Rationalizing a Good
Recently, I posted a status update on Facebook, as follows:
"My employer offered me the afternoon off. Four hours for which I'm getting paid but doing nothing. Taking my wages for that time to the grocery store, buying that much food, and dropping it off at the local food bank. Namaste."
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of "back-patting" going on in the above statement. I was out for the maximum number of "Like" clicks that I could get from people who felt that I what I was doing what a good thing, and I got several. If you were one of them, thanks.
But you're not the only group of people amongst my friends that I was trying to get to notice. I was going after another group of people on my friend list, and I'll explain who they are and why I was targeting them.
There are a few of my friends that are, for lack of a better term, social Darwinists. They think that people that cannot afford to feed themselves are in that predicament because they lack initiative. They attribute it to the character of those people, instead of their circumstances. Which is not incorrect in and of itself, but it's a different worldview from my own, and I don't fully understand it.
Here's where it gets interesting: I don't think that this "survival of the fittest" mentality is necessarily based on a lack of compassion. Hear me out: I believe that people who refuse to give to the needy refuse to do so because they are being somewhat empathetic (or so they think.) They believe those without food are suffering in many ways, and if you give them any food, you are being an enabler. You are prolonging their suffering. It's more humane to let them perish, and end their suffering in a "natural", perhaps Malthusian fashion.
Again, this is not how I feel; I disagree with this point of view entirely. That's why I donated to the food bank.
We're pretty good at rationalizing a "bad" or "immoral" action that we've done. It's a neat little trick that our brains play on us so that we can bear to look ourselves in the mirror each morning. In psychology it's called "cognitive dissonance". You feel bad about, or regret, some action that you took in the past. Since you can't change the past, you change how you feel or think about the action in your head so that it was no longer "wrong", in your perception.
So here's the question: since we have this powerful mechanism in our brains that allows us to turn a perceived bad into something we can live with, why can't it go the other way?
Specific to the action I took above: I was given the money in the form of a paycheck, but I didn't do anything to earn it. I could rationalize keeping it because I'm entitled to free money because I'm awesome (?),
-OR-
Rationalize giving it away because I didn't actually take the steps needed to earn it.
If you can't convince other people that you're "right", perhaps you can convince them that you're less than wrong. Subtlety counts.
"My employer offered me the afternoon off. Four hours for which I'm getting paid but doing nothing. Taking my wages for that time to the grocery store, buying that much food, and dropping it off at the local food bank. Namaste."
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of "back-patting" going on in the above statement. I was out for the maximum number of "Like" clicks that I could get from people who felt that I what I was doing what a good thing, and I got several. If you were one of them, thanks.
But you're not the only group of people amongst my friends that I was trying to get to notice. I was going after another group of people on my friend list, and I'll explain who they are and why I was targeting them.
There are a few of my friends that are, for lack of a better term, social Darwinists. They think that people that cannot afford to feed themselves are in that predicament because they lack initiative. They attribute it to the character of those people, instead of their circumstances. Which is not incorrect in and of itself, but it's a different worldview from my own, and I don't fully understand it.
Here's where it gets interesting: I don't think that this "survival of the fittest" mentality is necessarily based on a lack of compassion. Hear me out: I believe that people who refuse to give to the needy refuse to do so because they are being somewhat empathetic (or so they think.) They believe those without food are suffering in many ways, and if you give them any food, you are being an enabler. You are prolonging their suffering. It's more humane to let them perish, and end their suffering in a "natural", perhaps Malthusian fashion.
Again, this is not how I feel; I disagree with this point of view entirely. That's why I donated to the food bank.
We're pretty good at rationalizing a "bad" or "immoral" action that we've done. It's a neat little trick that our brains play on us so that we can bear to look ourselves in the mirror each morning. In psychology it's called "cognitive dissonance". You feel bad about, or regret, some action that you took in the past. Since you can't change the past, you change how you feel or think about the action in your head so that it was no longer "wrong", in your perception.
So here's the question: since we have this powerful mechanism in our brains that allows us to turn a perceived bad into something we can live with, why can't it go the other way?
Specific to the action I took above: I was given the money in the form of a paycheck, but I didn't do anything to earn it. I could rationalize keeping it because I'm entitled to free money because I'm awesome (?),
-OR-
Rationalize giving it away because I didn't actually take the steps needed to earn it.
If you can't convince other people that you're "right", perhaps you can convince them that you're less than wrong. Subtlety counts.