Does a Good Deed a Day Keep the Guilt at Bay?

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https://thethoughtdistillery.substack.com/

This Christmas, just like the many that came before, we threw in the towel when we were fed up of socialising, and resigned ourselves to the TV overlords and watch Home Alone 2 for 50^th time. I mention this, not to review the film but to focus on a line from the pigeon lady, wait wrong image... there we go. When they’re hiding up in the attic, an escape room that introverts like me would dream of during this holiday season, she says to Kevin that a good deed erases a bad one.

Now I wish I could’ve just shut off my brain and absorb the frothy message (it’s just a kids film I hear you say, why are you writing an article about the pigeon lady). Maybe it’s my growing cynicism but I can’t help but poke holes in glossy messaging. If a good deed does erase a bad one, then a greedy rich man could theoretically offset their bad actions by giving back at the very end of their life to people in need, with no incentive to make amends to those they’ve harmed, treating them as a small footnote. It’s not a 1:1 ratio of good deeds to bad; in a boxing match, you wouldn’t deliver an uppercut and then allow your opponent a free shot.

What if the rich man dies earlier than planned and misses the chance to make up for their past greed?

This type of Character appears in George Orwell’s book Burmese Days, personified with the corrupt local magistrate U Po Kyin who has committed countless immoral acts guilt-free, believing he can balance it out at the end of his life by praying and building pagodas. This is what he would tell his wife to keep her by his side. However, tragically, before he can atone, he dies suddenly, leaving his mark on the world with only gluttony, debauchery and manipulation as his legacy.

Even if he did manage to get some good in at the buzzer, this doesn’t heal the irreparable damage he would have caused others, they’re just doing a separate good deed to balance the books, so the intention isn’t pure. This doesn’t have to be done at the end of one’s life either; with this outlook, your evil can stay under the radar if you were to donate to charities as a cover, like Jimmy Saville did by donating to hospitals.

The way you atone then should be directly with the person whom you have harmed or at least with their family. Ideally you don’t harm anyone to begin with and sometimes we might not realise what we’re doing is harming someone.

A thought exercise to check if you’re living ethically

Imagine that you’re transported to the Pearly gates and God is the bouncer. First, remove any preconceptions of what God is in your head, you don’t have to believe in his existence, it’s just an exercise to see if you would make the cut for his heaven. Now ask yourself, if this God was the fairest judge of character, what would that look like? Would he want you to have been charitable to the less fortunate? Whatever you come up with, this will be your own ultimate good that you should strive for.

For me, the true ethical question which I think should be tallied up by this hypothetical God would be the following:

How many people who trusted you have you taken advantage of, whether it’s degraded, abused, victimised, betrayed, stripped of their autonomy, reduced them to less than human?

In Dante’s inferno, treachery is the final circle of Hell and for good reason, it is the greatest evil and like I said before, any subsequent good act cannot be equated with a bad act like treachery. Doing harm to one person who trusted you can cause a person to develop trust issues and make them less generous to others. This could affect their child’s upbringing, with their hollow persona being passed onto their kids and so on. This hereditary risk is reiterated by the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky through the character of the priest Father Zossima in Brother’s Karamazov when he laments that “kids from the father’s drunken abuse sending them to work in a sunless environment with no room to be a child”. The child is already at a disadvantage, with their uncorrupted light having no space in a sunless world.

This also demonstrates why we need to be more forgiving and generous to people who seem cold and standoffish: we are all influenced by circumstance, living with decisions made for us in our childhood. This awareness allows us to make a conscious, well-intentioned effort to have a positive influence on people regardless of who we think may deserve it, skirting the impure intention of trying to balance the books out and offset our bad acts.

Instilled in us is the responsibility to show respect, humility and grace

When we realise the butterfly effect nature of our actions and how they can influence generations in some cases, only then can we grasp the weight of our responsibility to be respectful, humble and gracious to others.

This weight might produce feelings of guilt for past actions. If you do feel an unshakeable guilt for your past, you can start by making amends to those who you’ve harmed.

Of course, you may not remember every innocent person who you’ve victimised so it will take some time to look back without yourself trying to re-write history and claim that you yourself were the victim. We all love to claim we are the innocent victims of our own stories. The French Philosopher, Albert Camus would say we are all capable of this self-obsessive compulsion. As he writes:

“We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all costs, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself”.

When considering past shortcomings then, consider asking a witness who was there to see if your account matches theirs or, if this isn’t possible, imagine yourself in the perspective of the other person who you slighted. Only when you’ve made peace with your past can you finally look forward without flinching.

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Thanks for reading,

Brandon

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Sources:

Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Brother’s Karamazov – Pgs 340-360

Dante’s Inferno

Albert Camus – The Fall Pg 280-28