Day: July 6, 2018

loribrio:

theblackelf:

I think we need to shelve the concept of whether or not someone’s nice to people and instead make judgements on how exclusive someone is or isn’t with kindness.

I remember that one post that went around showing an old film of Hitler chatting casually, kindly with a young girl, and the polarized responses tended to be in relation to how footage and narratives of “But look, the monster has a soft side” serve to humanize and normalize really, really bad people. Corrupt and murderous politicians constantly use baby-kissing narratives of their down-home chumminess- often to children- to offset any judgments about them being a bad person, and I’d like to say they should be entirely irrelevant. Not just because that’s a cheap emotional appeal but because I strongly believe we need to understand that niceness is neutral to symptomatic and not at all ‘good’ on its own.

The issue here, while I have other things to say about niceness, is that it shouldn’t matter that the monstrous person is *gasp!* seen doing a nice thing, because the issue should never have been that anyone believed they were 100% evil all the time. The issue is how big or little their sphere of niceness is.

Of course The Bad Person is nice to someone. But whatever warmth they’re showing is simply exemplary of how many people they see as like them. As human.

If the only time the person in question shows kindness is to people superficially just like them then their sphere of humanity is too fucking small. They see more people as ‘other’ than ‘like them’ and THAT is the issue.

Every bearer of poisonous idealogy has someone they like, someone they reward for being like them or suiting their ideals. The issue is how many other people in the world they don’t think are fucking human, or worth recognition and support.

For me the issue has always been is that no one is all good or bad, and we must judge individual behaviors or patterns, rather than trying to lump people into “monster” or “good person” categories. Because, really, that’s what we do a lot of the time. The neighbor of the serial killer says “oh, but he seemed so nice. Do you really think he did it?” as though if one seems nice then nothing bad can coexist in them. Alternately, pedophiles are often left to roam in families because “he’s so nice and helpful, and I know he loves the kids a lot.” This idea than one cannot be a perpetrator if they are capable of human affection is dangerous. It lets people off the hook because they say “look, this person does a good thing,” or “look, I do this good thing, I’m not as bad as this person/group. I’m a *good* *person*” as though this idea of the “good person” means that everything you do is now good and acceptable and should be free from repercussions. 

Alternately, this concept allows us as a society to subject people to monstrous and unjust punishments when we do have proof they did something monstrous, because now they’re a *monster*, and we dehumanize them, and put them away in prisons for decades and refuse to hire them and take away all their rights and murder them, because we see no possible good in them. 

We all do shitty things. We all deserve consequences for them. Some of us do inhumanely destructively deviantly shitty things. We still deserve appropriate consequences. There aren’t monsters and angels, there are people who do monstrous things and people who do sacred things, and often times people who do both.