The Nice and the Good (2)

Continues ....

One of the characteristics of the Nice and the Good is that they always do what is best both for the person concerned and for the Community at large. Thus ... if they are going to sack you, they will most certainly not do this because they find you a pest or insufficiently deferential or an obstacle to some cherished but dodgy scheme which they are secretly trying to promote. They will do it because it is for the necessary good of the community concerned, and because your own benefit also peremptorily requires it. If they have in mind to torpedo the boat you are travelling in, this will be because they know that you will only be truly happy at the bottom of the sea.

Some little time ago, I saw an example of this: a victim of sexual abuse wanted some form of public vindication. It was necessary ... of course, with the deepest regret ... for the relevant authorities to refuse this request because  the Meejah feeding-frenzy which such vindication would cause in the national and international press would be something which the survivor would be unable, psychologically, to manage.

 'Cover-up' is the sort of suspicion that could only be entertained by somebody who completely lacked both Goodness and Niceness. Just by thinking such a thought, you would be self-condemned.

By no means always, but quite often, the Nice and the Good are also emotional cannibals (Peter Ball was). They want you to be a willing subordinate in their passion for psychological dominance. In fact, they want you to want this status. If you fail to, that will in and of itself be a pretty definite sign of your calamitous shortcomings.

For students of such things, I warmly commend The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch, novelist and sometime Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne's College Oxford. It begins with "a lazy fat man, a perfect sphere his loving wife called him, his name Octavian Gray," who "was slowly writing a witty sentence in a neat tidy hand upon creamy official paper while he inhaled from his breath the pleasant sleepy smell of an excellent lunch-time burgandy". 

Its concluding pages show us his wife still cheerful: "'Isn't it wonderful that we tell each other everything?'

"In fact there were a few details of Octavian's conduct, concerning long late evenings when he stayed in the office with his secretary, which Octavian did not think it necessary to divulge to Kate. However, he easily forgave himself, so completely forgetting the matter as to feel blameless, and as he frequently decided that each occasion would be the last he did not view himself as a deceiver of his wife. His knowledge that there was indeed nothing which she concealed from him was a profound source of happiness and satisfaction."