Trope-a-Day: Good Is Not Nice

Good Is Not Nice: For the Imperials, while distinctly subordinate to its cousin trope, Light Is Not Good, this is played very straight on the occasions that Light does align with Good.

Good, for a start, has principles (see: Principles Zealot).  Good is an appallingly ruthless Combat Pragmatist.  Good believes in its own awesomeness and the moral worth of competence, and so Good probably has a The Reason You Suck speech to deliver about exactly how your lack of these things led to you needing Good to save your sorry ass in the first place.  (This particular Good also comes from a culture that considers pride a virtue and finds even normal self-deprecation about as pleasant to listen to as fingernails on a chalkboard.)  And above all, being from a society that is not terribly humble about having its shit together, Good is very tired of this bullshit.

(To take another angle on it, too, Good in this case understands mélith, as a moral principle, and therefore prefers venture altruism – while Good may help you out of a sense of charity, Good expects to profit from the deal long-term as, if nothing else, a demonstration of success; and while Good may, in this case, operate on a pay-it-forward basis, Good expects to see it demonstrated that you did, in fact, do so.

After all, it’s perfectly logical: If the same resources can give a thousand men fish for a year, or teach one hundred men to catch their own damn fish for the foreseeable future, or set ten men up in the fishing industry to supply the entire town with fish and economic revitalization, then the latters obviously make more logical sense than the formers, in terms of net good done – let alone good done per unit effort – even if some people don’t make out so well in the short term.  Shut up and multiply, son, and send the desire for warm, fuzzy good feelings right to the back of the bus.)