I began my internship at a local weekly newspaper today. My new editor told me that all the people in the company were good people, albeit a few of them might be oddballs. The guy I spent most of the day working with told me that it was a very dysfunctional company and that everyone there was a closet case. I tend to think his assessment is probably more accurate than than the editor's. Fortunately, I have a wealth of experience with dysfunctional groups of people to draw from.
I may be slightly (or really, depending on your point of view) pessimistic or cynical or both, but I don’t see most people as good people. What does that really mean anyway? Good people? Are you a good person if you go to work every day, pay your taxes and don’t bother anybody? Are you a good person if you lie in bed all day and don’t bother anybody?
I believe that for every malevolent human being in the world, past and present, there is someone who will say she or he was a good person: “Oh, well, Adolf really was a sweet boy. He used to carry my groceries home for me” or “Saddam isn’t as bad as he seems. He always gave me the orange skittles” or “Joseph (Stalin) was really a very considerate man sometimes,” etc, etc. As if those things ruled out their crimes. So, what does it take for a person to cross over from good to bad? (And why isn’t there any middle ground? You never hear anyone say, “Well, she’s not a good person or a bad person. She’s just a person.”)
People are too generous with their “good person” labels. We are comfortable in our passivity and don’t want to rock the boat by admitting that a person’s faults are more than just faults and that her or his occasional pleasantries don’t compensate for the pain she or he inflicts. And when someone else tries to call her or him out on her or his meanness, we label that person as over-reactive or emotional. We all just want to bury our heads in the sand.