One thing I have noticed in life is a lot of people have a tendency to put sinister motives on people who have done nothing to deserve it.
I had a bartender job once. Lasted one weekend. The boss came in on Sunday night and said someone had stolen money out of his safe. Of course I did it. So he fired me. Thing is, I didn’t take anything out of his safe. In fact, I had no idea he even had one and I would never go in his office anyway.
An aunt of mine does this all the time. She needs to see people as having lousy and nasty intentions. She heard that I had made $9,000 off this website. It’s true. At the time she heard that, major car repairs were needed on my car to the tune of $2,000. I only had $1,000. My Mom kicked in the rest and I’m paying her back. This ugly-minded aunt of mine actually thought that I was sitting on $9,000 and refusing to pay the $2,000 for the car repair, instead claiming poverty and forcing the bill on my Mom. In other words, she thinks I’m a huge scumbag. Well anyone who knows me knows I would never do that.
This idiot aunt has known me my whole life, but she doesn’t have the slightest understanding of what sort of a person I really am at the core of my being. I’m actually quite decent, but somehow she’s always seen me an evil-minded scumfuck.
She also routinely thinks I am dangerously incompetent to the point of being a menace, such as driving vehicles. True, I burned up a couple of transmissions because no one told me I needed to be in 2nd all the time. Turns out Drive is actually Overdrive. If you put the car in “Drive” and drive it that way, after several years, you burn up your tranny. Counterintuitively, the car is not supposed to be driven in Drive. It’s supposed to be driven in 2nd.
I figured it out and started driving it in 2nd. But she insisted that I was a permanent menace behind the wheel because I burned up car engines, apparently because I am a dumbass. I guess she also assumed that I am incapable of something called learning. I drove a new vehicle 35 miles from my Mom’s house to my home, in 2nd of course. She was alarmed and running around like a circus geek insisting that I had just blown up another transmission by driving a car 35 miles in the wrong gear. Truth is you don’t blow the tranny by driving it a few dozen miles that way. Instead, the tranny blows after ~60,000 miles when you mis-drive it like that.
I could go on and on. She has been doing this my whole life.
Why do humans do this? We vastly overestimate the evil of our fellow humans.
Most people are actually quite decent people. They are also generally competent, responsible, considerate, thoughtful, conscientious, pleasant, self-supporting if not out and out giving and generally harmless and efficient.
Yes, scumbags, layabouts, fuck-ups, assholes, incompetent morons, leeches, and generally dangerous idiots exist of course, but they’re not too common. I don’t see a lot of evil or wickedness in my day to day life, and I live in a slum!
Most people want to be good people, not bad people, regardless of their religion. And most people are going about their day to day lives trying to be about as good or decent as they can be, simply because most people seem to have well-developed consciences or religious beliefs that keep them from acting too ugly.
Yes, there are nasty, wicked, unpleasant, malevolent, and downright evil people in the world. I assume there are some even around this neighborhood. But most humans, at least in the US, don’t seem to rock that way.
So once again, why do we vastly overestimate the evil of our fellow man? What’s the advantage of seeing someone as evil when they’re not, or even if they are the opposite? What’s the point? People want to see a nasty world crawling with very bad people everywhere? Why? If I felt that way, I would hardly go outside. How does this mindset benefit the person who twists reality in this way to put a malevolent spin on so many innocuous things?
