everyone needs to understand. Just treat people positively and everything will be okay for everyone.
The second day of class, we reflected on Mencius and the question whether people are born good, evil, or neutral. Prior to class, I thought that people were typically good. I haven’t met anyone who is just pure evil and is full of negativity. But after reading Mencius, I think people are born with a clean slate and they decide if they want to be good or evil. Most people who start neutral end up good, and that’s what I believe now. I liked how in the Man’s Nature is Evil article that every paragraph usually ends with “that man’s nature is evil, and that the goodness is the result of conscious activity.” I don’t think people just wake up like, ‘I’m gonna be evil today.’ But I also don’t think people also wake up trying to be good. People just naturally are good…people don’t try to be good. From my perspective, people are just good. But that doesn’t come from our own conscience at first. Based on however we grew up, people will have more good inside them, but everyone will have some good in them nonetheless. We start out as neutral, but we usually end up good. That’s my opinion, that evil doesn’t really exist in this world. There are just different levels of goodness and everyone has a different definition of what being good means to them.