What Does It Take To Do the Right Thing ?
It’s the year of the OX
So i wanted to take this speech from the OX to the Tiger from the Chinese Zodiac.
a conversation about what it means to do the right thing comes up and has been transcribed below.
Tiger: “How can you always do the right thing and be so good?”
Ox: You must decide to do right, and then do it!
Tiger: Stares
Ox: What I mean by that is- it’s impossible for you to do the right thing, unless you make a conscious effort.
People do wrong in the most offhanded ways, just swept along they fall into evil.
Without purpose, without deliberation, without any thought at all, then just like that they’re on the wrong path as if there were no choice.
By contrast, no one often says something like, “without realizing it I was just doing the right thing,” or how about, “next thing I knew I was doing good deeds,” or perhaps, “I helped someone by mistake, oopsie”.
You rarely hear that, and you almost never will. Without intent, there’s no righteousness. There can’t be, because righteous action requires righteous intent.
You can’t do the right thing unless you’ve set your mind to do it. If your inability to do the right thing is causing you to suffer right now, that’s likely because you’re aware of the fact that you’re not trying to do it.
There are many reasons why one may not try to do good; a myriad of fears which might inspire hesitation.
You can blame it on another person, or on society as a whole. You can blame it on the age we live in, or the cards you were dealt.
But hear me, those who are not doing the right thing, must admit to themselves: it’s not that they cannot do it, but that they will not do it.
And you- you need not force yourself to do what is right, but don’t fool yourself into thinking your failure to do so is because you’re unable, but because you’ve made the choice not to even try.
All righteous people decide to do right, and then they do. The steps must be taken in that order.
Worrying about the second step while you’re still on the first is the height of calamity.
You can watch another variation of the original speech here
This speech was written in Japanese and translated so forgive any errors however the take on the Chinese Zodiac and its relevance to the network interested me.
When was the last time you made a decision to do the right thing?
(shameless self promo)
We created the Causevest network to help guide people to do more good deeds in the world regardless of their intentions. The speech above captures an interesting problem in that our current systems do not always naturally put people onto the path that involves self betterment for them.
One solution as the Ox says is to get people to consciously make the decision to want to do that right then and then do it. For us that means owning buying Causevest coin amongst a multitude of altcoins pick a crypto that wants to help you to do good and then do it!