Just and fair

Let me ask you a question.

What is your reaction when you know about someone being bullied?

Keep it in your mind.

Would your answer change when I give you more information about the bullied? What if the bullied is a real nerdy asshole who we all hate in high school? Would it change how you look into the situation?

Let me tell you one thing. The one who bullies does not care much about his target. He does not care whether the bullied-to-be is a nerd, a nice guy or a bad guy. The only common thing among the bullied is their physical and emotional weakness in relative with others.

The same thing happens when we read about women got raped. If she is a normal woman, we feel sorry. If she is a teen, wearing mini skirt, flirting with boys all around and acting slutty, we would think different. Some of us may think that she deserves that. Again, rapist hardly cares. He locks his victims at the moment he sees them.

Why do we keep thinking like that? Why do we feel less sorry if the victims are not good persons?

It is because we do not want to be like them.

We want to believe that because those people’s behaviors are not appropriate, they deserve all the bad things happening to them. Throughout the history of mankind, we have evolved to serve one purpose: to control our life. We learn about geography to predict the next earthquake, the next volcano bursting. We study animals to have to better way to deal with those wildlife creatures. However, there still remain things that are beyond the human’s reach. We cannot tell what will happen to us when we walk out of the door. Unless we have a time machine, there will never be a way to know whether we will be bullied, raped, or murdered. The best thing we can do so far is to calculate the probability of the events which may happen to us. Therefore, we have “invented” a concept that can help ease that pain. That concept is familiar to us. That concept is called “moral”.

We all have to agree that all the religions’ premise is to teach us to behave well and be moral. They all teach us that good men rest heaven, bad men go to hell. If you do good things, good things will happen to you. If you mess up, you deserve punishment. Except for some “special” beings, we all believe in that. We want to control our life by believing that if we do not do bad things, we will not end up in bad situations. By doing good things, we ensure that our life will be happy. It sounds logical. But logical is not enough. Life is not that simple and fair. It is more complicated. Believe it or not, some bad guys are still enjoying their life without any punishment for their sins. Vice versa, some good men who devote their life to the better society are now struggling, wondering whether they are doing the right thing. Logic, moral has their limits. After all, “moral is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back superior men” [Friedrich Nietzsche]

However, I am not typing these words to discourage people from doing good things and be devil. Let’s continue doing charity, just because we want to see people happy, not because of a desire to be treated fair in the next incarnation. Instead, I want to provide a different perspective. No one deserves to be bullied, raped, robbed or murdered. The only reason for our feeling that some of the victims deserve what happens to them is because we want to control our life. Life is not that simple. To make the world more fair and just, we have to make it harder for evil thrive, not just by reducing the number of its potential targets.

Kz

[special thanks to "You are not so smart"]