Mike Burr - log

[Charlemagne] [mind] /Bad/ people

We should no more hate a "bad" person for doing a "bad" for seemingly no good reason than we should hate an infected grasshopper for ingesting some metabolite that is out of the norm and required by a parasite.

The "parasite" in this analogy is some destructive shit going on in the "bad" person's mind that could be curbed, if poked at and understood without human judgement, in order to help fix.

Upon identifying the agent, the empathetic human will then say, "oh man, we've all been there." and actually internalize and believe it.

The metabolite is the pleasure one gets from doing harm to others.

If you don't get pleasure from it, you can more easily be persuaded to do something less destructive.

If a grasshopper's mouthparts get sore and it is soothed by eating a toxic plant, we needn't be mad at the grasshopper.