The pieces of Picoult

Jodi Picoult is one of my favourite authors. When I pick up her books I know I'm in for a read destined to please. I admire her for her insightfulness; the amount of times she surprises me and makes me go; "Ah! Yeah! That's right. Why didn't I ever think of that?" 

She has a way with words that I only aspire to. A manner of stringing together ideas with a multitude of characters that just seems to work. 

Needless to say, I thought I'd share a slither of that intoxicating allure of the book of hers that I'm currently reading; Nineteen minutes. 

She talks about bad things being like a chain. An evolution of real life Chinese whispers. That one person, in a world of good, did one bad thing which sparked others to attack them for revenge and so continued the trail of bad. Everything we do in spite could be in reaction to a fight over 2 goats a thousand years ago. But what made me think most was when she said that 'bad' was only a way of making us remember what 'good' looked like. 

What would the world look like without a notion of bad. Of people doing wrong. I'm not talking about the implications of an absence of crime on the police and judiciary but generally with no concept of bad. 

I still think the world wouldn't work. 

Sure, everyone would be good - perhaps weird and a tad annoying. But whilst one person would be 'good', another person might be an even better version of good. There would be varying degrees of righteousness and so, whilst there would be no malicious intent in the world, no one would be as perfect as the most good person in a race of good people. Certainly, the whole notion of good would topple. People who weren't good enough would struggle for perfection through losing their good spirit and embracing 'bad'. 

Maybe the world was once like this. Whether your religiously Christian, Eve eating the apple might have been the bridging factor. It whether your not, a man with a herd if dying goats looking to his neighbour with a plentiful stock and finding that stealing might guarantee his happiness. 

Because that's another thing; being good is not synonymous with being happy. What's good for you doesn't always make you happy. A hungry vagrant avoiding stealing from a shop owner and refraining from taking the money he's gained from begging might not make him happy; may not even keep him alive. But he would still have been a good person. 

And whilst I can't stand crime, feel threatened by thugs and constantly have self-evaluation sessions with myself in order to ascertain whether I'm "still on the right track", I don't think I could stand being in a world of goody-too-shoes!