I Cannot Quite Respect a Goodness That Refuses Effectiveness

Or, I am tired of heroes who ask us to be less human in order to be good

Sometimes I worry that I am not a very peaceful person.

This is an inconvenient thing to discover about yourself, especially if you have already purchased furniture, developed opinions about moisturiser, and started making long-term plans involving health insurance and compound interest. Peacefulness feels like one of those adult qualities you are supposed to acquire around the same time you learn how to say, “Let’s circle back on this,” without wanting to walk into the sea.

But I am not peaceful. I am restless. Sitting still often feels less like rest and more like being punished by an invisible school principal. Give me a problem, though, and suddenly I become alive. Not necessarily happy, but alive. Stress, within limits, makes me sharper. Urgency gives me shape. A crisis walks into the room and some ancient idiot inside me says, “Finally.”

This is not a virtue, exactly. It is not the sort of thing anyone writes in a toast. “He is a wonderful man: incapable of calm, suspicious of stillness, and emotionally dependent on problems.” And yet, this restlessness has carried me through much of my life. It has helped me work, build, endure, decide, recover, and begin again.

So what is it? A flaw? A gift? A manufacturing defect with good quarterly output?

I think this is why I have always been drawn to the heroes who are not very clean.

Not clean in the moral sense. Not polished. Not laminated. Not the sort of people who would do well in a corporate values workshop. Achilles is glorious and terrifying, a man whose greatness and rage seem to drink from the same underground river. Odysseus is brilliant, brave, slippery, manipulative, and very much the kind of person you would want leading your escape from a cave but maybe not dating your sister. Bhima is force before he is refinement. Karna is loyalty curdled into blindness. Draupadi is fire, and fire is useful, but nobody has ever called fire low-maintenance.

This is what I love about the Mahabharata. It does not seem overly interested in producing good boys and bad boys, which is a relief because human beings are rarely either. They are weather systems with names. They contain devotion and vanity, courage and resentment, tenderness and ambition. They can tell the truth in one room and lie in the next, and somehow both rooms belong to the same house.

The Ramayana, at least in many popular tellings, often feels cleaner: good on one side, evil on the other, dharma in white clothing, adharma with a better background score. But even there, Ravana complicates the matter. He is not merely a villain. He is learned, disciplined, powerful, devoted, musical, kingly, excessive. That is what makes him interesting. Not that he has no virtues, but that his virtues do not save him.

This is a deeply irritating truth: virtues do not automatically organise themselves into goodness. Intelligence can serve ego. Discipline can serve obsession. Courage can serve cruelty. Devotion can serve possession. A person can have many impressive qualities and still be spiritually bankrupt because one appetite has become king.

And then there is Krishna.

I love Krishna because he is not merely good. I mean, he is good, yes, but not in the decorative way. Not in the soft-focus calendar-art way where goodness means smiling gently while the world burns in the background. Krishna is cunning. Strategic. Effective. He understands timing, terrain, weakness, pride, theatre, incentives, and the fact that some people use rules the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

Krishna does not seem obsessed with looking pure. That is what makes him so compelling. He is willing to bend the rule when the rule has become a weapon for the wrong side. When Bhima strikes Duryodhana below the waist, it is a violation of the code. But the war itself has not been conducted inside a clean moral universe. By then, everyone is living among the ruins of violated codes. The question is no longer whether the rule is beautiful in theory. The question is what the rule is protecting now.

This is dangerous, obviously. “Higher purpose” is one of the finest perfumes ever invented for the stink of self-interest. Human beings are very good at bending rules and then writing philosophy around the bend. We say dharma when we mean victory. We say justice when we mean revenge. We say clarity when we mean impatience. We say effectiveness when we mean, “I wanted what I wanted and built a temple around it.”

And yet, I cannot quite respect a goodness that refuses effectiveness. A goodness that cannot protect anything. A goodness that stands at the edge of catastrophe saying, “But technically, I followed procedure.” There is something obscene about fairness when fairness is being exploited by the unfair. There is something weak about virtue that only works in rooms where everyone is already virtuous.

Maybe this is the real distinction: peacetime virtues and wartime virtues.

Peacetime asks us to be patient, kind, agreeable, gentle, forgiving, balanced. Wartime asks for speed, force, cunning, emotional discipline, even ruthlessness. Some people are wonderful in peacetime and useless in war. Some people are unbearable in peacetime and indispensable in war. This is not an excuse for being unbearable. But it is an explanation for why some people make more sense during a crisis than during a Sunday brunch.

I know people like this. People who are irritating, entitled, too sharp, too much, and then suddenly, when everything collapses, they become the only adult in the room. They drop emotion. They take charge. They cut through noise. You may not want to holiday with them, but if the ship is sinking, you want them near the lifeboats.

Maybe all extraordinary traits are like this. Spiky. Useful somewhere. Costly elsewhere.

Restlessness can become productivity, but also exhaustion. Calm can become wisdom, but also passivity. Cunning can become strategy, but also manipulation. Loyalty can become nobility, but also moral blindness. Fire can become justice, but also destruction.

We are told to become well-rounded, but sometimes well-rounded just means all the sharp edges have been sanded down until nothing can cut rope in an emergency. Maybe the great human task is not to become smooth. Maybe it is to know the terrain for which our jaggedness was made.

I do not want heroes who are perfect. Perfect people are usually unhelpful to me, partly because I do not believe them, and partly because I cannot find the door into their lives. I want heroes who show me that greatness can be mixed with damage, that effectiveness can require moral discomfort, that goodness must sometimes become intelligent enough to survive contact with the world.

But I also do not want to worship the flaw. That is the trap. Ravana is not great because he is consumed by ego. He is tragic because his greatness is consumed by ego. Krishna is not admirable because he bends rules. He is admirable because he knows what the bending is for, and because he does not seem to be doing it merely to enlarge himself.

Somewhere between Ravana and Krishna lies the question I keep asking myself.

What is my restlessness serving?

Is it serving life, work, love, courage, creation, protection? Or is it merely serving the restless little god inside me who demands motion because stillness would reveal too much?

I do not know. Not fully.

But I know this: I am tired of heroes who ask us to be less human in order to be good. I am more interested in the ones who show us the terrible dignity of being human all the way through: gifted and flawed, useful and dangerous, ridiculous and sacred, bending the rules and hoping, with trembling hands, that we are not only bending them toward ourselves.