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06-22-2004, 04:58 PM

"Good" people do "bad" things when they are forced (or believe themselves forced) into impossible situations. To give a highly simplistic example: A person who is honest steals a loaf of bread because he has no other way of feeding his starving child. Maybe this man lives in a poor African nation that is undergoing a famine and no international relief has come to his village yet, so even though he knows it's wrong, he steals from the village store.
Desperation is one answer to your question.

I think good people do bad things also out of a sense of powerlessness or frustration. A man looks around at the world and sees his boss stealing money from the company and getting away with it; he finds out that a friend's daughter was gang-raped and the police did nothing; his wife (who could get no health insurance because of a pre-existing heart condition) has a massive heart attack and dies, leaving him with hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital bills; he gets laid off from his job and can't find a new one because at age 60 he is too old for an employer to want to hire him (they know he'll retire in 5 years and they can get a younger worker at a lower wage). This man looks around at the world and decides that it's true that "nice guys finish last," so he goes out and robs a bank or blows up the billing office of the hospital where his wife died.

The above examples are the easy answer to your question. Now I'll give you the one that no one wants to hear: Good people make bad things happen. Every single one of us has it within ourselves to be a hero or to be the worst villian imaginable. We all have our dark side. The fact that we live in something called a society and that we have a civilization is proof that the majority of people for the majority of time keep their darker impulses under control.

However, before we are members of a society, we are individuals. That individual has an ego, a "self." Bottom line, we human beings are no different than any other animal. We come equipped with a survival instinct that drives us to meet the basic needs of food, shelter, protection or defense against injury or death, and procreation. No matter how "good" we are, if we feel threatened or our instincts become aroused in one of these areas, the survival instinct takes over.

The irony is that human beings are hard wired to be social animals. Maybe in 2004 AD, someone can say, "To hell with it, I'm becoming a hermit." But to say that in 2004 BC and all the time before from even when we still lived in trees was to commit suicide. We depend upon one another to survive. To be rejected by our group meant to die. One human alone couldn't make it against the other predators out there, couldn't put aside enough meat for the winter, couldn't bring down a woolly mamouth single handed. A woman alone couldn't bear a child all by herself, hold the baby to her breast and at the same time shoot arrows at small game animals.

A "good" person will do anything to be accepted by his fellows. A teenager will shoplift if that's what her friends are doing. An honest man will lie if he percieves that the truth would cause his friends to reject him. A woman living in Nazi Germany in 1936 will look the other way when the Gestapo comes for her Jewish neighbor because she doesn't want to be the next name on the list. A student who has never cheated on an exam will fold a crib sheet up his sleeve to take an exam to get a professional license or gain entry into a prestigous graduate school because he fears the humiliation society will give him if he fails. On and on.

Why do good people do bad things? Fear.

06-22-2004, 04:58 PM	#29
marichiko Guest Posts: n/a	"Good" people do "bad" things when they are forced (or believe themselves forced) into impossible situations. To give a highly simplistic example: A person who is honest steals a loaf of bread because he has no other way of feeding his starving child. Maybe this man lives in a poor African nation that is undergoing a famine and no international relief has come to his village yet, so even though he knows it's wrong, he steals from the village store. Desperation is one answer to your question. I think good people do bad things also out of a sense of powerlessness or frustration. A man looks around at the world and sees his boss stealing money from the company and getting away with it; he finds out that a friend's daughter was gang-raped and the police did nothing; his wife (who could get no health insurance because of a pre-existing heart condition) has a massive heart attack and dies, leaving him with hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital bills; he gets laid off from his job and can't find a new one because at age 60 he is too old for an employer to want to hire him (they know he'll retire in 5 years and they can get a younger worker at a lower wage). This man looks around at the world and decides that it's true that "nice guys finish last," so he goes out and robs a bank or blows up the billing office of the hospital where his wife died. The above examples are the easy answer to your question. Now I'll give you the one that no one wants to hear: Good people make bad things happen. Every single one of us has it within ourselves to be a hero or to be the worst villian imaginable. We all have our dark side. The fact that we live in something called a society and that we have a civilization is proof that the majority of people for the majority of time keep their darker impulses under control. However, before we are members of a society, we are individuals. That individual has an ego, a "self." Bottom line, we human beings are no different than any other animal. We come equipped with a survival instinct that drives us to meet the basic needs of food, shelter, protection or defense against injury or death, and procreation. No matter how "good" we are, if we feel threatened or our instincts become aroused in one of these areas, the survival instinct takes over. The irony is that human beings are hard wired to be social animals. Maybe in 2004 AD, someone can say, "To hell with it, I'm becoming a hermit." But to say that in 2004 BC and all the time before from even when we still lived in trees was to commit suicide. We depend upon one another to survive. To be rejected by our group meant to die. One human alone couldn't make it against the other predators out there, couldn't put aside enough meat for the winter, couldn't bring down a woolly mamouth single handed. A woman alone couldn't bear a child all by herself, hold the baby to her breast and at the same time shoot arrows at small game animals. A "good" person will do anything to be accepted by his fellows. A teenager will shoplift if that's what her friends are doing. An honest man will lie if he percieves that the truth would cause his friends to reject him. A woman living in Nazi Germany in 1936 will look the other way when the Gestapo comes for her Jewish neighbor because she doesn't want to be the next name on the list. A student who has never cheated on an exam will fold a crib sheet up his sleeve to take an exam to get a professional license or gain entry into a prestigous graduate school because he fears the humiliation society will give him if he fails. On and on. Why do good people do bad things? Fear.