This is one of those cases where our instincts get in the way of our higher thinking and drive us away from the truth instead of toward it. Because even when it comes to plants and foods, it’s not that simple. Being toxic isn’t an absolute measure, it’s a measure of dosage. A high enough dosage of salt is toxic, it will kill you. But you need salt to survive. Too little is bad, too much is bad. You need vitamins, but people often blithely assume that more is always better and start loading on the micronutrients. But they’re “micronutrients”, you’re only supposed to get a little. If you suddenly artificially force yourself to get a lot, your body will either have to eliminate them, if they’re water soluble, or be poisoned by them, if they’re fat soluble. And you can get sick and die from too many vitamins. Even water will kill you in too low or too high of doses. Pretty much everything that necessary for life, Al the really important and worthwhile things, cannot be reduced down to good or bad. It’s all about the balance, all about how much and in what way you take them into yourself.

Life in general is much the same. Pretty much everything worth having as part of your life could become a problem if you get too much or too little of it, if you allow it run rampant and overwhelm the rest of your life balance or if you remove it from your life balance.

The real mistake people make isnt actually any bigger than just asking the wrong questions. They want to ask, is this good or bad? What they should be asking is, what is its utility (what is this good for), and what is its pathology (how can this go wrong)? Anything worth having will have both of these aspects to its nature. It will have a benefit, a way it can help us and be good for us, and it will have a way it can become pathological and become the dark shadow of itself, working against us instead of for us.

You can apply this approach with almost everything. Food, activities, ideas, pasttimes, even people. You’re likely to encounter people and ideas different from yourself. And they’ll all likely have something powering them that has some utility, some energy and value, some power and function. And it may be obvious to you what it is, it may be easy for you to see. But even if the person or idea is completely pathological, somewhere under there there’s the germ of something that had power and utility, and it’s actually that power that’s driving the pathology. If there wasn’t potential power for good there there wouldn’t also be potential power for harm. If it was merely dark energy, not interacting or capable of having an effect on things, it couldn’t have produced such bad effects. The mere fact that it has power means it has the potential to be a tool, if we can learn how to use it and use it well.

Guilt and shame are powerfully unpleasant. Everyone knows they’re associated with being unhappy. But did you also know they’re powerfully associated with being happy? Guilt and shame are primary emotions for conscientious people. They feel them keenly and often, they internalize criticism easily, they heavily inform their motivations. And, after intelligence, the most consistent marker for long term success, happiness, and stability is conscientiousness. Those people are the most likely by personality (since intelligence isn’t part of personality exactly) to have happy and successful lives. The most likely. Out of everyone.

So there’s clearly some power there, some utility, that drives both the happiness and unhappiness. There’s a real benefit, so it comes with some real risks and real potential for pathology, and keeping it in balance is going to be terribly important. You won’t make things better by just labeling it good or bad. It has a powerful pathology because of its innate effectiveness. And you can’t just throw it out because you don’t like the bad feelings it can create either. If you throw out, fight, or reject that tool, you’re throwing out one of the most powerful forces for human happiness and success.

So we’re left with a much harder question. Not, is it good or bad, but how shall we then live? How shall we live with it? How shall we learn from it? How do we keep it in bakance? How do we maximize the good version of it and get the maximum benefits from it without it becoming a pathological tyrant and turning those healthy benefits into disease and oppression?

Because if we take a simplified approach with anything truly powerful, no matter what approach you choose, labeling it good or bad, I guarantee you will go wrong, cause harm to others, cause harm to yourself, become disillusioned (likely, and then flip to the opposing error), and subvert the potential good you could have had.

When you reductively label something powerful merely as good, you won’t sufficiently watch it or control it or restrain and direct it. You’ll assume it can do no wrong, and you’re super wrong about that. You’ll let its power run wild. And if you reductively label something powerful as bad, you’ll lock it up and restrain it far too much, you’ll suppress it and try to destroy it. You’ll assume it can do no right, and you’re super wrong about that too. And you’ll lose everything it could have done for you, quite likely things you really needed to thrive. Both those paths will come back to bite you in the end. And a whole lot of people spend their lives running from one extreme to another. With their diets, with their relationships, with their politics, with their work, with their play, with their personalities, with everything.

The world isn’t simple. Health, physical or mental or emotional or ideological, isn’t simple. It’s complex. It’s dynamic. It’s founded on potential for either great good or great dysfunction. Sin isn’t something with a nature unto itself, it’s just goodness gone wrong. And the greater the potential good, the greater the potential evil and harm. Whether you take it as literal or symbolic, there’s a fundamental truth being explained in the origin of Satan. He wasn’t some low spirit, he was an archangel, the highest good. The greatest threats are generated from the greatest potential goods.

Hitler and Stalin and Mao didn’t cause so much suffering because they were weak, degenerate men. And there had to be powerful cultures behind them to accomplish all they did. They caused so much suffering because they were brilliant and passionate and driven and cunning. They could have used those qualities to better themselves and others, but instead they subverted the power within themselves and used the power of their cultures (cultures capable of achieving amazing things) to cause untold suffering and destruction. Even modern children’s books like Harry Potter repeat this idea. That Voldemort did great things, terrible things, but great. Darth Vader didn’t start out of Jar Jar Binks, he started out as Anakin Skywalker.

The important question isn’t “Are they good or bad?”, it’s “How could they become good or bad?”

The potential for people, traits, governments, ideas, pleasures, and abilities is there to be either good or bad, sometimes successively, often at the same time. And even when they’re great, they’re still not complete. Even the best mathematician is likely a pretty poor plumber. Even the best scientific theory might fail to comfort a grieving child. Even the best-planned liberal democracy might fail if its citizens lacked courage to defend themselves. And they’ll all have their way to go wrong, or just fail to achieve their potential. Every good leader is always in danger of becoming a self-serving tyrant, even when he or she is at their best. In fact, abuse is the most likely outcome of every good idea, every revolution, and every good leader. It’s only by great care and exertion and caution and humility that we prevent our gods from becoming our downfall. The higher we lift them up, the more they lift us, the less we question them, the less we care we take with them, the more we’re willing to accept them as unquestionable and incapable of leading to bad outcomes. And because no one and no single structure or approach is perfect and complete, there will always be a corrosive influence to being held up in such a godlike position. The more we treat something that isn’t a god like it is, the more likely it will become pathological, no matter how great and good it is.

It would be easy to go on forever because this principle is almost infinitely applicable. People ask the wrong questions and draw the wrong conclusions in virtually every area of life. The entire approach is what’s wrong. It’s useful as a kind of shorthand, a basic way to avoid things that are bad for you and pursue things that are good for you. It makes a handy reference sheet for personal and cultural goals and behaviors. It’s a good way to start a person’s education and understanding. It’s a fine beginning. And it’s not really feasible for a lot of people, especially the young (physically or psychologically), to be constantly running a lot of complex moral calculus and judgements in their heads.

That’s why we’re so attracted to leaders and teachers and heroes and exemplars. We’re not sure we can work everything out ourselves. So we look for an example of someone we judge to have achieved a good end result and intuit that they must have worked things out fairly well to get there and become who they are. So we’ll follow and imitate them and hold them up as an example. That’s who we want to be. We become their disciples.

There can be problems with that approach though. Sometimes the appearance doesn’t match the reality. Sometimes the shortcut of just getting behind what that person holds up as the right way will actually lead us places we shouldn’t go. And often the problem is just simply that humans are too limited and no single human is able to be the perfect be all, end all of life and human excellence, and there will be some areas they’re wrong or just shortsighted, some area where that’s not their area of expertise and understanding, and their blind spot and weakness happens to line up dangerously with your personal situation, or even a particular moment in time.

A great leader of one type might not be the best leader for every possible situation. Sometimes you need a different kind of person, and that good leader, as powerful as they are, can’t adapt to being a completely different sort of person. The better a drill something is, the more specialized and powerful and dedicated to that purpose it becomes, the more likely it won’t make a great saw. And although there is a general sense and principle to human good and virtue and health and flourishing, individual humans are all quite different from one another. What it looks like from person to person and what people need to reach it varies from person to person. None of us are a perfect middle balance of all potential strengths and weaknesses.

And that’s why we need wisdom. Wisdom is more than knowledge or intelligence. Wisdom is the ability to walk the path. To see it, to see the potential good and the potential pathology, and know where to steer to strike the path between tyranny of expression and repression, to hit the proper use of power dead on. That’s what wisdom is. The ability to go beyond simple questions or simple answers to the heart of what actually creates those outcomes, and steer the ship of your heart and mind accordingly.

And anyone has the potential for it. It’s not dependent on being a certain type of person, because everyone is some type, wisdom is just a approach to how you will handle being whatever you are like. It’s equally available to all personalities. And it doesn’t require exceptional intelligence. Intelligence might be useful, it might make the judgements come faster and easier. But wisdom can come to anyone with time and care and practice.

In fact, an intelligent person without wisdom is far harder to move or help than an unintelligent person. Their minds can come up with reasoning to justify their pathology as fast as you can come up with objections. Everything can be rationalized with the best arguments. Intelligence is merely a tool, itself. And if that tool is being used to support pathology, that just makes it all the harder to overcome that power. A really smart person with depression or narcissism (or what have you) is much harder to help because they have the force of their intelligence behind it. A smart criminal is much harder to stop than a foolish one. And there is no shortage of fools and cheats and the mentally ill among the intelligent. I’m fairly intelligent myself, and I know it to be true by personal experience. Not of others (though that’s true), but of myself. Being smart makes it easy to lie and cheat and manipulate and avoid any consequences. It makes it easy to rationalize my behavior and think I’ve criticized it and justified it perfectly. It makes it almost impossible to escape the trap of my own unhealthy thinking because I already have all the answers and can talk circles around other people and their ideas and I’m not interested in listening or learning.

There’s a lesson I tried to teach my girls tonight. It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. What matters is learning to be a good winner and a good loser. Because you can win badly and lose poorly, and they’re both far worse than mere losing (for you as a person). And learning to be a good sport, learning to be a gracious winner and a gracious loser is an invaluable flexible skill. Because it will serve you and guide you right in any situation, no matter the circumstances. You can’t control the the whole world, so you can’t make it so you’ll always win. You can’t avoid the chance of losing unless you take no risks. But you can win in a way that makes people resent you for it and not want to play any more. This isn’t only true of humans, it’s true of rats. Rats like to wrestle and play. But if the big rats don’t let the little rats win at least a decent part of the time, the little rats won’t invite them to play any more and the game will be over. No one likes to play with someone who gloats and brags and rags on the losers. It’s great to be a winner. But you can’t always control that. It’s even better to be the sort of person who knows how to do and be their best whether they win or lose. The truth is, either outcome can harm you, and either outcome could benefit you. And wisdom is the path that makes a victory of any circumstance. It helps you learn the right lesson from losing and helps you stay in the game and it prevents you from learning the wrong lesson from winning and driving others out of the game.