[OS] You Don't Think it's Good to be Good
Beware the sheep with caprine horns
The following was posted over the course of a day under a collection of pseudonyms in the comments section of various posts and articles on different social media, news, blog, and forum websites, both current and defunct. It mostly faded into the chatter of a million million words of commentary, but a few people were curious enough and online enough to note the post across different sources and attempt to find its source. The pseudonyms were series of numbers which yielded to no cryptographic method and the IP Address for each post was a VPN server in the city of the headquarters of the company responsible for the site it was posted on. They could find no determinate author.
I know you. I saw you pile onto a problematic post. I saw you spit on a resident alien. I saw you steal from a chain store. I saw you lie to a suit. I saw you place a book in the bonfire. I saw you throw a brick through the strange man's window. I saw you hang a traitor. I saw you stone a harlot. I saw you burn a pagan. I saw you hurt someone who you thought deserved it. And I saw you like it.
You think you care about justice and what’s good, but you don’t. You don’t care about what’s right. You just like when it excuses your bloodlust. You talk about what’s right and wrong, but you don’t actually believe that being good is a good thing. You think being good is a pain, a bother, a load you bear because it gives you permission to hurt someone sometimes and because you are scared of being bad.
You wish you could murder someone. You wish there was someone out there who deserved it enough that not a single person—not even that troublesome whip in the left hand of your mind—would blame you. God, wouldn’t that be so justified. Just once, couldn’t there be someone worth killing?
You want to be good because it lets you do bad things. It lets you do things you know are bad to people who you think are worse.
You relish being wronged. Oh, it hurts, sure. Perhaps you’ve lost something—a friend, some peace of mind, an object. But think about what you’ve gained: an enemy, a battle, a claim to damages. Now, finally, you can inflict pain. There’s a target, an outlaw, someone beyond the bounds of your neighbors’ stale protection. Someone you have power over. Finally.
“Yes,” you whisper tenderly to the worst people you will never meet, “I should be allowed to do wrong.” “You are right,” you smile warmly to the mob, “my cruelty is justice.”
You pray each night for rape, flicking the sensitive bits of your phone, looking, looking, looking. “Is it here? Has someone garbled their line in our little scene? Did they forget to care the right way?”
The only differences between you and a murderer are cowardice and opportunity. If you knew no one would blame you, if you knew everyone would be proud of your crime, you would murder someone happily. Gratefully.
You don’t actually think you get to decide who lives and who dies. You don't actually think you can separate the ones who need punishment and the ones who need kindness. You don’t actually have the confidence or earnestness or arrogance or lunacy to believe any of that. That’s why you stare hungrily at all the other comments agreeing with you, why you need everyone else to say that what you did and what you felt were actually really justified and anyone who says they aren’t is toxic.
You don’t have the arrogance or confidence or lunacy to believe, but you need some reason to inflict pain on the world. Don’t worry, the market will provide.
“They won’t care, they can take it, they’ve had it good for long enough.” Congratulations, you just made yourself a little worse.
It’s the same stupid question, over and over: “why should I be good when they are not?” Because, you heartless idiot, the point is to be good.
The whole point is to be good. The good is good because it is good. Doing good things is good and not doing them is bad. The bad is bad because it is bad. Bad things are bad not because they do them rather than you, but because they are bad. It is bad for the doer and for the done upon.
For someone to be murdered is tragic; so too is it tragic for someone to commit murder. Look what they have done to themselves: look at what they have become. This person could have been good, and yet they became this. Such a loss. The point of punishment is to allow a wrongdoer to become good. To atone. This much punishment and no more. Then welcome back, we hope you join us in our attempts at goodness.
But you don’t care about the wrongdoer, even when you sneer at a cop; you have just decided that the cop is the wrongdoer. The cop is the one of which you allow yourself enjoy the suffering. You don’t care about the victim, even when you pile on the damage to the man in the orange suit; you just want to make the most of this crack in the mask of civilization.
Right now I am not interested in the murderer or the murdered or either of their reasons. I am interested in you. The spectator, the one who does little wrongs not because of necessity or arrogance but because you have convinced yourself they are punishments, the one who is only interested in what might be good because you need someone to hurt and you think that might tell you your easiest target. You love doing bad things. Punishment is a thrill, a release of all this frustrating restraint, this pretense of thinking that the good is worth doing. Finally, you get your due.
To punish is a terrible thing, a tragedy: a bad thing which must occur, which we all agree to allow. A hangman ought to have a long face. It is not a celebration, and yet you cheer.
Let us make clear our positions here. It is not that you get to be bad while I must refrain from being bad. You must refrain from being bad while I don’t want to be bad.
You have no plan to make things better. You’re just angry people don't listen to you—you are angry that they are other people. You’re angry the world is bigger than you. You’re angry the world doesn't bend to you. You’re angry that there is a world. So you try to make it bend. You want it to be you. You want everything to be you.
Bad things let you cut something off. They let you cast it aside. One more thing or person or group that you get to say doesn't matter. And so you cut, cut, cut. Until you have sliced the world neatly into a battlefield. Everything that is you against everything that is not. Snip, snip, snip. It doesn't matter if it gets better; it just matters that they are worse.
You do bad things because doing good feels so yielding. It feels like service. It feels like one more thing that doesn't bend to you.
Every time, it’s the same stupid question: “why is it fair for me to have to be good when they are not?” Because you're assuming that being good is a bad thing, something you don’t want, and so you were never that good in the first place.
“Why do I have to be the one to be good?” Because that’s the whole point. When you do good things, you make yourself better. And that is good. And when you hurt people, you make yourself worse. Even if it’s necessary. And sometimes it is necessary. Every justified infliction of pain is both a burden on the one who bears it and the one who enacts it. The man who killed Adolf Eichmann felt remorse. Would you?
When you hurt someone, you don’t just hurt who they were then. You hurt a million other innocent mornings long passed or yet to be born. A mewling babe, a bucktoothed smile, a grasping and fumbling teenager, and, yes, a perpetrator. An offender. A wrongdoer. And also the font of a million more moments, some innocent and some guilty. Moments grown from crime but themselves innocent, as much in our world is. You can’t only punish the criminal—you always end up hurting everything else that's attached. Including yourself. Don't you get it? Once you start cutting things off, you don’t stop. Once you love punishment more than you love forgiveness, there’s no way to live with anyone.
The question, every time, the only one that ever matters, is “what next?” And you keep choosing cruelty.