moral grey area
Listening to a popular musical this morning on my walk to class, I realized how normal it’s become to shout our dysfunctions to the wall to see what sticks: what can I get away with without being called out on if I’ve already acknowledged it?
There appears to be a rising misconception that getting help and admitting to a problem is enough to address the issue. Once the bar is set we seem to forget that we can rise above it. We strive for a level of self-awareness that coincides with being an enlightened human being — a status more than anything. However, we only reach for average as far as being healthy is concerned. Similar to the way we strain to be physically fit enough to fit our personal aesthetic, we treat healthy mental states as the perfect beach body we aspire to train our body to. In the way that bodies are able to be perceived wrong, we may perceive our mental state wrong.
Bojack Horseman is a grand example of this kind of faux awareness presentation. The point of the show is made in the very beginning, episode 2, when main character Bojack berates a young woman and tells her, “Not knowing that you are a horrible person does not make you any less of a horrible person.” You may have had this dilemma yourself: am I a better person for understanding my shortcomings? The short answer is a blunt no. The long answer is it may actually make you worse.
Social media, lately, has become a culture of calling out “toxic behaviors” in others and receiving either praise or rejection of the claim. Overlooked by the most popular of tweets is the fact that people who are quote unquote toxic to others are often acting in a purposeful way. Unless you have prefrontal damage or irregularities (e.g., a personality disorder) you are likely very aware of the way in which you act toward others — toxic or not.
Now you hear the issue that you, in fact, are not special or different for understanding your own behavior. This is the most common problem, actually. Can you imagine knowing there’s a leak in your sink and just letting it build a puddle underneath? No. You fix the leak. Here there’s a leak of character that requires fixing: how do you do this?
You stop being a bad person.
You stop making excuses for the ways you act toward others and start changing the behavior once you notice it. It’s no longer acceptable to treat someone like shit and make a faux apology that it’s because you are “an awful person.” 1. That isn’t an apology, and 2. it doesn’t make sense.
An awful person does awful things always and doesn’t care about being awful. Grey area between good and bad reminds us that people are not inherently good or inherently bad — they can only act in those ways. When you choose bad actions, you do lean toward being a bad person. However, this means choosing good actions will bring you back to being “good” on the spectrum.
We no longer care if you know you are a “bad person.” It’s up to you to stop choosing actions that have horrible effects on people without them having to tell you those obvious effects. When you’re busy excusing your behavior you’re probably missing all the complaints from those who are being affected.
So choose good actions. Acknowledge your good actions rather than the bad ones. Leave the labels behind and forget about knowing whether or not you are a “bad person.” Choose to be a good one.
