It can take a dozen people, a dozen hours and a lot of effort to create and provide something good for your community and those closest to you, but it takes just one person and a moment to bring it all down.
So, there is no merit in doing wrong, doing harm, even the most foolish and incapable can do it. But doing good? creating? helping? healing? It requires effort, cooperation and commitment.
Think that, whoever you see doing something despicable, does it because he is incapable of doing anything else.
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I mean it assumes not everyone can be good (which is fair) but it’s also assuming everyone wants to be good. And to be blunt, I think there’s some people out there that don’t care if they’re assholes.
It’s an interesting thought though, and I totally agree, some people really don’t know how to be good.
Yeah, you’re right. There’s people who don’t care if they’re assholes, just as there’s people who don’t care if they’re bad at cooking (at least thats how I see it).
The one thing that really trips me up is that I am now really interested at how many people are assholes because they aren’t able to be good, and how many do it for other reasons…
Two things come to mind:
- a psychopath wants to be good because he knows this will give him a better social stand. But he doesn’t really get it, because some things his peers do just look irrational to him. At some point he just reverts back to manipulation because that’s what he understands.
- an autistic guy tries to be nice, but he doesn’t get it. People are puzzles to him, and the way he is nice is very different from everyone else. He starts becoming jaded and stops trying to be nice like everyone else.
Both examples are people who don’t have the extended knowledge of what “being nice” is, and therefore they stop being nice. I would love to know how big that percentage is amongst all assholes.
This is also intertwined with the fact that if there’s an asshole for every 20 people who are nice (just as a thought experiment), you wouldn’t remember the nice people, because they don’t give you a headache. The asshole does. So for us, the percentage always looks really skewed, in fact it’s almost exclusively the assholes we hear about.
Agreed.
I often think about this with regards to superpowers. If one knew everything, and could do anything, then there is no reason to smash. Little nudges would be all that is necessary. Bad guys pants fall down, their gun jams, the getaway car breaks down in a remote area… The opportunities are endless.
