In the last year I have gotten two sex offenders tossed off of Facebook. Thinking about them, I started to consider personal responsibility and good vs evil. No one likes to think they are evil, and yet there are some that bash themselves. Those that hold themselves as less than good people seem to be a lot nicer to be around than those that explain away their evil.
Child molesters and sex offenders have been at the edge of my mind recently. In October I humiliated a pedophile named Ron Collins in Lexington while doing a seminar there. Since then, it seems he can’t go a week without posting another blog attacking me for being a part of a complicated plot against him and mentioning how he is going to bring me down and ruin me. Since he has proven that he is no threat to me in any respect, I can afford to sit back and look on his obsession and be fascinated by the whole thing. I honestly think he has spent 100 hours every month since then writing various things about me, but no other concrete action. But every hour he spends writing about me is one he can’t go out and try to prey on 13 year old girls again.
My experience with Ron Collins in the past somehow got the attention of someone when they ran across a person on a sexual conviction list for a child who was on Facebook. His name is David Allison. Facebook has a policy against convicted sex offenders being members, but he had an account anyway. I wrote a blog about the experience, with the link posted below. The guy said it was all a mistake and he was trying to clear his name when he contacted us to try to get us to not report him. I can believe mistakes and false accusations, but the way the guy acted didn’t fit that sort of situation. The mere fact that he didn’t wait for his name to be cleared and instead broke the rules of Facebook spoke volumes to me.
So, together some of us managed to figure out how to report him and got him tossed off of Facebook.
That knowledge came in handy not long after that. I found a sex offender who was in my city posting on Facebook. I honestly can’t remember his name now, but I do remember that I ran across him ona page for a local news source. There was a story involving the police and he was ranting on about how evil cops were. It went beyond normal and was similar to what I expect criminals that have been convicted (like Ron Collins) to do with the hatred and passion he took in trying to paint the police to look even worse than Osama Bin Laden. He was nasty and rude, attacking anyone that didn’t echo what he said and going far beyond decent behavior.
So, wondering what got up his butt, I did a search of his name and Colorado Springs and the sex offender registry was at the top of the first page.
Here is the thing, I took the time to confirm that it really was him and not just a person with the same name. I remember that I found that his birth date was the same as on the sex offender list. That was enough, but on his timeline he also talked about bad times behind him and mentioned that he wasn’t the same man he was when he went to prison.
Now I am thinking about that. He claims to essentially be another person than when he committed a pretty vile sex crime. In essence, he is saying that is was someone else that did the crime, not him. People use that phrase that they are different people now when they look back on the bad stuff they did.
Now compare this with a friend of mine. I am a believer that if you are the best at what you do in the room, you need to get to another room. So instead of hanging around with egotistical martial arts group that give each other ranks and titles, I try to associate with guys that have had a lot of real world violence under their belt and from which I can learn from. I prefer to learn from other people’s experiences than get any more scars building up my own.
So my friend has a lot of experience doing violence for money. It was mainly not in a good way. If you didn’t pay your loan shark, it was he that you were looking over your shoulder in fear of. Now he has found christianity and is a pretty decent guy. I would even let him babysit my kids, though I would hide any DVDs such as “Kill Bill” before I leave because I know his sense of humor.
My friend, the ex-thug, talks about himself as being a bad person. He does good, and he is trying to follow the faith of christianity. He actually does follow it a lot closer than many christians I can point to that loudly proclaim how good they are. But he has said that when he gets up in the morning he is a bad man who makes a choice to do good.
What a difference that is! The guy that committed the sex crime and still acted like an ass tries to pretend that he is somehow not the guy that did the crimes, while the guy that admits he fundamentally is the same guy as his past self is a much better person. That is what I want to talk about when we discuss personal responsibility and how we grow.
No one wants to think they are anything other than good. I have dealt with this in another blog about how I fear good people more than openly evil ones, because we can justify a lot in the name of doing “good.” When you look at some of the worst tragedies in history, such as Pol Pot and such, you find a drive to do good behind most of them.
And no one wants to take responsibility for their failures or trespasses. When we do, it is usually an effort. It does not matter what part of society you are in. There is a saying on Wall Street that when someone does well in the stock market, they say it is because they are a genius. But when they do poorly, it is because of a bad market. We have huge sections of our society now that seem devoted to explaining away their failures and ability to succeed.
Thomas Sowell wrote the following,
“No political message has proven to be more welcome, in countries around the world, in both democratic and undemocratic nations, and among peoples of every race and culture, than the message that your problems are not your fault, but the fault of others- and it is they who much change, not you. Moreover, it is they who must pay the consequences if they do not change, but not you.”
He wrote it about racism, but it applies to a lot of things. We have a society now that when you do something, it isn’t your fault. It is society, your parents, poverty or something else, never the actual person. That is considered cruel.
Now, there are influences on our lives. But do these sort of thing really controls us? In Japan I experienced racism far greater than most people in America have ever experienced. Koreans whose grandparents were brought over as slave labor experience laws on the books that would make most of us scream about the injustice. And yet, despite all the barriers they face, they get further than many who face much milder versions of racism. The culture there doesn’t allow people to blame outside influences as much as more ‘enlightened’ countries. I have run across many westerners in Japan that never got far. They listed the racism and difficulty in the language in how little they gained living there. They rarely did much to learn the language, which told me a lot. At the same time, there is a growing culture of used car salesmen from the middle east (treated worse than whites in Japan) who have managed to gain a reputation as decent businessmen and are gaining a lot of loyal customers to the businesses they create.
All these groups face racism and sometimes a big language problem- Japanese is damn difficult. But those I knew that talked about the barriers the most let them stop them while those that just counted it as just another problem to overcome went much further.
In terms of morality, this seems to be related. Those that think of themselves as being bad are rare, but the ones I know I trust much better than the high and mighty types like the preachers that keep getting caught in sex scandals. When you think of yourself as bad, but try to do good, then you are trying to be good. When you think you are good, you don’t think about doing good and assume all your impulses and desires come from being good. In the later case, we are much more likely to fool ourselves.
In fact, much of the history of christianity had the attitude that mankind was flawed and was stained with sin. That has been abandoned for the attitude that we are fundamentally good people but outside influences cause us to waver. I have long thought that when you see a system that has been working for generations or longer, it is prudent to understand exactly all the reasons it survived that long before you start to fool with it. But we have given up the idea of original sin in favor of societal influences or other things that take away from our perfection. In short, we are good and not fully responsible for any evil that we do.
What does that bode for us as a society?
I am not giving answers here. I am just throwing this out for people to think about.
Link to the story about David Allison.