The Common Good Can't Be Selectively Applied — Yet Here We Are

The common good is invoked constantly. It is practiced rarely, and almost never for everyone.

Let's start with what the common good is not about.

The common good is not a fairy tale or a classic story of good triumphing over evil. The common good is more like a steady stream, gradually eroding obstacles that lay naturally in its path. It doesn't seek balance between good and bad, but rather explores the space in between.

Have you ever heard of the "common bad"?

As an expression, "the common good" is already a little awkward.

Good versus bad is a binary. These polarities cannot exist or be understood except in relation to each other. Nor is there an exact middle or fixed balance between the two. Balance is not a state — it is an action, and a temporary one at that.

Imagine a teeter-totter on a children's playground.

Watch two children playing on a teeter-totter, up and down, playfully trying to find a perfect balance with both feet off the ground. That moment is fleeting: one child slowly rises while the other descends. The only part of the structure that holds things together is the fulcrum, the mechanism that allows the board to move up and down from the middle.

The common good is like that fulcrum: not the board, not either child, but the mechanism that supports the instability itself and whatever is pushing down on either side — whether good and bad, strength and weakness, hatred and compassion.

The common good doesn't revolve around notions of equality or equity.

Instead, it is about supporting a harmonious balance that connects us all.

Its essence can't be found in rule books as a prescription, or within rigid ideologies that dictate behaviour. Nor is the common good the dictate of a single person. When any one person insists that what they are telling you, or forcing you to do, is for the common good, they are likely acting out of self-serving interest.

In one of the great sourcebooks of Taoism, Wen-Tzu: Understanding the Mysteries, verse 40 describes the self-awareness and leadership required to cultivate the common good:

"Brilliance and broad knowledge are preserved by ignorance; learning and eloquence are preserved by frugality; martial power and courage are preserved by fear; wealth, status, and greatness are preserved by restriction; benevolence extended to all the world is preserved by deference." (1)

What does this mean in practical terms?

The final lines from verse 40 offers an answer, but one that requires elaboration:

"These five things are the means by which kings of yore kept the world. Those who take to this path do not want fullness, only by not being full can they use fully and not make anew."

What the Wen-Tzu means by fullness is not daring to be self-satisfied or self-serving. This kind of egocentric behaviour is diminishing rather than expansive. By not pursuing fullness (i.e., fullness of self) choses a form of yielding — which is neither giving up nor giving away. Instead, yielding is like water: it flows around obstacles without needing to overcome them.

The Common Good in Practice

Contemplating verse 40 of the Wen-Tzu reveals the fluid meaning of the common good through five principles.

1: Preserving Knowledge

"Brilliance and broad knowledge are preserved by ignorance"

No one possesses extensive knowledge of everything, but everyone holds unique insights worth sharing. It is the awareness of what we don't know that cultivates curiosity and collaboration.

Indigenous peoples across the world, for example, hold cultural and historical practices and wisdom — about land stewardship, ecological cycles, and sustainable community — that offer perspectives often absent from dominant institutions. That knowledge only becomes available when those with power make space for it.

2: Learning and Eloquence

"learning and eloquence are preserved by frugality"

Frugality, from a Taoist perspective, means knowing when you are learning only for the sake of knowledge without application. The person who studies indefinitely without putting knowledge into practice knows less, in any meaningful sense, than the person who acts on what they've learned. Over time, practice becomes skill, and when those skills are freely shared, they take the quality of eloquence because they benefit the common good.

3: Courage and Martial Power

"martial power and courage are preserved by fear"

The idea that power and courage are preserved by fear is worth contemplating. It implies a form of restraint: holding back from actions that would cause harm to others. The common good involves a complex interplay of actions, beliefs, and values that maintain a delicate harmony among people.

Courage, when grounded in genuine strength, avoids recklessness. Power, when wielded without restraint, tends toward chaos rather than influence.

4: Wealth and Restriction

"wealth, status, and greatness are preserved by restriction"

Without restraint, concentrated wealth compounds in the hands of the few as unchecked power, eroding the collective welfare. We see this in the disconnect between rising consumer prices and simultaneously expanding corporate profit margins: the language of scarcity deployed in service of accumulation.

Restriction in extreme wealth creation is not punitive. It is a safeguard against extreme inequality and supports the idea of a universal common wealth to be shared and accessible for the common good.

5: Benevolence and Deference

"benevolence extended to all the world is preserved by deference"

Benevolence is the quality of well-meaning, and more specifically, of active kindness. It speaks to the simple recognition of human dignity: the belief that every person merits respect not as an earned reward but as a baseline condition.

Deference, here, means humble submission to that recognition. It means supporting or elevating someone without requiring acknowledgment in return — yielding, in the Taoist sense, to another's right to respect according to the equity or inequity of the situation. Deference keeps benevolence honest. It is what distinguishes genuine kindness from the need for adulation.

The Common Good as a Shared Ideal

The common good is cultivated by acceptance and a lack of prejudice toward others.

It exists as part of human nature. Societies have been built around this shared ideal, aiming to survive and thrive harmoniously. To flourish, the common good must be nurtured both communally and at the individual level.

The dominant behaviour that cultivates the common good is acceptance, which fosters feelings of belonging and respect.

When the common good is suppressed, the dominant feeling is fear, which eradicates belonging.

Contemporary Challenges to the Common Good

We witness extreme tensions among communities, tribes, and nations. Superiority claims divide countries, and radicalized groups, often rooted in fundamentalist ideologies that accelerate that fracturing. Wars throughout history have resulted from the sustained erosion of the common good.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine offers a clear illustration. Whatever the stated rationale — security concerns, historical grievance, the threat of NATO expansion — the use of disproportionate force to suppress another people's self-determination is a failure of the common good by any coherent definition. Fear of democratic influence, when it escalates into annexation, reveals exactly what the Wen-Tzu warned against: power preserved not by restraint, but by its opposite.

Embracing Diversity: The problem with anti-LGBTQ legislation.

These tensions exist on a spectrum. At one extreme, Uganda's anti-homosexuality legislation, which made same-sex relations punishable by death, represents what happens when the machinery of the state is turned entirely against the common good of a group of people. This is not an anomaly — it is the violent and intolerable endpoint of an extreme ideology rooted in fear.

Further along that spectrum, but on the same continuum, are political and religious movements — particularly Dominion theology within U.S. evangelicalism — whose stated goals include imposing laws to eradicate all “unnatural behaviour” and differences, which includes not just people and race, but also belief systems. The distance between these extremes differ, but the underlying logic does not.

The common good cannot be selectively applied.

A framework that protects some people's dignity and humanity while actively erasing others’ is not a common good — it is a coalition of interests dressed up as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Canada is not immune to this pattern. Policies framed as protecting children — such as requiring teachers to notify parents if a child requests a different name — raise a question worth contemplating: whose common good is actually being served?

There is an older version of this tension that most people recognize without controversy: a parent who insists their child follow a particular career path, or take over the family business, regardless of the child's dreams and goals. We generally agree that denying someone the freedom to become who they are causes harm, both to the individual, and by extension, to the people around them.

The same logic applies here. When a child's emerging sense of self is suppressed rather than recognized, they will grow up unhappy, unfulfilled, and emotionally suppressed — infecting those around them as a virus to the common good.

Withholding is Contrary to the Common Good

Withholding is about self-preservation and selfishness, sometimes at the direct expense of others.

Cultivation, on the other hand, promotes growth and requires care, attention, and genuine attending to as you would a garden. It is ultimately altruistic.

Have you ever had to hold back any part of who you are? Have you ever been forced to conceal your identity, your dreams, your natural behaviours or mannerisms? How did that make you feel, and how did it affect your thoughts and actions towards others?

A note on what "unnatural" actually means in this context.

Across the natural world, organisms compete, flee, fight, and prey on one another — but sustained, organized hatred directed at members of one's own species is not something anywhere but in humanity. The capacity to dehumanize others, to construct elaborate justifications for their erasure, appears to require language, culture, and ideology. Hate, in other words, is learned. It is not instinct; it is instruction, it is learned, and it is practice.

The common good is not a binary of right/wrong, or good/bad.

It is the awareness of the multiple influences that lead to cultivating stability and homeostasis — of the qualities of dignity, acceptance, and belonging.

These are core human aspirations: to function as individuals and collectively, to live with dignity, opportunity, and equity.

For the common good to work naturally, we need to discern what we genuinely have in common, and foster those connections. We must accept differences and diversity as a natural, unarguable aspect of all life on this planet — not as a concession or toleration, but as the humane starting point.

Footnotes

(1) Cleary, Thomas, trans. Wen-Tzu: Understanding the Mysteries. Boston: Shambhala, 1992.