“Bad people” are everywhere, maybe not!

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“Bad people” are everywhere, maybe not!

Some people, such as the famous economist Tim Harford, believe that life is best explained with Economics. In his book, The Logic of Life, he believes that incentive is the driving force behind human behaviour and the mechanism of human life. Personally, I think life is more like Statistics – the randomness and possibilities of people and events.

People are interesting. There are no two people who are exactly the same. That’s because humanity has a great variety of people, ranging from “bad” to “good” ones, like a rainbow with countless colors. Let’s assume that the world is in black and white, just to simplify the complexity of life. We put these people on a graph ranging from “bad” to “good”. Most people are not saint, and they are no where near devil, so most of us are at the middle of the extremes. Extremely “bad” and “good” people are rare, so their population is relatively low. The graph of human population distributed from “bad” to “good” should look something like this.

This is a bell curve. As you can see, the peak of the bell that represents majority of human beings is at the middle of “bad” and “good”. The number of people slowly decline as it moves toward the extremes. The rare “extremists” are at the end of the graph with low population. This graph should more or less represent the people in our life.

In our life, there’s a small percentage of “good” people who always support us and a certain percentage of “bad” people who always trouble us. The rest are majority who are relatively “neutral”. This should be our rational expectation toward people around us. It’s too optimistic to expect everyone to be “perfect” and if we really have this expectation, we will live miserably because we will meet “bad” people who break our perfect expectation from time to time. This is the same as meeting “bad” people in life. There will be “good” people coming in to your life so we don’t need to focus too much on the “bad” apples and neglect the positive aspect of social life.

In reality, there’s no such thing as good or bad people. People only make “good” or “bad” decision or action in a specific time. Someone may do good deeds 10 minutes ago and commit crime on the next day. Objectively good and bad people don’t exist. There are only perceived good and bad people. That means a good and bad person is subjective due to our own judgement. A Westerner may perceive Osama bin Laden as the big bad guy and the same can be said about George W. Bush from an Easterner’s point of view.

Actually, the “goodness” and “evilness” of people around us is partially caused by our own deeds. We can easily meet “bad” people if we behave badly to others. Just walk up to a random stranger and talk dirty about his mother, and you will meet a “bad” guy will “horrible” attitude. We can make enemies because of our own behaviour. Don’t worry. This is actually good news. It shows that we can control the bell curve of social life to a certain extent and increase the chance of meeting “good” people and avoid “bad” people, by controlling ourselves.

The strategy to be successful in our social life is not to eliminate “bad” people and mix only with the “good” people. This is not realistic and not healthy. We should mix with every body. Somebody might appear “bad” doesn’t mean he’s really a bad person. We can’t know a person deeply based on surface judgement. What we should do is to behave well, friendly, and respectful to other individuals so that the “good” side of others will turn out more often than the “bad” side. Slowly we will feel that we are surrounded by nice people. Our bell curve will seem to shift towards the “good” side, where we meet far more “good” people, than the “bad” ones (majority is on the “good” side). I call this shifted bell curve the wise curve.

I’m living on the wise curve and feel happy with my social life. I believe the world will be peaceful if people choose to live on the wise curve. You can live on the wise curve if you choose to improve your soft skills and interact with others positively. It’s also good to learn to tolerate all kinds of people and accept that people are diverse. Not everyone is at the same wavelength with you and mix well with you, but you can avoid making enemies by being respectful and tolerating. If you think your life has full of “bad” people, maybe it’s time to make the choice to change and improve yourself, before you can change others.