How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

by Michael Schur

But if Montesquieu was right, and knowledge makes people gentle, maybe it makes them safer too. That’s the bet I’m making, really. I’m placing a decent-size bet on the idea that understanding morality, and following its compass during decisions great and small, will make you better, and therefore safer. Not safer from harm, necessarily—though I hope for that too—but from all of the traps that modern life sets, especially for people lucky enough to be born into privilege. I’m talking about selfishness, callousness, cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery—those qualities people display when they decide we are not actually living all together, here on earth, but instead are living alone, individually, eight billion siloed ego states, competing with each other in a race that (they seem to forget) inevitably ends with everyone in a dead heat.