I strongly agree with the statement by Chuang Tzu that “perfect goodness is crooked”. I further agree with Lao Tzu who said we should “Renounce sainthood: it will be a thousand times better for everyone.”
We have all met people who were self consciously trying to do “good”. Most of the time, to me at least, they come across as superficial, not infrequently covertly pretentious and judgemental, and the consequences of whose actions are quite often quite different than what they intended.
Certainly, neither Chuang Tzu nor Lao Tzu were encouraging people to be bad. They were just saying that compulsion and spontaneous Goodness are incompatible. In my own terms, I view personality as a chaotic system, as a system in motion which traces a repeated pattern that is the outcome of the the decisions you make, which necessarily reflect your ACTUAL rather than your stated values. This pattern–imagine drawing a figure eight over and over–will be disrupted if you set a rule that you can NEVER, under any circumstances, go past a certain boundary. In my example, would you not have to greatly constrict your range of motion? Would your 8 not get much smaller? Would you not have to draw slower, and with less energy?
This is the effect, say, of stating that the sexual instinct can NEVER be expressed spontaneously. This rule, in my view, is one of the principle reasons for the social retardation of Islamic cultures. There are some rules–actually many rules, in many iterations of the doctrine–which get you killed if you break them. This makes their culture rigid and, yes, fearful.
At the same time, if there are NO rules, then there is no order, no pattern in the chaos. Plainly, we need some rules in sexual relations. The question is what they should be. In our own society, sex is in our face at the checkout lanes of the grocery stores, on billboards, on the radio, on the TV, at the movies, pervasive on the internet, in many restaurants, and pretty everywhere but church. And some people go there to meet partners.
This is the topic of another post, but in my view we have simply asked too much of the sex instinct. Actually, I will leave that for another post.
For now: no perfect person is a good person. The instinctual bias I at least feel for mild sinners is in my own view quite warranted.
Actually all the biases I have I feel are quite warranted. I can say that with my tongue in cheek since I’m quite aware I am neither perfect, nor perfectable–at least at this stage and manner of existence.