I don’t necessarily think people can be evil.

I know of some of my abusers that they were abused themselves. They knew what they were doing to me wasn’t right but it gave them feelings of power in a world where they otherwise felt powerless.

For others, bullying me was a social sport, just something you did to “belong” to a certain group.

I think what they did was evil, but I don’t think they were evil people. They were normal people with inadequate upbringing put into painful situations that resulted in bullying/abusing me being the only perceived “good” outcome for them. For almost all people who do evil things, this is the case.

I think we all possess the ability to do evil acts in response to certain stimuli, many are just lucky enough never to receive the set of stimuli that causes them to be evil, so they can allow themselves to think they are different, i.e. “good”, and start labeling other people a certain way, i.e. “evil”.

Conversely, I also think all the people who do evil acts are also able to do good acts in certain situations.

What we then call a “good” or an “evil person” is just a person where we perceive a larger share of behaviors attributed to that adjective. But are they evil or good people, is that a quality inherent to them? Or is the environment they grew up in evil or good? Or are humans in general evil or good? Is our perception of the share of each set of behaviors even right?

I think no one deserves for their whole self to be called evil. I think you can call actions evil, and some people may have a lot of these actions, and they’re worthy of being avoided because of that, but I believe they’re the same kind of person than everyone else, just put into terrible situations. So no, I don’t think people can be evil.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing. How did those encounters affect you?

What’s stopping you? No money? :D

Of course they are kidding. People change, you can be a POS earlier and change to not be one now.

For what it’s worth, I would have appreciated as a victim if my bullies seeked me out and truly apologized to me. It would’ve restored a little faith in humanity. I don’t care now anymore, but there was a time.

Of course, any feeling that the apology was fake or forced would have ruined the whole thing and had the opposite effect.

You were lucky to grow up in an environment not triggering your natural human evil.

The main reason I didn’t bully anyone was because I was bullied myself.

I’m 35 and when I grow up I want to be psychotherapist. However, I hate university. Fun!

That doesn’t work, you can’t train models on another model’s output without degrading the quality. At least not currently.

„Es gibt immer wiederkehrende Zyklen, Höhen und Tiefen, aber der Verlauf der Ereignisse ist im Wesentlichen der gleiche, mit kleinen Abweichungen. Man hat gesagt, dass sich die Geschichte wiederholt. Das ist vielleicht nicht ganz richtig; sie reimt sich lediglich.“

Theodor Reik

Makes me think the same. I personally believe that no, the concept in the sense that “anything can change and could theoretically happen” doesn’t exist, but… I also believe it doesn’t really matter either. If there is free will, then anything can happen, if there is no free will, then not anything can happen and it is determined, but since we currently can’t predict the future and determine what’s going to happen, both situations have the exact same outcomes.

For me, most of these philosophical questions that are (currently) not definitively answerable I liked to ponder for a bit, but dismiss relatively quickly. I don’t really care if there is a free will or not, if there is any meaning to anything or not, basically whatever. What I care about is the current situation as far as I can discern it, and my actions that I want to take in the current moment based on that. My biology determines that and I just let it happen.

I’ve never said that anyone “should” have that much control. In fact I literally said almost no one can do it. The controversial thing is me even suggesting that it is possible.

Yeah but you can not suffer and still act to get out of the situation is what I’m saying.

See :D told ya it’s unpopular. Yeah, it’s “victim blaming” essentially. You might not believe me, but I have been a victim most of my life in many situations. I also have or have had mental disorders.

In the end, you can only control yourself. And so while it is of course not my fault if I am being abused or whatever (it’s the fault of the abuser) it is actually very much my fault if I don’t find ways to remove myself from that situation. Of course, every situation is different. The difficulty of “fixing” it, and how to do it, massively differs. But in almost all situations, “suffering” only makes it less likely you’ll get out of it. If you feel too bad, most people are more likely to feel powerless, to not think clearly, to be defeatist and so on.

Life literally always has challenges, things that make you feel bad. No matter how good of a situation someone has, you’ll always find people that are miserable in that situation. I’m saying you can actually be fine with your situation, whatever it is.

Obviously, yep. We are all victims of our circumstances and if you never get in contact with this concept or are not in a mental situation to want to believe it to be true, you’re pretty much out of luck.

If someone betrays you - you can either be upset at this, feel terrible for a long time

Or you can be thankful for them showing their true colors, thankful for the opportunity to enhance your people-reading skills, i.e. learn how to prevent this better (or identify that it simply happens sometimes, even with good prevention skills), perform the correct consequences (i.e. cutting them out of your life, minimizing your dependence on them), and then move on with the new state of life.

I’m not saying one won’t feel bad at first - but there’s no reason to continue with that past the initial automatic reaction, how fast you can “move on” depends on how good you are at this. After handling the situation properly, there’s no reason to continue to feel bad, feeling bad about it is just a motivator to do something about it, if there’s nothing to do anymore, there’s no reason to feel bad anymore.

You can extend the same line of thinking to literally anything - you get fired from your job, you go hungry, you suffer some debilitating injury/sickness, you get put in a concentration camp due to be executed (“Man’s search for meaning” is an example of this).

Which interpretation is this, and what is the other one?

You can change your (psychological) reaction to everything. All psychological suffering is chosen by yourself and can be stopped if you choose not to suffer.

Of course this is simple, not easy. Almost no one can do it.

Most people I meet don’t believe this and hate that I’m saying this.

Good, more people should buy bicycles

You can’t really. Only solution for me was to just not work 5 days a week. If you have a good job now… likely 3/5ths, so 3 days a week, will also make you able to support yourself.

They are “actual” though, if you care about comments :)

If you shit your pants, do you keep going with your week or is your week over?

If you shit your pants, do you keep going with your month or is your month over?

If you shit your pants, do you keep going with your life or is your life over?

I clean up and do whatever I still feel like. The arbitrary border of “day” means nothing to me, same as any other arbitrary border.