A Dumb Meditation

“Good is Dumb” is a trope that refers to a common thread in a lot of stories (typically fictional stories) where you have a protagonist that has to do some sort of heroic feat. It’s very common for stories to resort to having said feat be an incredible and risky venture that would normally fail or outright kill the protagonist. Something that you can see usually powered by such things as the powers of love, friendship, brotherhood, or the like.

Protagonist A needs to help out Protagonist B and either: makes a risky rescue attempt that involves falling at least once from a great height (assisted falls: via zip lines, parachute, etc still count), defies some powerful Antagonist A or Head Antagonist and manages to be the only one not killed for their defiance, cries magic tears (let’s lump suddenly magic phrases or songs in with this one), sacrifices themselves, or some combination of the above.

In other words, for many characters, it takes an act that would normally be considered stupid given the circumstances of the current situation somehow succeeding (or necessary failure) anyways. In order to be good you’re going to eventually have to do something stupid in the name of good.

I’ve been rewatching a couple of my favorite movies lately along with some new ones and I keep bumping into this inevitable wall of good having to take a stupid action. Being reasonable makes a character uselessly passive by the climax of most stories; making them easy to then discard or have them become an unintentional antagonist with tacked on social commentary about the sin of inaction.

Though to be completely fair the stupid actions are inherently much more entertaining than the reasonable ones. They give climax and drama. And the point of this meditation is not to decry the whole practice as foul. I like big stupid actions having incredible pay offs in the name of love, or something else that’s shiny like that.

The only problem comes from trying to think of how exactly that applies to real life. Where does someone draw the line in how far they’ll go before they’re considered heartless or useless? What makes an action not dumb anymore? Is that only a label that gets stripped off if the venture is successful or at least a level of tragic that can appease a critical eye?

More than anything I wonder sometimes how it works out in a much simpler and smaller scale. Every day opportunities that are missed or seized to help out others.

Like ripping a dress in a thorn bush to save a starving kitten, there was a dumb thing (said thorn bush was in a parking lot at some time after midnight) that could be considered a good thing. Especially since the kitten was chipped and able to finally get back home after a long stint of wandering. But if that didn’t work out that way and something happened (like getting mugged or falling into the bush and getting injured without anyone nearby to help) would anyone still call the attempt good? Or would it just be foolish then and nothing else? (“it was probably feral and could survive on its own” “the cat probably had a way out and you should have left it alone”)

Likewise there are missed opportunities to help because of the fear of doing something too dumb to recover from. Like helping up a stranger on the street when no one else is around. Or letting a stranger borrow your phone. Or even something like helping out someone in need who actually has hurt you before.

I have experiences of doing the active and inactive in those situations and others and I have noticed that their success tends to color whether I think of the action as good or dumb. The problem is that I’m starting to think that that’s not a suitable enough way to define those events.

Can you still be good when you help only sometimes? And do good actions become tainted or misaligned when that dumb factor starts to chime in?

Unlike movies or books there’s not a gigantic pay off for my actions. I haven’t saved lives, I could never help the ones I thought I loved that much, and there’s no reward of the ideal realization of something shiny being within me the whole time. I have helped some for a small moment, at most. I have also accidentally risked my life on several occasions and still vividly remember the moments of almost losing it in various efforts to be good that ended up producing nothing. No good, and most times just more bad.

I want to be a good person and help lots of people. It’s just still hard for me to discern between which dumb ideas will take me towards that wanting to be good (regardless of success) and which dumb ideas are just, well, dumb.

-Loki-