There’s a kind of goodness we’ve all been taught to admire and aspire to. It’s polite. It’s agreeable. It doesn’t create discomfort at dinner tables or in office corridors. It smiles, nods, and most importantly, stays quiet.

And that’s precisely how good and nice enables the very harm we don’t want in the world.

The good men who don’t get involved with your case because they are good people. The good men who would not speak against their friend because they are a good friend — of course, loyalty outranks behavioural accountability. The good men who won’t speak against a colleague because they are so freaking good in their work, so knowledgeable — How can you even complain?!

The good men who want you to match their niceness with your silence — silence against abuse, silence against inequality, silence against disrespect, silence against threat to safety, silence against normalised daily sexism, silence against anything and everything unfair because that’s the only good they know in the world — the goodness of male privilege and institutionalised discrimination against women.

The good men who choose compliance through silence because no one ever told them that silence always favours the abuser and never the abused.

By the way, don’t be fooled, please. The equivalent good women are just as common. They uphold the same norms, excuse the same behaviours, and sometimes enforce silence just as fiercely. Because social acceptance is a currency powerful enough to buy their conscience.

These are the “good people” of the society who have signed a quiet agreement: “I won’t directly harm you, but I won’t help you either. I am comfortable with you being hurt because preserving my social image of being the good, agreeable person is more important than you not being harmed”. A friend to all is a friend to none.

The good people who will do anything to be socially acceptable — at the cost of righteousness, fairness, equity, dignity, self-respect — the good people who keep unfairness and injustice alive because being good is a hell lot more important to them than doing the right thing, doing what needs to be done.

Yes, they are and shall remain society’s worst challenge to building inclusive communities, the biggest setback to enhancing equity and access to justice.

Injustice doesn’t survive because no one knows. Injustice survives because too many “good people” knowingly decide to look away.

Question to Self: When it mattered, did I protect my image or did I protect my dignity?

[Hint: The joke you didn’t laugh at, but didn’t call out either.]