that everybody can be a good person, if they just try?
Yes. Not necessarily if they just try though. It takes hard work.
The Chinese Communists after WW2 took a bunch of the most heinous Japanese War criminals and turned them into lifelong peace activists and anti-imperialists.
They did it with patience and kindness that was still firm and unyielding.
I don’t know
I think it’s complicated and more about environmental factors than individual effort (well, both. But I think you can’t try properly without the opportunity and support to do so. You can only do so much on your own)Edit: Fuck I just noticed the name and that it’s fucking Undertale quote lmao fucking hell I ate the onion
We ball
The thing is, even if the worst person turns a new leaf, to be “the worst” they probably have a trail of victims. And I believe those victims have a right to say what justice looks like to them.
Exactly. Can the worst people be rehabilitated? Maybe some. Should they? Not if their victims are still suffering (or are still dead!) They should suffer as their victims have.
When I think about the worst things the worst people have personally done to me and to my loved ones, I do not yearn for the perpetrators to find enlightenment, inner peace, and to become positive forces for those around them. Why should they find peace and happiness when I cannot and never will, because the harms they did begat other harms begat other harms and shaped my life and those of the people I hold most dear disastrously? The suffering will never be reversed even if I recover and it ends. I did recover from a lot, but then a loved one who didn’t rcpver ruined everyyhing anyway and all my hard work healing ended up being for nothing. These wrongs will always have happened and the trajectory of my life will always have been worse for them.
Seeing the perpetrators heal and be happy would feel like salt in the wound , additional injustice. Evil people should not get to heal, recover, and enjoy life.
Instead, what I yearn for is that those fuckers die and go to Hell so that their suffering never ends. The biggest reason I am sad that I can no longer believe in Islam is that I do not believe any wrongs will be avenged after death. For example, Henry Kissinger got away with his atrocities, and his victims will never be avenged.
What makes the worst person the worst is they’re refusal to change even though they are capable of doing so.
Every single thing is the product of its contradictions; as a consequence, everything is in a constant state of change due to the contradictions within it which come to define new states of being. The only thing that is constant is change. In this sense, even the most rotten person, the worst criminals in history, have in their essence a conflict between what they actually are and what they could be instead. It’s much like how the present world is in contradiction with the future world it’s pregnant with.
I think the standard leftist response to this kind of question involves talking about how individuals are only that, individual, and their morality should be assessed not just as a question of how they behave in absolute terms, but how they function within the system in which they live. And I think this is true, but it does run the risk of erasing an important feature of dialectical analysis: what drives a thing to radically change is not the presence of some external force or its external contradictions, but always its internal contradictions, even when external forces are conditional for a change. No amount of heat will ever turn a rock into a chicken, but heat will help an egg hatch into a chicken. Similarly, people actually have the potential to change regardless of the external forces that they are interacting with, it’s only that their environment may enable them to change, or they may need a different environment to do so.
ill answer that the moment you stop befriending my mom
I think most of the “worst” people either lack connection/lack the ability to connect or truly think they’re doing the “right” thing. I can’t say for certain if alleviating those issues is possible for all but with actual rehabilitation/reeducation programs I’d like to think so.
sidebar
I watched a video last night where a youtuber I like said that the point of prison is not to remove dangerous people from society or rehabilitate them, but rather as a punishment and it left a bad taste in my mouth.
Can we not see how unsustainable that attitude is? At that point we might as well go back to cutting off the hands of thieves, etc. I swear most people these days are walking around privately foaming at the mouth for a “just” opportunity to be cruel and violent.
But it’s true, that’s what prisons are for and that’s why we’re prison abolitionists are we not?
There are ways to hold people out of the general population while they are rehabilitated that aren’t prisons
fair point that certainly is the reality.
Under the right circumstances, I’d like to think so. The thing about having no empathy is that being nice to others is still generally in your best interests even from a purely selfish perspective.
If given proper context and support, absolutely there’s no such thing as an inherently evil person imo, just people who developed into monsters over time.
Existing in this hellworld is not the proper context and makes it impossible for the worst people to be helped right now, is how I view it. The musks and nazis of the world, they just gotta go right now, though I believe they could be reformed in a post communist world
Though I’m not always sure about that, sometimes I feel like a person can get so twisted there’s no going back
man i wish TNG: The Neutral Zone had gotten any kind of followup episode.
depends
for some people, not in this life, not under capitalism
I think that everyone can be reformed, but in the case of people like Kirk, it’s best to stop them causing harm now than to try and reform them.
Edit: I just hit reply and realised this was an undertale quote. fuck.
who’s this guy? Boooooo where’s Sans Deltarune
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