Would you rather be righteous, or whole?
A video + essay on "being right" vs. "being whole"
Hello!
I have some thoughts on the distinction between “righteousness” and “wholeness” in morality. I recorded a short YouTube video on them last week, then decided I had more to say and wrote a Substack piece about them.
You can enjoy the video if you’re short on time, or the writing if you’re looking for a bit more context + philosophical grounding. And even if you have no time, you can still subscribe to the channel 😊
The video
The piece
I want to tell you a story about my attempts to be good, and how those attempts caused a lot of evil.
The experience changed my view of morality, and if you read it, it might change yours. But that change will only make sense after I’ve told the whole story.
It all started with an act of grave depravity.
I was somewhere around third grade, and I’d just learned about a supposedly evil thing that people were doing. Since I was a bookish kid, I spent that afternoon searching my family’s bookshelf for any mention of the aforementioned evil act.
I finally struck gold. In a few paragraphs of a thousand-page book, the evil act was mentioned. The book called it an act of ”grave depravity.”
Since I was a child, I’ve always cared a lot about righteousness: about pursuing the good and avoiding evil. When I learned that this newly-discovered act—homosexuality—was evil, I wanted desperately to avoid it. I also wanted to make sure those around me avoided it. So I spent the next decade of my life judging anyone who expressed it.
Then, at age 18, in the presence of an unusually accepting friend, I found myself making a confession.
“Actually, wait, I think I’m gay.”
“Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” he asked.
I thought about it.
“Because I was trying to be good.”
This isn’t a story about me being gay (most of you already know that), and it’s not a story about the institution which told me that being gay was evil.
It’s a story about the heart, and the ways we go about breaking it in our attempts to open it.
After all, what was I doing in that decade of gay-bashing? I was trying to be good. But why was I trying to be good? Because I thought it would make me (and others) happy. I thought righteousness was going to open my heart.
Of course, it did the opposite. During that decade, I suffered from an inability to connect with other people. What I couldn’t accept in others, I also couldn’t accept in myself, and so I related to others as a half-person. Righteousness may have made me “good”, but it also made me broken.
This is the part where I pose a somewhat difficult question. Is the pursuit of goodness (and avoidance of evil) necessarily the best way to achieve happiness? In other words, if righteousness can fail to open the heart, is there anything that can do it better?
With time, I started to find an answer in my meditation practice. As any meditator will tell you, the first time you sit on the cushion, two judgements will jump out at you:
“I’m kind of a bad person.”
“I’m also kind of insane?”
Personally, when I started to meditate, the gay thoughts came up. And not just gay thoughts, but angry thoughts, fearful thoughts, hateful thoughts, and depressed thoughts. From the “righteous” perspective, this was a very bad sign. Bad thoughts had to be cut off at the root, lest they get out of hand. Right?
Wrong. Because with time, my meditative practice made me less and less reactive. The space between the arising of the thought and my reaction to it grew wider, and in that space, I realized that the thoughts weren’t as bad as they seemed.
By the way, you can try 5 minutes of meditation (or “doing nothing”) by watching the video above.
For example, anger. For years, I was incredibly nervous about experiencing any kind of anger. I thought it was going to tear me apart. But in meditation, I learned that I could let myself feel angry without pushing the anger away or adding fuel to it. The anger flowed through my body with time, and eventually burned itself up.
The same was true of fear, grief, and desire. Every time I could meet the so-called “bad” emotions with awareness, they moved cleanly through my body—and what’s more, they left newfound clarity in their wake. Anger, felt fully, told me of a boundary I needed to protect. Grief, felt fully, reconnected me with love.
In the process, I began to replace my desire for righteousness with a desire for wholeness. Wholeness, as I define it, is a heart in which all parts are allowed to play a role. Rather than dividing some emotions from others, people who are whole integrate every part of themselves into something sincere and cohesive.
Imagine you’re at a party. The person on your left is especially righteous. You might admire their ethical discipline, but you start to suspect that they’re also judging you. When you apologize for showing up late, the apology lands on deaf ears.
The person on your right, however, is especially whole. No matter whether you’re coming off as serious, silly, reflective, or ticked off, they’re 100% happy to go there with you. Interacting with them can feel comfortably—maybe even shockingly—intimate. When you sheepishly realize that your shoelace is untied, they don’t pounce. They out-awkward you: “Oh shit, I forgot to feed the meter.”
Now, who would you like to continue the conversation with? Who makes you feel more connected, more yourself?
I won’t choose for you, but I have a hunch.
This story was about the difference between righteousness and wholeness. Righteousness, as I define it, is splitting the world into good and bad and pursing only the good while avoiding the bad. Let me be clear—if the choice is between righteousness and anarchy, righteousness is not that bad. I’d rather people be divided, but doing good, than not be doing good at all.
However, if you feel fragmented from trying to be righteous, I highly recommend wholeness. In wholeness, we don’t divide our hearts into two by labeling certain emotions as bad. Instead, we fully feel emotions—anger, hate, grief, sexuality, to name just a few—until they metabolize into clarity and connection. In my experience, people who are whole naturally do good—sometimes even more than those striving for righteousness.
We live in an incredibly righteous age. I don’t need to tell you about the people out there doing all kinds of harm with the utter conviction that they’re doing good. Those people, in my opinion, are not whole. What they judge in others, they judge in themselves. And they’re only achieving in creating further fragmentation.
What part of you, in this moment, feels fragmented from the whole? An angry part? A fearful one? A lustful one? Don’t fuel it, but don’t push it away either.
Maybe it has something to teach you. It might not be depraved, after all.
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Here’s the human condition, as far as I can tell.Thanks for reading The Labyrinth! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Thank you for sharing this, Rey! I always look forward to your posts. Re: "What they judge in others, they judge in themselves." -- as you may have noticed, pretty much every accusation made by the 'righteous' (particularly, but not exclusively, those by the party currently in charge in DC) is actually a confession. For example, it turns out there actually was/is a cabal of elites sexually exploiting children - but it was predominately those making the accusations.