Good Intentions

“With your charter you don’t go into another monastery!” I was slowly boiling over.

How do they not understand that we must not force them into anything! For the third hour we sat in this disgustingly clean living room, and for the third hour I tried to make them change their mind.

“People must learn for themselves! What you’re going to do is teach a savage to press buttons without explaining why they should be pressed.”

“And do you know how many people die there each day? Not a year, not a month, but a day? Fifty thousand. Do you hear, thousand! And what, let them keep killing each other?”

“If they kill each other, that means they are unworthy of happiness!”

“But the worthy die. And the killers remain alive. Some fanatic is capable of sacrificing even a child’s life, and children are not guilty of anything! We just want them well, we’ll bring them peace, there will be no more killers and victims…”

“And there will be only a herd of happy sheep! Victims, even among the innocent, are normal, however awful that sounds. They have always been and always will be. But the suffering people go through changes them, fundamentally changes their whole life. It’s not the event that matters — struck or not struck, stole or not stole — it’s what remains in the soul afterwards. Having made a dozen mistakes on his own, a person will understand a lot and change greatly. Perhaps he will learn to understand other people. And if some egoist is never given the opportunity to act egoistically, he will stay an egoist; nothing in him will change. Maybe by hurting those dear to him a few times, he would understand he is doing wrong.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it would give him nothing, and he would remain as he was, only he would no longer be afraid to hurt his family and loved ones. There is too much evil in this world; it won’t change on its own. That is exactly why we want to help it, understand…”

…The golden rays of the sun smoothly flowed into silver, were remelted into lead, and finally disappeared behind the distant horizon line. The day was dying. Vultures of clouds still finished it off, when the night slowly wrapped the earth in a black mourning cover. The world was leaving for the kingdom of dreams.