#but fuck sake if our only answer to some shit going fuckways is to erase someone off the face of the earth we're never gonna get anywhere

[problemnyatic]

man i just cant get over how fuckin distracting the idea of morality is in terms of actually like, trying to create a more ethical status quo. People get so caught up in worrying about whether they're a good person, whether people think they're being good enough, who's good and who's bad, and like, man, fuck!!! Who gives a shit what the fuckin' score is!!! There is so much problems in the world and if we waste all our time trying to figure out all the ~hidden signs~ and ~tells~ of who's predisposed to evil, we're never gonna get around to actually doing anything about the actual evil being committed every day on a systemic level.

If someone hasn't actually hurt someone, lay the fuck off the accusations. If you really want to garner a culture that prevents harm rather than simply reacting to it, you need to make causing harm something that can be recovered from. It can't be fucking shameful, because then people hide it. People will avoid pain, so threats of punishment aren't fucking useful. And if you believe doing The Bad Things will get you a world of hurt, then you're gonna get defensive if someone tries to approach you about your own harmful habits!!

I've seen it so many fuckin times, dude, it's insane. Someone will try to be like "hey, you could do this better" or "hey, the way you x hurts me" and instead of like, having a conversation, that person will get up in arms about how they weren't ~being bad.~ Whether it's trying to avoid blame or minimize how bad people think it is, the end result is that nothing actually gets dealt with because people are too busy trying to avoid being seen as a fuckin' sinner.

Who gives a fuck about being a good person? What does "good personhood" actually do? Best I can tell, it's just this label people get to have that says "Don't come after me, your target is someone else." Because if you ask anyone, being a Good Person is about your actions. So... why not just look at those? Ditch the shorthand that flattens everything, and risk the fucking nuance. If you don't have to worry about maintaining your status as a "good person," then suddenly it stops being so scary to scrutinize the ways in which you can actually improve.

And it's not even like you can just, like, get rid of all "bad people" and solve harm forever. If your solution to the ills of humanity can be boiled down to "if we just point a big enough gun at anyone who Breaks The Good Person Rules, no one will want to break them!" then, sorry to break it to you, but you're a fascist, no matter what values you purport to be championing. You still intend to use force to enforce them, and by enshrining those values as The Good Ones, you blind yourself to your own biases and flaws. You loose sight of the fact that you still have to aim that gun. Best not miss, or you'll take out an innocent- that's bad, right? Hope your aim's perfect- and everyone after you, too.

There's always gonna be pain. Always gonna be conflict. There's just too fuckin' many people out there to force the world to homogenize under a set of values that no one deviates from. So you need to be flexible, and you need to let good and bad exist side by side as shades of gray. You need to think of harm reduction not as a destination you reach by restricting the agency People Who Will Do Harm, but as a complex network of social safety nets that ensure that people who wind up in danger have multiple avenues with which to protect themselves or escape that danger, and ensure that the ones who cause that danger have ways to get help.

The world is more complicated than a binary of who's an abuser and who's a victim. People are more complicated than simple predisposition to hurting others. There will never be a set of values so all-encompassing as to ensure no one ever gets hurt if they're strictly adhered to, and there will never be a person on earth so perfect they never fuck up practicing those values. So you gotta fuckin adapt, man.

No more heroes and villains. No more good and bad people. you're more than that, I'm more than that. There's no shortcuts to heaven, no tickets to hell. You just gotta do the best you can with what you have, and course correct as you learn more stuff. What matters is the impact of our actions- they land how they land and we deal with it after. Quit botherin' with what it means and lets just work with what it is, we'll work towards that intent on the way, yeah?