Bad Guys and Good Guys

They don’t exist. Everyone does bad and good things in different proportions. Sure, some do more good than bad and some do more bad than good, and maybe there’s a threshold where the amount of one that you have done cannot possibly outweigh the other but if that’s the case it is very much the exception. More importantly, we are all capable of good and bad, and that’s where I draw my conclusion. None of us can really know if we would do the same things someone else does unless we were put in their position, and I don’t mean just that one moment where they did something “bad”, no, I mean their entire life’s experience. Maybe one can know how they would act had they been put in a dangerous situation, but it is impossible to know how you would act had you lived all of a person’s life up unto that point and then put in that situation.

I really believe that the only thing that separates some people from being considered “good” or “bad” is luck. The luck of how you grew up and what things you had to go through. What challenges you had to face that maybe others haven’t, and more importantly, challenges that others wouldn’t have been any better at facing. I think there are many people walking around being seen as good people simply because they haven’t yet been put in the situation where they would prove they weren’t. I think that what determines if a person is kind or gentle isn’t necessarily how many people they’ve hurt but rather how many people they have the ability to hurt yet chose not to. Sometimes the only reason a person is gentle is that they lack the physical power to be cruel, not the will. Converse to this, I think sometimes the reason a person is seen as bad is because they were put in a situation where that was virtually their only option, not because it was their sole will to be bad. I find this so important because the way we think about other people and their actions as well as how we think about ourselves, directly affects how we decide to design our society and the morals therein.

The way I choose to see good and bad in this world is like this. Every person has their threshold of what they can tolerate from their environment and what circumstances they would have to endure to make them behave in ways others may not approve of. Some people have a very low threshold and will behave in a way that is less than likable given the slightest adversity, while others have such devotion to certain ways of being that virtually no circumstance could change their behavior. I believe those two groups of people are the extremes and nearly everyone else exists much more in the middle than we would like to admit. I believe most of us aren’t aware of how we would act given a certain set of circumstances but we think we do know and we are willing to judge others based on our assumptions of our own capacity to act certain ways given different circumstances. Case in point, how many people can honestly say they know they’d never steal food if they believed that was the only way they could have it. How many people can honestly say they know what it’s like to feel completely stuck on the societal ladder with absolutely no way to move up?

I believe at the core of my being that our current prison system and “justice system” is inherently corrupt because it is built around the principle that there are good and bad people rather than the more nuanced truth that good and bad are more actions than people and are more (if not nearly completely) determined by circumstance than will. I find our current prison system to be an inhumane and futile waste of our resources. It seeks to punish those we deem “bad” rather than understand them and perhaps create a society where their actions are less likely to occur. If you want less drug use in society (I don’t think use is inherently wrong, only abuse) then perhaps it would make more sense to create a society where being happy or even content on a daily basis wasn’t so damn hard. There is an experiment called rat park that clearly outlines this principle and demonstrates it’s truth that you can look at here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park P.S. Just because a system looks like happiness is attainable for everyone doesn’t mean it actually is, case in point, the U.S.

I think a much better way for our society to run, is to learn from psychology and let go of baseless belief systems, such as the one Ronald Regan so often posited that claimed actions only occur because of the individuals will for them to and therefore the individual is the only one responsible for their actions. If this were the case, then we wouldn’t see trends with environments compared to actions but we absolutely 100% do. People tend to be more abusive if they come from a family of abuse, people tend to be mentally ill if they had an abusive or neglectful childhood… Yes people overcome these things but that does not mean that these adversities in no way affect that person and it does not mean we shouldn’t offer great sympathy to people regardless of their actions when seen in the light of what circumstances led up to them. I don’t believe we should let people who wish to harm others just roam the streets, we do need a safe society to live in, but we shouldn’t think of them as “bad people” but rather people doing bad things that need to be quarantined until deemed safe for society again. For the very few who could never be safe, quarantine them indefinitely (and treat them like a person not a monster) or offer assisted suicide if that is their wish. I truly believe if we addressed the fundamental flaws within society however, that these people would be virtually non-existent.

In short my belief system is thus; don’t punish the person, figure out what circumstances led them to the place they are at and change those circumstances. Are those circumstances from their past and now you cannot change them? Do whatever you can to eliminate the possibility of future generations enduring those circumstances; for the person now, do your best to help them overcome those previous traumas and please, don’t demonize or dehumanize them. We are causing our own pain by seeing everyone as “good and bad” and not just as people. We can evolve past this, we will be better off once we do. I am not asking you to be a victim and allow bad actions to continue, only to never label people as good or bad because of their actions, because truthfully, you have no idea how bad you could be given different circumstances than the ones you currently experience.

Thank you for reading the slightly rambling thoughts that I have in my head. I think my official post day is going to be Thursdays and I plan on being as diligent as Stevenly possible to commit to that set day. You can donate on my about page to the cause of me writing words in exchange for existence but only if you are rich and want to maybe try out a one person experiment of UBI? If you’re actually rich then maybe pick up some more people wishing to enjoy what they do for money while you are at it. Love you all and I’ll see you next week. ❤