I get angry when I realize I will never again be who I've always been before, someone who lived strong and free by the creed that people are essentially good, that if you think optimistically, trust others.
Please don't let them steal this too.
I'm really sorry for your bad experience, but remember:
- You can still live strong and free.
- People are still essentially good.
- You can still think optimistically.
- You can still trust others.
It's true, you will never be who you've always been. But you can be almost the same person, still optimistic and trusting, just a little less naive. You many not realize it now, but the time will come when you may actually appreciate this as a learning experience.
There are bad people out there and some of them will want to hurt you. You don't have to sacrifice who you really are because of them. You just have to live a little bit differently.
Don't let them take away you really are. Believe it or not, that would be much worse than what they've already done.
Out of every 100 people, 98 are absolutely wonderful human beings, 1 is an asshole, and 1 is a lunatic. My experience out of doing retail for a few years.
Only in the same sense that we can say "intenex wears a diaper" (because you were once a baby). Defining somebody by an off moment is one way to look at things, but I'm not sure it's particularly reasonable.
I think that's good advice in general, but you'll miss the point if you stick too closely to it. You kind of have to weight your judgments. I mean, yes, a guy who beats his wife if he's had a bad day at work should be judged pretty harshly based on that. But if you-at-your-worst is somebody who is kind of grumpy and maybe a little bit selfish, you're a whole lot better than somebody who constantly acts like a crabby miser.
I am sorry to be a downer, and I agree that it is nice to pretend that people are essentially good. Ignoring the Milgram results, however, leads us to forget why we have to maintain societies with complex crime deterrent schemes, and why we should not trust anonymous individuals who cannot be located for punishment.
"[H]alf ... were female, and their rate of obedience was virtually identical to that of the male participants." "Where participants had to physically hold the "learner's" arm onto a shock plate, ... 30 percent of participants completed the experiment."
"I don't think that means what you think it means."
That experiment deals with ability to disobey authority, not with the basic goodness of the people performing the actions. Nearly 100% of the people performing the actions questioned what they were doing. That indicates they knew it was wrong, instinctively and didn't wish to do it. But we are well trained to listen to authority, and the authority figure was telling them to continue.
This actually backs up the idea that people are essentially good. But it also provides evidence for the idea that most people can be easily lead into violating their natural conscience.
Studies of innate "goodness" performed on children reveal that most people, from birth, have an innate moral conscience that we would consider 'good'. I'll see if I can find a link to back this up.
Depending on what you're thinking the authority can do, "for survival's stake" may very well be exactly what those people in the Milgram Experiment were experiencing.
"No, I-I can't, b-but he's in authority, and I'll be in trouble if I don't, so", he cringes, "I must."
The Milgram Experiment doesn't indicate that it in any way threatened the participants for non-compliance, yet these people were willing to knowingly endanger someone else's life. I think why they were willing to do that lies more with the belief that the authority would take the blame rather than any reasonable fear of punishment from the authority.
My guess is that they were rationalizing it in the experiment context. "The authority is telling me to go ahead, there has to be something else going on here. His life can't really be in danger."
I don't find it that surprising, given that we are taught from birth to obey authority figures (parents, family, teachers, policemen) /without question/. It's perhaps a useful simplification in early life but is one I've long-considered harmful.
>given that we are taught from birth to obey authority figures (parents, family, teachers, policemen) /without question/
One of the important aspects I'm trying to maintain with my kids is a right to reply and express their opinion. My eldest's teacher goes against this, she demands "do it first time" whilst I demand a response - he can refuse but he can't ignore a request, if he can reason his way out/in to something then that's far better IMO than blind obedience.
It can be a useful simplification in the sense that one needs a child to obey commands like "don't touch the hot stove" and "don't run in to the road" ("stop" covers both).
It's important to teach children to obey authority figures. It's also important to teach them critical thinking skills and learn how to detect when a thing is arbitrary. However, instead of teaching the child to disrupt the authority in place, I think it is preferable to teach the children to obey unless there is a moral imperative against doing so.
For instance, while your son's teacher may assign him some silly work, while there is no reason to do this work other than the teacher said so, he should learn to work within the framework and do the work anyway because he is subject to the teacher in his current circumstances. If the teacher, however, assigns him to physically harm another student or participate in another morally objectionable act, he should refuse to comply. Things go much smoother this way than they do if people are constantly nagging and arguing over things that really have no incident; much energy could be saved by both your son and his teacher by compliance with non-useful but non-harmful requests rather than disrupting the flow of instruction and encouraging further disorder and disrespect to authority.
It's INCREDIBLY important to teach children to obey authority figures WITHIN REASON. If a teacher, cop or fireman is asking your kid to do something that doesn't seem quite right, their first instinct should be to ignore them, and get help from someone they know. The only people a kid should blindly obey is their own parents.
As far as I know, very few people teach their kids that it's OK to question authority (within reason - and yes, respect authority always. If you're in a teachers classroom, you follow their rules.)
>I think it is preferable to teach the children to obey unless there is a moral imperative against doing so
// I'm not teaching my kids to be anarchists ;0) But equally well I'm not happy for them to be drones or to accept the word of others without reflection on the truth/moral good/right action.
>while there is no reason to do this work other than the teacher said so
// That's a pretty good reason and one that, within the school framework is hard to argue against. The only sorts of arguments that will work against such reasoning are those arguing for a greater moral good or similar.
>Things go much smoother this way than they do if people are constantly nagging and arguing over things that really have no incident;
Who decides what has no incident. Things that matter to one don't to another.
Let me give an example of the sorts of issues that he currently has to address, they're pretty low level: The school has a policy where the teachers lead a class out at a time from the building to be met by parents/carers. The teacher tells them to put their coats on, but it's often too hot to do so and my lad is there in summer in a jumper and coat (causing a minor harm to himself) because he's being obedient. Weather here is very changeable. His jumper and coat should rightly be in his bag. I say he should tell the teacher "it's too hot to wear my coat, can I put it in my bag please". The teacher is possibly menopausal and may be having difficulty assessing the temperature - should he just put his coat on, or should he make a [albeit small] stand with the possible outcome being the greater comfort of all the class [ie they wear appropriate levels of clothing]?
>disrespect to authority
I don't consider it disrespectful to question someone’s reason or motive in giving an instruction. Indeed if you can't explain why one should carry out your instructions then you need to question them.
I could be wrong but I think the child questioning the reason to put on a coat in hot weather today, if they learn to reason an argument, is better equipped to question those who have authority in more vital questions tomorrow.
If something has no incident then why demand it's fulfilment?
One of the examples I normally bring out for this is the case of me being told off by a teacher for insisting that my spelling of a word was correct and theirs was wrong. This (excuse for a) teacher insisted that it had no bearing at all that my spelling was indeed correct, and that I was in the wrong for disagreeing regardless. Needless to say, I adopted a slightly different teaching style.
I guess that not all parents teach you to obey. I always knew that you never should talk to police, never whistleblower to teachers or anybody, be positive and keep to yourself until you asked for help. It is just people, especially authorities are negative. If you say something to the police, they will use it against you.
That doesn't seem to be the conclusion of said experiment.
"In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40)[1] of experiment participants administered the experiment's final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment."
IMHO Milgram's experiment has more to do with obedience than ethics.
Or they felt trapped by their agreement to participate in the experiment. They made an offer to annul the contract, which would indicate that they were following through with what they had agreed to do. Moreover, the situation they were in was greatly outside their experience with what people had ever asked them to do in fulfilling an agreement.
If you promised someone "I'll do whatever it takes for you to have a good time while you're visiting", you probably aren't imagining that it will involve a triple homicide and a liquor store robbery. If it starts there, you'll likely refuse. But if you slowly build up to that, the pressure to keep complying with your agreement builds....
I am familiar with the psychological phenomenon you are referring to, but these people were not forced to do anything; they clearly considered it wrong; and yet they proceeded. Feeling trapped isn't being trapped. Being rude to a researcher is not as bad as physically injuring an innocent person. Excuses do not change the fundamental reality that people commonly do things they know to be wrong and suboptimal – we are so far from perfect agents! Improving this through rationality is the whole purpose of e.g. lesswrong.
You mention LessWrong, very nice; then you know they were forced: any time you deploy the Dark Arts to manipulate someone's behavior, you undermine their free will. "Choice" wasn't part of it, or at least not the largest part.
People react wildly differently in different circumstances. This has been proven over and over. The Milgram experiment was heavily designed to influence how people act. A twist in circumstances can easily get 100% of people to do the "right" thing. If you only look at extreme cases like this, you won't get an accurate idea of human behavior.
I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of people, in normal circumstances, are essentially good.
Certainly, you can get nearly 100% of people to do the right thing most of the time. That is what judicial deterrents accomplish. Those don't work if people are anonymous, however.
The Milgram experiment was not intended to be "extreme". They expected less than 3% of participants to actually torture their (fake) victim to death. The U.S. group was to act as a control, such that they could proceed to compare results in Germany, for instance, where the Holocaust had so recently occurred. Following the unexpected American results, Milgram simply did not bother to perform the actual intended experiment in Germany.
That experiment shows you exactly the opposite, rather: that people who seem essentially bad (i.e. bad in essence) may simply be responding to circumstances, incentives and social pressure.
Most people are able to think 'this would make me feel awful, I don't want to make someone else feel this way' - those that aren't are usually canny enough to pretend.
People might not be essentially 'good' - but most people are rational and lucid enough to stay within the bounds of what's socially acceptable .. even if they're unable to empathise.
This was a random nutter / group of nutters .. stuff like this, unfortunately, happens all the time - although, thankfully, on a minimal scale.
The issue for me, is related to some fundamental flaws in AirBnB's business model .. flaws which are seem largely absent from the alternative of CouchSurfing.
People are generally good, but there is no bar so low that 99% of humans can not be convinced to slither under given the right circumstances. The world is full of horror.
I was sitting here mulling over why you wouldn't think that people are essentially good and it dawns on me that a lot of people are scared and likely have behaviors that suggest they aren't good (e.g. drive by someone with a flat tire in the rain because they are scared it's a robbery setup for passer-bys)
I think if you just look at your day to day interactions, most people are decent. I doubt many people are trying to rob you, hit you or actively steal from you. Sure there are outliers, but the majority don't do this.
Lastly, as a reformed paranoid "everyone is out to get me", I would make the observation that the energy you put out there has maybe 70% to do with the types of reactions you get back.
A friendly, open-faced "Hello" gets a hell of a different response from a shrouded, closed off, nervous "Hello".
Try and be more free for 3 days and see if the experience you have with others is better.
Hey, don't get my wrong! I'm probably one of the most cheerful and happy people you'll ever meet in real life. I'm always smiling and enthusiastic with everything I do. And you're right - people tend to (usually) treat me the same way. Everything is beautiful on the surface, and that's just about never where I have a problem.
I've been betrayed by a lot of people I trusted, and I've had to do some things (not for my own good) that I'm not proud of myself. I'm in the process of blogging it (http://shenglong.posterous.com/a-prelude-to-eternity), but unfortunately, it's very long and I've only had time to finish the prelude. In the end, I've seen what people are capable of when they think they can't be held accountable, and that's the primary driver of my cynicism.
Regardless, I still treat every person I meet with respect. It's just, in the back of my head, I'm cautious about what could happen.
Edit: I don't know if I can post links like this. If not, let me know and I'll edit it out. It's for reference, not for publicity.
I hope you continue your blogging, as it seems like quite an interesting story. It sucks you've been betrayed so many times by those you trust, but I hope you don't lose faith in your fellow humans.
It truly saddens me to know people don't believe in the innate goodness of fellow human beings.
Having said that, I have an overdeveloped sense of vengeance, and I do not trust the law to protect me suitably. I wish I were better at the approach taken by Gandhi, but I have not internalized his wisdom yet, though I recognize it (so that gives me hope).
I think most people are good but not because it's innate. I think humans are like electricity, seeking the path of least resistance. Attracted to pleasure, averse to pain, people judge circumstances and weigh their options according to what they think will be the most pleasant / least unpleasant set of consequences. Skewed by their predilection for short-term or long-term consequences. This results in people being essentially good, but not because it's intrinsic but rather because "good" generally has more positive consequences associated with it than evil.
"Should I steal this?" is always weighed more heavily against "Will I get caught?" and/or "Will this cause me guilt or affect my self-worth?" rather than "Is it wrong?"
Maybe it's the difference between "people act good most of the time" and people truly being good. I don't think the vast majority of people are up to something criminal right this moment, but I might be less confident that 99% of people are motivated by good intentions. "Good intentions" and "not a criminal" are very different standards, but that's the point.
The fear thing made me think something else entirely: does it count as being good if a person acts good out of fear? (Of being caught/punished.) Everyone's answer to that question may also colour their views on peoples' goodness.
This just reminded me of an interesting idea one of my highschool teachers proposed: mother that doesn't love their child, but still performs all of her motherly duties because she feels a responsibility towards the child?
Is she worse than a mother that loves her child? Is she better because she can 'do the right thing' even though her feelings might opposed?
I'm not so sure about this. People might know what is good (for the most part), but in weakness it is violated, and in strength it is often ignored to pursue self-interest.
Let's just say that, I've been betrayed, and I'm very aware of the circumstances needed to be betrayed by people I care about -- some of them are impossibly extreme (and some aren't so much), but they do exist, and you do have to navigate that. Whether the person would be apologetic or not after the fact really doesn't enter into it.
If one lives, I think you automatically develop protections against other people. I think that you've set up a protection zone around yourself just like everyone else. But it's a good one -- instead of withdrawing, you simply force the surface interaction to be a positive one (as much as you can). Sometimes this translates, sometimes it can backfire. For what it's worth, I think this is the right way to go. You can be wary, but still positive about your interactions.
But there's a necessary bit of detachment -- I can wave to people on the street, but I'm not going to let just anyone into my apartment.
I'm with you, but I'm not so sure that it's not that people aren't good, but that the human race is inherently selfish, and many of the good ones are afraid of conflict.
IMHO There are bad people out there and some of them will want to hurt you. You don't have to sacrifice who you really are because of them. You just have to live a little bit differently. means don't use AirBnB
If the implication is don't use AirBnB, then the implication is also: never leave your own home and never let anyone in, which is paranoid and absurd.
You might object that what you say applies only to strangers and not to those you trust, but then you would be forgetting that everyone you trust was once a stranger.
Simply walking down the street is a testament to one's notion that in general humans are good and that that goodness is worthwhile enough to risk the occasional social or even physical injustice.
First, I'd like to be clear that I'm not advocating for or against AirBnB (and my sole experience as a buyer of accommodation via AirBnB was positive).
It should be transparent that different actions have different levels of risk and reward. Often by accepting higher risk (e.g. accepting the risk of letting strangers into your apartment) you can get higher reward (e.g. some money, a sense of community and connection, etc). But risk is risk, and so you can also get anti-rewards, sometimes huge ones (home ransacked and burglarized and vandalized, identity stolen, sense of life violated, etc).
If you want to draw conclusions from events like this, they should be about modulating your risk tolerance, not about setting your risk tolerance to zero (which is incoherent anyway). You might decide that although things like this happen, it's a risk you're willing to take. Or maybe not. You might decide that if you're going to rent your apartment out to sight-unseen strangers, you're going to put all your identity documents in a safety deposit box first, to slightly limit the maximum damage. Or you might decide that that would offset the benefit too much, and thereby just go back to the no-renting-to-strangers option. Or you might decided to take martial arts lessons, and not let strangers in. Or you might decided to install security cameras, with real-time transmission to offsite backup, so that if something bad happens you'll always be able to strike back and regain a sense of control. Whatever. All of those options are coherent alternatives, and all are a far cry from 'never leave your own home, never let anyone in'.
It's certainly true that simply walking down the street requires trust, and it's certainly true that transforming strangers into friends is a process that requires risking trust, but both of those _can_ be done with very small trusts. Or they can be done with large trust, which has greater risk, greater possible reward, and greater possible injury.
Sometimes things go very very wrong. That's why they invented insurance.
Most people act 'good' most of the time. That's why this whole society thing stays cohesive. But, everyone has a probability to act badly. Just consider someone who may have had a stroke that considerably changes their personality.
A small portion of people act 'evil' under more common situations.
It's odd that airbnb doesn't seem to risk mitigate these sorts of black swan events. They wouldn't lose much having a 100% loss redemption clause. It would seem that the property owner would be much less likely to game the system than the visitor.
>All the material stuff is superficial, the only thing of real value is you.
Our house was broken in to by youths looking for drug money. It took me a couple of years to get over the sense of not wanting to trust people.
The sense of betrayal was considerably enhanced by two factors - I was on a neighbourhood committee with the mother of one of the youths that broke in; an amount of cash was taken that belonged to a group that we volunteered with to help children on the estate from whence the youths came.
IMO the greatest harm was stealing [for a time] my trust in others.
People kept empathising with me as to how violated we must feel, how awful having people in our home. None of that mattered to us really though.
The vast majority of People are good yes. The main problem is that most people stop caring too quickly. On a multidimensional empathetic scale they stop caring with a nigh exponential drop off the further away from the this and now the other person is. Once someone's genetic and then phenotypic expression is far away from theirs, once the spacial, chronological and cultural locations etc. are diverged; people stop caring enough. Sometimes the person that they do not care about is their future self.
The keyword is enough. Certainly if everyone was too empathetic that would neither be good. But I do think the world would be a better place if more people did not set the line of when to stop caring and empathizing so close to Now and Me. If they picked a slightly less steep atttenuation function then we would not have so many perfectly good people that were bigoted Xist bastards when it came to topic X. or peopele who were just following orders. or just having a bit of fun. or well at least it is not me. or on and on. for example.
I haven't watched the linked video, but the word "mistake" in no way applies to this situation. This was an entire week devoted to thinking up ways of being cruel to another human being.
The fact that human beings are capable of spending "an entire week devoted to thinking up ways of being cruel to another human being" when the other human being has been nothing but honest and welcoming is why I believe that we are an inherently evil species that doesn't deserve its place on this planet.
Someone once said (can't for the life of me find the quote), that the difference between a good man and an evil one was that the evil one did the things that the good man thought about doing.
Some people are very badly affected by trauma. But most do get over it and the almost same person is actually a wiser slightly more careful person. A bit less idealist, yep, but that's growing up.
Please don't let them steal this too.
I'm really sorry for your bad experience, but remember:
It's true, you will never be who you've always been. But you can be almost the same person, still optimistic and trusting, just a little less naive. You many not realize it now, but the time will come when you may actually appreciate this as a learning experience.There are bad people out there and some of them will want to hurt you. You don't have to sacrifice who you really are because of them. You just have to live a little bit differently.
Don't let them take away you really are. Believe it or not, that would be much worse than what they've already done.
Lots of well wishes for your quick recovery.