I haven’t been blogging much lately because of political depression. I’d like to try to write something I’ve been thinking for quite some time today.
I was talking with a friend, who wanted to talk about why some people are “inconsistently good/bad”. There’s a social media post that we both read. The post goes like this (rough & abbreviated translation from Chinese): “I met a guy online lately and there are many guys like him. He seems nice. Ordinary. He posts about reading books or petting cats or listening to music. He seems well-read, thoughtful, loves life. He also comments under my post that feminists are nothing but braindead dogs who only know how to bark.”
My friend told a similar story of her own of some who “seems like a good person” and yet does something incredibly wrong.
“Why would they do that? What might their motivation be?” She asks me.
I’ve once wondered the same thing for people who do terrible (and often not at all self-serving) things. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is not a worthwhile question. “What kind of answers are you looking for?” I ask her.
“I’m not looking for any specific answer. I just want to understand how a person can be so inconsistent.” She says.
But, surely, the person isn’t inconsistent — they exist and so they must be possible. There’s a causal story beginning from their birth (or even their genes) leading up to their action that “explains” their action in some uninteresting sense. That can’t be what she’s looking for.
What she’s looking for is a story. A higher level generalization. Something that looks like “everyone who has experienced X will behave like Y”. First of all, something like this probably doesn’t exist. But second of all, what good does it do? One possible outcome is that I hear this story and judge that X is bad enough so that I shouldn’t be as mad at Y as I was — this doesn’t sound right. Another possible outcome is that, once I know exactly how their psyche works, I can develop a plan to either handle or avoid similar situations in the future.
I’m looking for a solution.
But real problems might not have solutions. And, even if they do, I might not need to understand the underlying mechanism to solve the problem. If someone does a terrible thing, why does it matter whether they are “a good person otherwise”?
My friend and I continued on this topic for a while. She mentioned that she’d met men who behave misogynisticly. “But some of them are good people with basic capacities for rational thought and empathy; they are just ignorant.” She says, “if I can only talk to them about it, they’d see the light. I wouldn’t be able to do that if they were bad people.”
I’m not so sure. Why do people think that it’s easier to talk a “good person” out of doing bad things than it is to talk a “bad person” out of being bad?
I don’t actually know how difficult it is to talk a bad person into being good — I’ve never tried it. Moreover, usually when a bad person becomes good later, people tend to say that they “were not bad after all, just misguided”. This makes it difficult to pick examples of bad people gone good (or vice versa).
I have, however, tried to talk to good people into doing good things. And, let me tell you, it’s hard. As a matter of fact, it’s part of the reason why I stopped blogging for so long.
To gloss over the story in the interest of anonymity: the union of my school went through (and is still going through, but somewhat more slowly because of quarantine) a rough phase. The central tension is that the old contract was not very good. It was not very good because not many people voted in the “willing-to-strike” poll back when we were negotiating and so the union decided to accept the school’s offer. Currently, a small group of people is voicing a strong willingness to renegotiate, so the union is planning to put the matter to a vote. If the vote fails, the union will be deeply divided which will be terrible for our upcoming, scheduled negotiation.
It’s generally hard to motivate union engagement between negotiations. There were also a lot of misinformation flown around about the matter. Luckily, the small group of people have made quite some substantive noise, and so many members are at least minimally aware that something workers-rights-related is happening.
A friend of mine in the department is a union officer. He decided to hold a meeting where he can explain the situation, explain why the stakes are so high, and answer any questions anyone might have. He conveniently took the time of a colloquium talk that was canceled last minute so everyone would be free. This was before quarantine but he set up a Zoom room too for those who wanted to stay home.
There are about 40 affected workers in my department.
About 7 people came.
It was one of those moments that really shook my world. I spent the following month trying to think about it from various angles and running into walls each time.
Some of my best friends — some of them love to talk about politics and many of them deeply affected by the issue at hand. Some of them know everything there is to know about empathy, about doing one’s part, about servicing the community, about collective action. They weren’t there.
I tried to reason with myself to try to make sense of it. As an East Asian woman, I naturally start by forcing myself into feeling guilty. Perhaps I’m asking too much of others. There have been times where I cannot summon the energy to do important things. I am nowhere near being an activist myself so who am I to say? They have a lot going on and I’m judging too much.
It worked to the extent that I was able to hold my feelings in.
I told my friend this story.
“Do you know how hard it is to get good people to do good things?” I said, “at least when a bad person actively does bad things because of their beliefs, I can reason with them about morality. I know how to do that. I don’t know how to talk someone who doesn’t do things into doing more things.”
Another friend of mine, an alum from my department, recommended a book to me. I haven’t finished it (I find it hard to do these things during quarantine) but I like what I’ve read so far. I recommend it to anyone who ever enjoyed talking about politics.
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