From the article:
Okay, I admit that I also had a fantasy of being the manic pixie dream girl who helped him turn his life around. I pictured us opening an HIV/AIDS clinic together and wandering the streets of New York, handing out wads of cash to homeless people and other strangers.
That may well be true, but you shouldn’t admit that.
[quote=“TooGoodToCheck_, post:12, topic:71711, full:true”]
re Martin Shkreli being human - I hate to sound like I’m defending Shkreli, but I’ve occasionally met people who are actually really nice in person but they sort of don’t process abstractions, or can’t connect the idea of a large group of people to actual individuals. People who take the old saw that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic, and that phenomenon in their brains is just turned up to eleven.[/quote]
Absolutely. I remember being a kid and watching 3 Ninjas (the title of which should have been 3 Surprisingly White Ninjas) and some of the comic relief villains in the story were (inexplicably) hippies and that their VW van (of course) had a bumper sticker that said “DIE YUPPIE SCUM”. It wasn’t until over a decade later that I even knew what a Yuppie was, and here I am more years later and I feel more and more like it’s becoming my ethos (albeit far less literal). I think people really take for granted how much being neutral and going on about their business is really part of how bad and indefensible things are allowed to continue happening.
These same people get extremely defensive when you point out how much they buy into a system that is deeply immoral, no matter how gently you phrase it and how much you avoid pointless (it’s always pointless) sanctimony. It’s not like I hate them, and it’s certainly not like I live in anything other than a glass house. We’re all forced to go along to get along to some extent, but people get really emotionally invested in systems that allow them to accrue a lot of benefit and will overlook a lot to feel good about it. There really aren’t a lot of cartoonishly evil people out there. One of the startling things that was made clear by the history of terrible events is that there may have been a few sadists in our midst, but that truly terrible wide-scale destruction and inhumanity are perpetrated by the collective efforts of what you and I would consider perfectly nice people.
