“How do we make good people?”
Dennis Prager, founder of PragerU, posits that this is the most important question a society can ask itself and that our society spends far too little time asking it.
While many people spend plenty of time pursuing academic or athletic achievements, or proving their worth at work, very few people spend much time at all actively contemplating or improving their character. Most people generally assume by default that they’re good.
“It’s a very interesting riddle, isn’t it?” Prager notes. “Most everyone thinks they’re a good person, and yet, there’s a fair amount of evil out there.”
Prager argues that many people are able to paper over their moral shortcomings because, “We don’t assess our goodness by our behavior. We assess our goodness by our intentions,” and, as the old saying goes, good intentions often pave the road to hell.
Virtue is hard-won and often in short supply precisely because people don’t prioritize it, according to Prager. While intent is insufficient, the first step to being a good person is aiming to be a good person, because, as Prager puts it, “You become what you want to be.”
Prager outlines a handful of key qualities that he believes are especially necessary to become a good person: Honesty, courage, kindness, gratitude, responsibility, morality, self-awareness.
Barring exceptional circumstances (such as hiding another person from someone trying to kill them) it is generally a very bad thing to lie. And, once you start lying, it rarely stops at a singular lie – if you lie to your spouse about having an affair, for example, you’ll often have to lie about where you were and who you were with, and then if those alibis are questioned you’ll create more lies or try to get other people in your social circle to lie for you until the entire situation spirals out of control into an ever more complicated web of deceit.
Being honest with other people is a virtue, but so is the ability to be honest with yourself – to admit when you’ve made mistakes and to be self-aware enough to acknowledge your own failings, to improve your shortcomings, and avoid or resist what tempts you.
WATCH: Episode 9: How To Be A Good Person
Courage is also another lynchpin virtue, as being able to recognize right from wrong isn’t very useful if you aren’t willing to do what’s right. Doing the right thing can often be difficult or painful, but confronting challenging circumstances and making the hard, but right choice is foundational to being a good person.
Prager also highlights gratitude as a keystone of happiness as well as goodness.
“No ingrate is kind,” Prager says. “Ingratitude is a guarantor of meanness, of anger, of bitterness, of lashing out.”
On that note, Prager says that one of the quickest measures of another’s person is how they treat perfect strangers, particularly people they want nothing from who they outrank in some broad social hierarchy, say a waiter or a menial laborer at their place of work. If they take a moment to acknowledge the basic humanity of all people, recognizing them by name, thanking them, or even simply smiling at them, it is generally a very good sign, and if it isn’t something you do regularly, it’s a good habit to start working on.
“Goodness is cultivated on a daily basis with little behaviors, but little behaviors add up.”
On a broader scale, good people take responsibility for their actions, support their families and communities, and are morally centered around proper values. While cultivating goodness requires a lifelong commitment and vigilant efforts, the payoff is that your world will be a warmer, brighter, and happier place.
“The biggest reward, probably, is that you bring good people into your life,” Prager says, which he describes as “the single greatest source of happiness.”
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In 2020, The Daily Wire joined forces with Dennis Prager to expand the reach of PragerU’s culture-changing content. Going beyond five-minute videos, Prager is now distilling his wisdom and experience into a series that will strengthen minds and improve lives.
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