People of Good Will
tl;dr: Our culture often defines love in self-focused terms. How I am seen, understood, or affirmed. Being a person of good will means turning outward, not just inward. True love, the source of good will is about wanting others to flourish.
People of Good Will.
What are people of good will?
It seems like the phrase fell out of fashion.
Are you a person of good will?
If you were sitting in a guided meditation and you were invited to bring good will towards all beings, what would you do?
What happens within you when you evoke your good will?
How does your body feel?
What happens within you when you understand yourself to be a person of good will?
What is it like to embody good will?
Good Will & The Culture
The culture pushes us to be “too cool for school.” To be a bit detached and cynical as a way to signal sophistication.
Even when we turn our attention to the cause of justice, it can quickly turn us towards a sort of analytical abstraction. An ideological take that might be helpful in looking at systems and structures. But can also detach us, even protect us, from the devastating sensations that come with facing the travesty of it all.
There is a polarity that seems essential to being people of good will. And it includes being intimately in touch with the suffering of other beings. Good will flows from this awareness, and from the grief that comes with it.
When we don’t want to fully feel the overwhelming terms of the human condition we can reach for certainty. We find certainty in fundamentalisms or ideological abstraction.
We find refuge in being right. And being right makes us self-righteous. Which is different from being people of good will.
Good Will & Personal Work
If we look at it from a different angle, we can call the important work we are doing through the discourses of therapy and healing. These have been a balm upon parched soil. It is so important to pay attention to the ways we have been hurt. And to make space for all those ways in which others have been hurt.
But here too we find a danger. A trap.
David Brooks wrote about it in a New York Times column the other day: The Wrong Definition of Love.
He talked about a Substack post where Antonia Bentel asked six people about how they fall in love.
One woman responded, “I fall in love when someone sees me in a way I didn’t know I could be seen.”
A young man answered, “Falling in love is like seeing yourself reflected in someone else’s mind.”
Another woman said, “I fall in love when I don’t feel like I’m performing competence.” She added that love happens “when someone sees you in the absolute mess of it — your pain, your pettiness, your unpaid parking tickets.”
Another man replied, “Falling in love is like entering a room you didn’t know existed in your own house.”
Brooks says that the answers share a common definition of love: love blooms when somebody else makes you feel understood and good about yourself.
And ain’t that the truth?
Of course it is!
Feeling felt, seen, and understood is certainly a very powerful condition for love to bloom.
But Brooks also says that:
The Substack answers betray a common misunderstanding of how you become beloved. There was a lot of self in these answers and not much about the other person. There was a lot about being paid attention to, and not much about maybe serving and caring for another person, or even putting that person’s interests above your own.
He says that these answers reflect deeper cultural trends that evolve over decades. With thinkers noticing how our society was moving from shared moral frameworks into a “therapeutic culture,” where personal well-being is the highest value. Later, others called this drift “the culture of narcissism,” where the focus on the self leads us to become fragile and desperate for recognition.
It is deep stuff. But I trust we can agree with his assertion that:
The goal of love is to enhance the life of another, not to feel good about ourselves.
And here I could spend a lot of time talking about the importance of boundaries. And the dangers of aiming to enhance someone else’s life when we lack a fundamental sense of self-worth. It is not healthy to think that the way we need to earn our place upon this Sacred Earth. And that the only way to do so is by giving others what they want. Plenty of traps there.
There are a lot of ways to misunderstand the truth. And yet it is still true! The goal of love is to enhance the life of another, not to feel good about ourselves.
This deeper definition of love shows up not only in theory, but also in culture. Last week I wrote about what Bad Bunny is doing, and how he is saying “I love you” to his people.
And he is saying it in the way all of us should say “I love you.” With a deep understanding of who is receiving this love, how they are, how they listen and speak, what they love. How they move their bodies when they feel most authentically themselves. What is their heartache? What do they long for in being loved?
Being People of Good Will
This is where I come back to good will. To being people of good will. To being people who want what is good for others.
Not everyone is a person of good will. Some don’t care. Some just want to “win.” And others want to actively harm. It is a mystery to me why this is so. But it behooves me to know and to understand that all these people also live within me.
Which is again why I want to be actively engaged in being a person of good will. Because when it is not an active practice, my more selfish tendencies always seem to grab the reins.
Our good will might not immediately lead to right action. There is something to the saying: “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” But no one knows what is always right about everything anyway. There is a narrow path of wisdom. And we are each paving our way.
It is better to make a mistake from the active intention that comes with good will than it is to stay cynical, analytically detached or just enacting what the culture says is right.
It is better to risk making a mistake with an authentic desire to be a person of good will than it is to deprive yourself and the world from the energy of good will.
Something happens inside of you when you determine to be a person of good will. It allows you to feel. It brings you into closer contact with the heart ache of it all. This opens you up to a tenderness that helps you get humble. And when you get humble it less likely that you will fall into the trap of “knowing what is best for someone else” (yes, I know this trap all too well.)
When you're determined to be a person of good will, you are filled with energy. It connects you to other beings. It strengthens you with a sense of agency. And it sets you on the path to wisdom.
Let’s keep working at it together.
And watch us become even better company to each other.