Nobody's Perfect

Today, for my literature class, I read a story titled "Young Goodman Brown" in which the titular character learns that many of the people he knows and respects aren't quite as religious and pure as he thought they were. Perhaps this was significant to him because he's a puritan, or perhaps it's significant because those respected people had darker pasts than Goodman Brown expected, but if the protagonist was shocked at the revelation that nobody's perfect, I wasn't.

I know that nobody is perfect. Everyone has faults and flaws, and everyone has committed sins. Now, the examples Goodman Brown saw of people having consorted with the devil seems extreme, but in a sense, it's kind of true. Whenever we commit a sin, we either knowingly or unknowingly are taking advice and guidance from the devil. When we give in to temptation, we are doing what he wants. If he suggests a course of action, and we then follow it, it could be said that we are consorting with him. I expect that we don't do it often, and I expect that we do the exact opposite of that more often than not, but the fact remains that we all give in to temptation from time to time, and when we do, in that moment, we are following Satan.

I'm sure the devil would love to paint us all in a darker light than is actually accurate. I'm sure he'd love to tell us that we all worship him and do whatever he says. I'm sure he'd want us to hate ourselves and distrust others, but as I said the other day, we're all human. Everyone makes bad choices sometimes, and yet everyone has good in them. That's what Goodman Brown didn't understand. Having seen how so many people had, evidently, turned to the dark side at least once in their lives, Brown comes to realize that people are, by nature, evil, but that's not quite true. Everyone has both good and bad in them, and we can all act on either set of traits on a whim. Sure, nobody's perfect, but nobody's pure evil either. We all have to decide, frequently, what kinds of people we are, and we have a lot more options to choose from than just Good and Evil. There's a lot of gray area between those extremes, and everyone lands somewhere within it.