CHANGING PEOPLE

The attempt to change people resembles trying to change evil into good, which is impossible unless the nature of both is understood. Even then we must strain to initiate change because of how the emotional (and molecular) structure of each is arranged. With good the challenge is in identifying the flaw, and then being able to call forth a person or an age’s highest faculties. With evil, in contrast, we must understand depravity and its influence on the soul despite the claim of some that people are naturally as “good as gold.” Perhaps? Yet how do we explain the lapse, the lingers, the unjustified anger that sabotages our systems. Maybe people are neither as good nor evil as we wish them. In either case we must understand the base and the basics in order to rearrange it to reflect what we suspect about human nature. Otherwise our efforts will only frustrate the person, ourselves included, because we aren’t sufficiently rooted in truth.