Forever damned, locked in place, inside static molds...
Do you believe people can change? Can you change? Can people learn from their mistakes? Do you give people a chance at redemption? Do you give people the benefit of changing their minds?
None of us are flawless super beings despite what some of us may believe. We make mistakes.
Also if we are intelligent enough to realize we will always have more to learn, and that we will be wrong about a great many things then that means by extension we will change our minds.
It seems our society is increasingly taking the forever damned approach to dealing with people. If they make a mistake, or do something wrong we so easily forever ostracize them and treat them as hopeless. We close the road to redemption. If the people genuinely have changed that will not matter because we have frozen them in place in our minds much like Han Solo being frozen in carbonite. Forever scum, forever lost, forever evil, forever despicable, etc.
Do you get that this behavior of society is actually a VERY bad thing?
In a society like this ALL OF US are damned. There is not one of us reading this or out there in the world that has not made mistakes and has not learned from mistakes.
You need not be stupid about giving people a chance to change, but ideally we should be giving people such a chance.
Our legal system in the U.S. is also essentially forever damned. Once you do something and spend time in prison, when you are released you would think you have paid your fine, and you have done as needed. Yet you will have a black mark for the rest of your life. So many doors will be closed to you that are open to everyone else that in some ways society will almost be forcing you back into crime. Once the villain, always the villain. This is not a good thing.
Likewise we tend to view people like we view our politicians. Flip flopping is bad. If a person in life says something and a few days later they say something different we consider them a flip flopper.
In politics this is generally actually something we should watch for and not support unless the politician provides a very good reason for changing their minds.
Yet should we also be doing this to regular every day people?
Is is not okay to learn some new thing, or to think for awhile and decide we were wrong and change our mind?
These days changing your mind can be deemed as one of the ultimate evils...
We'll gladly down vote into oblivion people who changed their mind and did something different than a statement they made yesterday, or weeks ago. Changing your mind is not permitted.
In reality people should be willing to change their mind. It is a good thing. A mind that is rigid and locked into place is a fool's mind.
There are of course exceptions. Repeat offenders (that were not forced into it by closed societal doors) and people who change their mind with such frequency they cannot be trusted will occur. Those are not the people I am referring to in this post, and I greatly suspect they are in the minority when it comes to these actions.
My purpose in writing this post was to perhaps get people thinking about condemnation and how they decide to FREEZE people into place and not permit them to get out of that mold. This is actually bad. It might even be considered evil in some places. I am not talking any religious evil, but simply as a harmful thing to people and to society itself.
Steem On!
"Oh, you were convicted of a crime, you're a criminal, I can't hire you."
...
Blind ostracism doesn't help anyone. The prison system and the psychiatric system are two of the biggest threats to a free society. Magical authority to lock you up against your will because they say so. Smoke some pot and end up in jail... say things others don't like and get pumped full of drugs... society is a falser representation of what is could be, masked in falsity, evil hiding under the image of good while the populace is blind to what is happening.
A cage or drugs doesn't rehabilitate people. Psychological work, self-knowledge, is required to change people. Some people might not want to, but this is a community change that needs to be created where there are no prisons, and we all deal with the failure and teach the knowledge of ourselves to elevate everyone.
I am proof that people can (and do) change. Believe me, there's a time when you wouldn't have wanted anything to do with me. I would have put a bullet in you as soon as look at you. The penal system had absolutely NOTHING to do with my change.
Yes, I was actually intending this post to focus on the concept in general. The penal system was meant to be an example. It was not meant to encompass what I was thinking.
I was trying to get exactly at what you have indicated. People can change. We should give them the chance to do so. If they keep saying they changed, and show they have not then we can be less forgiving, but so many times in society these days people leave no room for redemption and change.
People tend to take a static view of human nature: "Once a crook, always a crook." People, in reality are more fluid. When I wrote my work on political theory I tried to identify some unalterable facet of human nature...something beyond the left/right, conservative/liberal paradigm. Those things change and so too can any other aspect of human nature, including behavior. Heraclitus wrote that everything is in a constant state of flux...I used this in my writing and it applied to EVERYTHING- especially human behavior.
I make it a point to force myself to take a neutral stance on morality. Even when someone hurts me or wrongs me. I no longer repress my feelings or frustrations and try to be as authentic as I can in any given moment. For example, I can make a post blasting Dan and Ned and all of the "experiement" conductors, and still keep faith in steemit. Does it mean I agree with what they did? Does it mean I am over it? I honestly don't even reflect back on it. What I know is that I was pissed off in the moment, I said what I had to say about it, and I am moving forward with no ill will or repressed anger. I am all about the present moment. Grudges and judgments are for the past and the future doesn't exist right now, so I'm not going to worry about things that aren't affecting me right now. Namaste.
Good way to look at it. I wish more people were that way.
Lol, it's not like I've always been this way. However, it's one change that I find does not seem to regress once you fully embrace it. Just be 100% you at all times, don't accomodate another persons feelings about how you should be. Don't cater to another person's perception of you. Don't change who you know you are at your core for anyone or anything. Accept that you are the "real McCoy" and don't give away bullshit substititutes of yourself that you think people need or want. It's not for us to bend to the masses. The universe can move around us as long as we maintain our own balance.
Well I am that way as well. Which is why I wrote the article. I have encountered a number of people in our community that this article was more written to maybe/hopefully get them to think about this, or plant a seed.
We have a number of community members that view the world through "forever damned" lenses.
There is a fantastic German word:
Wendehals (plural: Wendehälse)
literally turn-around-head
Meant are those who after the German reunification turned their stances and grabbed the (monetary/power) opportunities without any moral constraints.
Such behavior is bad. However, not being able to declare a past decision as an error (either because you made an error or because things changed or where unknown to you) is worse.
Unfortunately being stubborn is often praised when it comes to decisions :(
How I see it is that who we are and what we do are quite different things. What we do is based on doing our best in any given moment based on what we know, our current mental state, habits, desires etc. What generally acts are the many layers of our personal culture. These things are malleable, removable and can compound against each other creating complexities. Even when what we do we may know as 'wrong' and we don't want to do it, a compulsion may still make us do it. There goes free choice.
However, the actions we make are what people see and they then attach some representative sticker to the forehead. We can all think back to the school bully, and when we think of them we remember them the way they were, not the way they are now. Perhaps, they are the most compassionate, perhaps even worse than they were but our memory of them is not them. We see them walk down the street and we paint them with the insensitive brush of memory, not the sensitivity of awareness in the moment. We convict them, rarely considering that they may no longer be guilty of the crimes they perpetrated earlier in respect to the current moment.
Who we are would be something below all of these layers yet it can not be investigated if the layers exist. Removing each layer would reduce conflicts and complexity making our movements more authentic with each layer gone. Whether it is possible to discover what truly is below I am not sure but I would assume at that point, true enlightenment happens.
In practice, I give people a break as my judgement is biased and based on a very limited amount of information and probably, if I was transplanted into their body with their skills and experiences, I could do no better than they. Which would make me no different to them.