May I think out loud with you for a minute?
I’m not sure how this extended thought will conclude.
This has been brewing for a while, but after reading Wynn-Williams’s account of her experience working with Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and the people and teams there, I realized I had to say something about it.
Questions like, “Why do people with more power care less?” “Why do people with more money get more greedy?”
Are they evil? Or is something else going on?
But here’s what I’ve come up with so far: I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that we are all essentially good. That we’re born good.
Now, this goes against everything I was taught in my home, society, and in the Church growing up. And by visible evidence. I was taught I was a depraved sinner even before I was conceived like everyone else.
But I don’t think that anymore.
“What he discovered is that our true nature is already awake, already perfect as-it-is; and that what he initially sought to attain was already within him.”
I understand this now.
But how do we account for the evil that happens in the world… through people?
This reminds me of Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed by Patrick Woodhouse. Hillesum, a young Jewish woman from Amsterdam who perished in Auschwitz, refused to hate — even in the face of cruelty. She saw even the worst bullies as broken and believed that, at our core, we are all rooted in goodness and love. A fan of Jung, she saw a fully integrated life as the ultimate goal.
I prefer this kind of language to broken and damaged. Even the word “fragmented” is problematic for me.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about “distortion”. We all have an inner mirror — when we’re self-aware and integrated, it reflects clearly. But without self-awareness, that mirror warps, distorting both how we see the world and how we move through it, creating more chaos in the process.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche wrote, “All are motivated by the wish for happiness. The universal constancy of this orientation toward happiness is a reflection of our basic goodness.” That feels true to me. At our core, even in our actions, is a cry for happiness. Even the bully, inflicting cruelty, is just searching for it — without knowing how to find it without taking from others.
A narcissist trying to inflict suffering on me — at the root, I see someone deeply unhappy, struggling to find joy.
I know this can sound trite, even dismissive. Saying, “They just want to be happy,” about a narcissistic bully feels oversimplified.
But I don’t think it is. Their cruelty reveals their distortion. The harsher their actions, the more twisted their view of the world — and of themselves.
