We all know (or have known) somebody who is a bad person and who does bad things. Not criminal or illegal but just bad. Bullies a colleague, spreads nasty rumors, tells an anorexic friend that she gained weight, squeals to the boss about a co-worker who made a personal call on company time, sabotages other people’s projects for fun, steals other people’s ideas, etc. Cruel, cold, calculating people who go through life harming others and not feeling an ounce of remorse about it. I’m not talking about Hitler or Stalin here. The subject of today’s discussion are not genocidal maniacs but small-time villains who never break any actual laws.
I have this very simplistic worldview that works for me perfectly. In this worldview, people are either good or bad. Good people are those who cannot hurt others consciously without feeling pain. Bad people are those who are incapable of feeling any pain but their own. The good people are the majority on this planet. However, they always end up losing out because they can’t find an effective way of dealing with the bad people.
As an example, here is a comment left by reader Danny about another blogger’s suggestion that nasty people should be shamed for their bad actions:
About the shaming article I have to disagree with the idea that there is some sort of “good” or “correct” shaming. Shaming is too volatile to be used as some tool for positive change. In the long run I don’t think its right to expect some positive result from shaming (“My shaming of you is okay because I have good reasons.”)
Danny is a good person who doesn’t want to inflict harm on anybody. The problem remains, however. What should be done about bad people?
I have seen too many situations where a bunch of great, wonderful folks is practically terrorized by one cold, calculating, nasty person who keeps them in subjection with nothing other but his or her lack of conscience. They don’t want to hurt the horrible person’s feelings, so they never tell the horrible person to his or her face, “You are horrible. Shame on you.”
What these good folks forget, however, is that their fear of hurting the bad creature ultimately causes pain to all those future victims who could be spared their suffering had the previous victims gotten together and taken a stand.
I sometimes look at this person I know who caused great suffering to a good many people and wonder if she even knows how horrible she is. I mean, if nobody ever says anything, if everybody always acts like her actions are completely acceptable, does this person – who obviously has no moral compass of her own – realize that what she is doing is wrong? I feel like I’m endorsing her vile treatment of others every time I say “hello” to her.
There were several times in my life where I told nasty people that they were nasty and that I despised them for their horrible actions. It felt very good and liberating. I believe that if we all do this more often, bad people will feel less empowered to hurt others. However, every single time I tried to confront a bad person, there was always a bunch of good people trying to shush me down.
“Shh, don’t, just don’t, just let it be, it isn’t worth it, shhhhh,” the good folks would say to me in such situations. “Forgiveness is the best answer to bad people.”
I’m not sure, however, that one can forgive somebody who never asked for forgiveness and never recognized that his or her actions are wrong.
Do you tell horrible people that they are horrible to their face? If you can’t simply avoid them, what is your strategy of dealing with them?
Clarissa's Blog 
This is an excellent question. What DO we do about bad people? Personally, I have a harder time with bad adults than I do with bad children. I am very happy to tell a kid when he or she is being mean, nasty, or spiteful. I do so in the hopes that they will learn a lesson and be a less bad adult. I don’t believe that telling children “that’s not okay” is the same as “that’s bad.” I think we need to be more clear with kids in order to teach them how to be decent adults.
With adults, I am a lot more passive aggressive. I don’t like that, though. I’d rather tell them they are being offensive or mean or whatever is appropriate. But I feel like I need to be more careful not to offend adults, since my job could be affected or my kids could be affected (in the case of talking to my kids’ teachers, for instance). It would certainly be a different world if we all said what we thought all the time.
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“But I feel like I need to be more careful not to offend adults, since my job could be affected or my kids could be affected (in the case of talking to my kids’ teachers, for instance). ”
– It’s one thing when you are afraid of retaliation. But there are many situations where telling bad people off carries no consequences. Yet it’s still hard to do it.
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I would imagine the problem lies with “who” gets to decide the bad person. The truth is we are all bad once in a while.
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Speak for yourself, shall you? I have absolutely no fear of being judged by anybody which is why I’m not afraid of judging others.
I was hoping this thread wouldn’t drown in pious inanities but that hope was obviously misplaced.
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For those who will start to preach to me that everybody is both good and bad in equal measure and we should not judge, let me tell you a story of this one person I know.
This person once decided that her husband was too poor and it would make more sense for her to be married to her husband’s boss. She seduced the boss and got pregnant with his child. The boss wasn’t interested in marrying her, though, so she told her husband this was his kid. For years, the husband took care of the kid, adored him, spent time with him. Then, the woman managed to bully the boss into leaving his wife. She came home and told her husband, “Please move out now. Your boss is coming to live here tomorrow. And, by the way, this is not your son.”
Later in life, this person started working for a beneficent organization that brought humanitarian aid to poor elderly people. Even though she was quite rich, she appropriated huge portions of the food and clothes sent to the poor folks. Her excuse? “Well, I’m old, too.”
She bullied both her sons to the point of severe clinical depression.
She bullied her husband to the point where he cursed her on his deathbed and said that dying at 54 was something he welcomed because it liberated him from her.
She spread most vicious lying rumors about everybody she knew and especially enjoyed besmirching the memory of those who were dead and couldn’t defend themselves any longer.
She couldn’t spend 5 minutes in a person’s company without saying something nasty to them.
She borrowed money from people and “forgot” to give it back. When people pressured her to give the money back she faked a depression and guilt-tripped them so that they would never dare to ask for it back again.
But nobody ever told her she was horrible to her face, so she continued doing bad things to people with complete impunity.
So when people ask me whether I’m ready to be judged in the same way I judge others, my answer is yes, absolutely. If I have done anything like what this person has done, I invite everybody to spit into my face and shun me forever.
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I live with a real queen. He is always insulting people to their faces. He is a german queen blue blood. Walks around the house like a real queen with a fat gut and hands and wrists hanging down like wendy williams how you doin. He she loves to gossip.
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I totally agree. Having raised to believe that conflicts are either misunderstandings or my own fault, this was very hard for me to understand. I still do not really know how to handle such people. I have recently tried to call a person like that out, but then the reaction is of course “but surely we are both to blame” when in effect sometimes it is only one person who is to blame. It is very hard to understand this, because we have been taught to expect that the “truth is in the middle”. Only if you are dealing with a bad person it isn’t!
Somehow our education raises us to be toothless and then we are surprised that the sociopaths among us are thriving and happy, making everyone else miserable.
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“Somehow our education raises us to be toothless and then we are surprised that the sociopaths among us are thriving and happy, making everyone else miserable.”
– that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. We are always so afraid of hurting the feelings of those who are never prevented from hurting our feelings with such considerations.
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If the truth is “in the middle”, is this supposed to imply that the two parties involved have equal amounts of power? I guess this is assumed, but it is rarely the case. There are different factors determining how much power one has. These come down to one’s level of knowledge, one’s standing in society, one’s age and maturity, one’s credibility, the amount of wealth one has to fall back on (in case something goes wrong), and so on.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not arguing that the weaker party is always right via some leftist reversal of normal social dynamics.
Rather, one should take into account that some people are handicapped from the start, in relation to their ability to make a claim on creditable truth, whereas others have more social capital to draw on.
Those who speak glibly in a common tongue are often believed, whereas those who have to stand alone for any reason are often condemned reflexively.
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I agree we should say when someone is doing something bad. I don’t know if it would have had any effect on the woman in your example, but someone should have said something anyway.
But there are lots of crazy people who have bizarre notions of what is bad, and I don’t want them to feel as if they are doing something noble by shaming others. There was a case recently in British Columbia where a 7th grade girl flashed her breasts on the internet, and her “friend” took pictures, posted them everywhere, and there was years of shaming until she recently committed suicide. Did these self-righteous shamers think she was immoral and deserved that? Did they think they were standing up for some kind of values?
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I have no doubt that the absolute majority of people in BC did not approve of the bully’s actions. So where were they? Why didn’t they take a stand and condemn the bully? Why were they just sitting there like a bunch of scared rabbits?
This story is the perfect illustration to what I’m saying in the post. A bad person just goes ahead and bullies a girl to death while crowds of good people sit passively by terrified that they might hurt a bully’s feelings if they say something.
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That’s for sure. The cowardliness of those who sit around should also be condemned. I, personally, would condemn it. I find it reprehensible and vulgar behavior, to sit around being cowardly.
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Well, I’m from a colonial culture, so if there were any problem people, those people were dealt with immediately and directly, in much the way that our majestic prime minister recently (but belatedly) demolished Tony Abbott. This video is very instructive as to how it’s done.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-09/julia-gillard-attacks-abbott-of-hypocrisy/4303634
My female teachers used to be extremely adept at the art of sarcasm, and capable of demoralizing you for not focusing in class, in an instant.
Nowadays, nobody does anything about actual bullies or menaces, or they waste their political ammo attacking people like me, who intend them no harm, but come from an uncomfortable sounding part of the world.
You can tell you have been defeated when you are not allowed to fight back, or when your weapons are powerless. As Marechera writes, an enemy that is defeated does not lose their weapons but their armor. That way, you feel all the stings and humiliation of not being allowed to fight back.
I always fight back, though. If someone uses a weapon against me, I take it off them.
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I totally love Gillard’s speech. She is phenomenal.
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Please believe I’m not trying to say that the ones doing the horrible stuff should get a free pass or anything like that. I’m just saying something about the way one points out they’re horrible behavior.
Sure it’s all nice and neat to get righteous and decide that your (metaphorical) attack is somehow right and use it against someone else’s attack that has been deemed wrong.
Part of the reason I’m against this shaming back and forth is because of the question of who decides whose shaming is right.
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I’d say it takes experience to know right from wrong. You can’t base your judgments about it on ego: “He hurt my ego, therefore he was wrong!” From my studies of deep psychology, I am able to see that those who hurt others are always damaged or damaging themselves in some ways. You can look at it from the point of view of neurological mirror cell theory. What I do to you I am in a way also doing to myself. When Nazi soldiers were commissioned to kill people, they couldn’t take more than a few weeks of doing it without becoming sick, because they were also doing the killing to themselves.
Of course, there are those who are emotionally dead, who have some neurological mis-wiring, and these are the thoroughgoing psychopaths among us, whose behavior cannot be changed.
In the case of the majority, though, many of them would be relieved if they were denied the scope to express bad behavioral patterns. They would gain a part of themselves back through not being misogynist, or dominant in an abusive way.
I’m convinced there are all sorts of people walking around who do now know what’s wrong with them, because they have been socially trained to express themselves in negative patterns, for instance by repressing emotion in order to express a “male identity”. Repressing emotion might seem like a good way to assert one’s dominance, as you can climb higher over people if you don’t feel their reactions. Ultimately, one kills oneself this way, though, to the point that one cannot have any genuine human relationships.
To be able to see when someone is doing this to themselves, and to intervene appropriately on behalf of both parties, is what I call “intellectual shamanism”.
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People should be confronted about unacceptable behavior. I just do not understand why this confrontation should be by shaming. There are less manipulative ways. And, by the way, I am not sure that emotional “Shame on you!” is really shaming…
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I’m not sure even confronting bad people is necessarily effective. I had the misfortune of living with one for the first 24 years of my life and confronted him multiple times – in a tearful manner as a child, more angrily later on – and it didn’t have any kind of effect on him. The rest of the family doesn’t like him either but he… it’s as if he simply forgets every time he is told. I think the reason is that he simply does not think it worth remembering. And since he really doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings except his own, why should he?
Getting people to safety from abusive people should be the top priority because avoiding them is really the only thing you can do (not that confronting them would be wrong, it’s just ineffective). In a small society where everybody knows everybody else this can mean shunning of the worst people but in a big town (or even a big village, really) an abuser can always find a new victim.
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