In March of 2023, notorious transgender TikToker Dylan Mulvaney gushed to talk show host Drew Barrymore about the importance of surrounding oneself with good people. Barrymore clearly fit the description, in his view, because she spent much of the interview kneeling before him in worshipful adulation. Who would not want to be surrounded with good people like that?

The phrase “surrounding myself with good people” has been used a lot recently. Not just by Hollywood types, but by average Americans, too. It’s become a staple scrap of verbiage in our deeply anti-philosophical, anti-reflective lexicon. On closer inspection, however, “surrounding myself with good people” is the opposite of another thought-destroying verbal tic: “it is what it is.” The latter implies that whatever has happened is fated, out of one’s control. It’s a way of begging off taking responsibility for outcomes, and begging off the burden, too, of thinking about cause and effect. The former, though, implies a great deal of control. It means that one has taken the reins in one’s own hands, and is now making the decisions about with whom one will share existence, and whom one will shun as not worthy company. Things may be as they will be, but the imperial self need not settle for second-best. One can take over from fate and surround oneself with the people one deems to be good.

How “good” are these kinds of surrounders, though? The reason that Dylan Mulvaney needs to surround himself “with good people” is obvious. He needs people to lie to him, as he lies to himself, that he is really a woman and not a badly broken man. Mulvaney’s “good people” means “people who tell me what I want to hear.” It’s an epistemology, one rooted in falsehood, that Mulvaney smuggles in with his chatter about “good people” being all around him. Look past the narcissism of someone who thinks that others are in the universe simply to serve as surroundings. The bigger problem is Mulvaney is using people as means to an end. He doesn’t want to hear what anyone will tell him about the truth of his body or his soul. The people who help him deceive himself are, by his definition, “good.”

But there’s another way to think about people other than as pawns with which to surround oneself. People can be seen as bearers of the image and likeness of God, sent, by some mysterious working of the Holy Ghost, to say or do a thing that could lead to one’s salvation. These kinds of people are not good in and of themselves. They are like angels, doing the good will, the perfect will, of the One who sent them. Either people are “good,” in other words — which is to say lost and full of lies — or they are good because of Whom they follow. These are the only two kinds of “good” that people can be.

In the moment, in the heat of a debate or when trying to accomplish some task, I am prone to see other people as annoyances, obstacles along the path I have set for myself. I don’t want to hear objections to my plans. I don’t want to hear challenges to my opinions. I want the world and everyone in it to bend to my infallible will. I would love it if I, too, could surround myself with “good people,” the kind of people who will agree with me that all I say and do is beyond reproach. What a shortcut to Heaven such a living Hell would be, wherein I rule and all acknowledge my authority.

Thank God that He does not send those kinds of “good people” my way. I shudder to think at what I would become, in my pride, if there were only a swarm of yesses goading me on.

Good people speak the truth and don’t go along with every scheme. Good people are not good in their own right, because the truth they speak and the righteousness at which they aim belong to God, not themselves. Truth and goodness are not theirs to give, only to reflect toward those who need, often badly, to hear and know them. People like me. People who need not the kind of “good people” who lie to please a crowd but good people who risk all to please God.

Judas Iscariot was a good person, wasn’t he? He had no enemies among the opinion leaders of his day. Any number of self-deceiving whited sepulchers would have loved to surround themselves with “good people” like him. Jesus of Nazareth, by contrast, was a good person, too, but the kind that gets nailed to a tree for refusing to say and do what every sinner in creation is expecting. Very few people want that kind of good person around. At least not while pride and the need to go on lying are running the show.

There are more than enough “good people” in the world of the Judas Iscariot variety. Those kinds of “good people” make endless YouTube videos, give lessons on how to get success in the world, and fill the pages of glossy magazines with lies. Those kinds of “good people” really do surround us. And it is a horror in our time. I pray that God surrounds me, and surrounds Dylan Mulvaney, with the kind of good people who follow His will, and not ours.