Bad intentions!

"Some people are so rotten!" Says one of my good friends. He is clearly convinced such people exist. People with bad intentions who do wrong. Nothing controversial in her position, is there? Yes, there is. There is a big amount of confusion. Let's clear that up.

What do we really mean by bad intentions? A thief robs a house. He had a bad intention and acted on it. Avaricious politicians. Rape. Murder. War. Bad intentions. Clear, crystal clear.

Yet, Socrates insisted more than two millennia ago, during the first experiment we call democracy in ancient Athens, that everybody does only what they believe to be the best of all possible actions, all available options. Always. An addict smokes, drinks up, shoots up. The craving is irresistible. Anything short of the fix leads to pain and suffering unimaginable to many of us who are blissfully prone to such extremes of substance addiction. Do they believe they are doing what is right and don't they know that there is a better way? Yes and sadly no.

How do we know? Imagine that you fell from six feet high straight down your foot on top of a kink which inevitably caused your ankle to fracture and dislocate and a bone or two almost puncture out of your skin. Are you in pain? Not yet. The miraculous adrenaline response numbs your nerves and if you are present enough and are not scared by your own thoughts, you notice that your ankle looks very unnatural, yet there is sense of a deep peace within and it's not disturbed by the ghastly looks of your lower limb. Yet. Then, after a long while, cause it's the pandemic and all ambulances are busy, first help arrives and announces that they would need to stabilize the ankle before they can take you to the nearest ER with a trauma center. And, by the way, they say they are not qualified paramedics and can not provide any numbing agents. And the moment they wiggle your ankle to push the stabilizing board under it, you experience the pain known as 10 out of 10! Actually, not the exact same moment. There is a split second delay between the moment of wiggling and the moment the tsunami of the action potential reaches the pain centers deep within your head, inside your brain. How clearly I felt it coming! Yet, there was nothing I could do to stop that wave from hitting my poor brain. If there were, nobody could convince me not to do it.

Now, do you see how we know that an addict would do anything to not experience that 10 over 10 level of pain?

You might object and say, but, they got into it in the first place for pleasure, to get high, didn't they? And in some cases you'd be correct. And, why did they do that stupid mistake? Well, you guessed it, they believed it was the best experiment to do at the time. Call it peer pressure. Call it dysfunctional upbringing, trouble at home or school. The variety of the causes abound! But, the essence of it, the root cause is very very simple and fundamental: the kid believed that she was doing the right thing. Oh, she might have had some doubts. Who doesn't? Yet, there was a moment of certainty and up went the glass, down went the innocent looking fluid called beer. Are you still complaining that uncertainty is a bad thing? Well, depends on what you get certain about.

Nobody gets intentional about a future act convinced that it is wrong, let alone bad or evil. On the contrary, they are convinced that they must do it, even though after the fact, they might say, with full honesty, the devil made me do it. The thought, the belief, the conviction is so strong, no wonder we give it the name of the most potent angel, or demon of the good old scriptures.

Yet, we started this page acknowledging the commonality of the "rotten people" with "bad" intentions. What's going on here? Again, Socrates put it in the simplest form: the only evil is ignorance. So, yes, we call it bad, but it is only ignorance. A brutal dictator, ignorance. A serial killer, ignorance. A meteor comes and hits the earth killing all the dinosaurs? Ignorance. And in that last case, ignorance was bliss. If an alien civilization were to stop the big rock, some conjecture, the puny mammals would never get a chance to flourish and evolve much further to get to primates, Homo Erectus and eventually Homo Sapiens Sapiens, humankind. 

On the other end of the spectrum, we have good intentions and the wise old saying: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So, yes, just a little high, was the good intention of the teen who wanted to get a bit of a relief from the oppression in the dysfunctional home or the isolation and bullying at school. 

Let's conclude and hopefully agree that there are no bad intentions. There are misguided intentions. There is confusion. There is ignorance. Not convinced? Read more on "bad" which is just like darkness.