There are a few bad people in the world but not many and none of them are reading this. They skip over pages like this because they already have decided that the only way to get what they want out of life is what we call the Dagger or DAG approach—Dominate, Attack and Grab.
Of course, we all have a little bit of that in us, but most of us do not let it turn us into aggressive, heartless Dagger people. Instead we take a normal, reasonable approach to life most of the time. All we want is to stick with the same default settings all humans are born with—the ordinary desires to manage our own lives, escape pain and enjoy the things we want to enjoy.
This is realistic. It doesn’t mean we will get our own way all the time. It means we expect reasonable freedom to set our own goals, boundaries and schedule and choose our own relationships and obligations.
While we do that, we would like to make a positive difference in the world too. We may not be as good as people like Mother Teresa who sacrifice their whole lives for others but we admire them and lean as far as we can in being like them.
We could be a lot more like them if it weren’t for those nasty Dagger people. Our big problem in life, as we learn at about the age of two, is that even though there are only a few real Dagger people in the world, everybody has a Dagger streak in them.When people show that streak, inflicting pain on us or interfering with what we want to enjoy, we learn to fight back. We exclude them from our group, retaliate against their attacks and guard our things more the next time. We call this growing up, gaining adult levels of suspicion and self-defence.
The change we would love to see in the world would be for people in general to suppress their Dagger streak more, and maybe even for some of the Dagger people to get a total personality makeover. Oppression and crime would drop. Cheating and abuse would die down to manageable levels. We wouldn’t have to be so defensive all the time: A better world would arrive.
But Jesus says our analysis is all wrong. According to him the real problem with the world is not the few Dagger people or even the Dagger streak in the rest of us. It’s the whole approach to life that masses of normal people see as realistic, grown-up and good.