[1144] Bad Bad Bad Bad Boy

I want to talk about acting in “bad faith.” I almost didn’t, but then I caught a headline about private equity firms buying up vet offices to drive up prices and make you choose between your pet’s life and otherwise financial situation.

I reduce most things down to the “individual” fundamentally. That doesn’t mean any given person actually chooses to own their behavior or place in the world, but it does mean that I believe in any given moment a choice exists, wrought and complicated as it may be. I think we collectively pay lip service to this idea, but don’t “truly feel it.” That is, we are always, and I mean always looking for some excuse to prompt or justify our behavior.

Impersonally, I suspect this is just a consequence of evolutionary wiring. If the only “goal” is to reproduce and you’re being crafted by natural selection, it’s a dependent state by default. You’re waiting for the queues from the environment to trigger your behavior. You jump at the scary thing, adopt a certain affect to secure a mate, or discover a well of energy to construct or protect a sense of sacred feeling towards something.

We stumble when we talk past the actualized consequences of our behavior. If you are, somehow, convinced you are innocent or are only ever coming from a “good place,” you remain perfectly blind or in denial about the harm you’re otherwise causing. I think this is true down to the most banal of situations. You go out of your way to be a caregiver whose insecure imposition alienates and undermines, all the meals you cook and loads of laundry are a litany of divots on the fields of your relationships.

Whatever the context, as an individual or part of a broader group, we start with the justification. “As a capitalist…” or, “It’s because I care for the children…” or especially, “As a Christian.” The “logic” of whatever more formalized system you wish to adopt exists for the necessary conclusion of how it’s going to exploit or hurt something. Indeed, I don’t think the systems or even formation of those kinds of sentences would exist were it not for the deeply ingrained at-the-mercy-of-circumstance conditioning we’ve been naturally selected for.

I think it’s wise to start from a mindset of “I’m probably hurting something” first. It doesn’t mean you’re dispositionally malicious, it just means you’re ignorant. We’re all, fundamentally, extremely ignorant about almost everything. We hurt things because we don’t know. We hurt ourselves because we can’t unpack how we operate. We hurt the things we care about most because we find it extremely hard to conceive that we could actually be as ignorant or devoid of the necessary tools and perspective as we really are.

How do we get a better handle on our own potential for depravity? You might not think ignorance and depravity need to exist as words so close to each other, but practically speaking, it’s often a series of depraved consequences and compounded decisions that play out. You’re anti-abortion and unconcerned about what happens to kids born into our current system? You’re “staunchly capitalist” in a way that chokes on the word “regulation.” You’re “pro human rights” in a way that has you unironically cheering for Hamas?

Let’s take a simple example of someone who recently reached out to me on OKCupid. The ignorant, malicious, and depraved voice in me was there the entire time. Why? Whether you want to call it immaturity or a simple consequences of how I was raised, I have a voice that’s just mean and cold and at least a little bit tempting to distance me from interacting with someone I’m not attracted to or otherwise might conceive of as “lesser.” This person talked about being raised sheltered, being in bad and abusive relationships, having a child, and sent a picture of herself that made me think of my mom. We’re in very different places.

Here’s the thing, I carried on in polite conversation. I’m perfectly aware that I was tempted to say something like, “You know, I’m just not attracted to you, so let’s end this before I’m accused of leading you on.” It’d be unnecessarily brutish if not true-enough. At the same time, I’ve grown increasingly sensitive to the idea of what you put out into the world and hope to get back. I don’t actually believe in karma, but I do believe we’re all connected. I don’t actually consider that a “belief” system, just a fact of physics and atoms. As such, I know when I act cold or in a depraved manner, I’m functionally peeing in the pool of our collective awareness.

I’m not less capable of being an asshole, nor is the voice inside any less loud. I don’t have to deny my ignorant potential to practice or advocate for my better self.

I think this is why we’re constantly swinging between “reactionary politics.” Anyone who too-deeply adopts a “side” is unwilling, foundationally, to understand what makes them fickle, weak, and wrong. It has nothing to do with what the “other side” is even advocating. It has everything to do with how you’re choosing to navigate your antagonized feelings. Or, as I understand people, how you’re explicitly carrying on as if you have no choice and you’d be justified in lashing out further if it was suggested to you that you did.

If you can’t qualify your own being, you don’t have a prayer of understanding or believing someone else’s. That’s the existential danger I think we’re doing a poor job of navigating. That’s the pivot to endless memes and irony in lieu of using your own words or developing your own concept of how you navigate the world. You’re otherwise skirting by with passive aggressive knowing winks that don’t actually know shit and can’t be bothered to try.

Think of all the things you get away with by adopting an excuse-ridden pretext. When you’re always too busy, you don’t have to maintain any real obligations to friends or family. When you’re job is too demanding, let the responsibilities around the house or to your partner fall to the wayside. When you’re too “anxious,” “depressed,” or “stressed,” why go out and look for fun or believe you can make a friend with a stranger?

I argue the excuses come from both a cynical and lazy place. I have friends who ritually abuse the stress and job obligations they’re under to not even answer texts. I have friends who downplay the traumatizing relationships with family so as to arrest their own obligations or desires to develop healthier relationships outside of their familiar bubbles. I have clients, especially, who will write me a book of excuses to justify physical abuse, property destruction, child endangerment, and chronic fear of what’s going to pop-off sometime in the future after months of, hopefully not just parroting, expressing or demonstrating genuine growth and change behavior and language. You can cripple yourself in a couple weeks if you stop practicing.

You’re a bad actor, and that’s okay. It just needs to be accounted for and  worked against. I have someone who has still functionally stolen $500 from me. She’s stopped responding to me asking for updates or when a next repayment will be made. I guarantee you she’s in some kind of paralyzed guilt spiral who doesn’t want to entertain the true nature of the consequences of her lies and theft. How can someone who works for nonprofits and overcome addiction and who cares about and raises her children be bad? I know how. I need her to know how for me to stop flirting with getting increasingly impatient and antagonizing as it’s been 6 months of getting taken advantage of. I believe she’s as bad as the consequences I’m facing as a result of her behavior. She doesn’t.

It’s not theoretical to me how much pain I can cause. It’s not a secret or source of shame. Independent of the consequence of our negligent ignorance, there are people just as perfectly aware as I am of their malicious intent, and they weaponize their resentments, intelligence, greed, or sad-sack story to exploit. They’re doing so high on their own supply of self-righteous justification, just like you, but to greater financial or power consolidating effect. I’m not asking you to believe that. I’m asking you to look inside at what you get away with when you ignore the part of you that wants to do bad.

If you imagine that at scale, much of the world makes considerably more sense. How to approach or talk about it can start to take focus. The practice of accountable behavior and sense of deep appreciation for when things go well can take root. It won’t happen if you don’t understand that you’re a dumb cunt with terrible ideas and a woefully incomplete picture first, and what we’ve barely managed to figure out needs practice and protecting.