Bad Thoughts, Bad text, Bad Choices

As humans we sometimes make pathetic choices, and for some reason we seem to have forgotten that.

The guys from the funeral service seizing the moment nobody was watching them to take a few sneaky pics of themselves, smiling with the thumbs up, with the body of Maradona, then posting these pics online: this can easily be labelled a pathetic choice. They were instantly fired from their jobs, which seems proportionate to the crime. All accounts coming from Argentina say people are enraged and want their blood. Mourning people have been deeply disturbed in a delicate moment when they were emotionally charged and almost literally down on their knees. Some accounts report that one of the guys has been lynched by a crowd, but it is unclear if this is true. In general, there seems to be an agreement that these guys seriously risk their lives. One of the guys, a massive fat bloke with a big bald head, has since appeared on tv crying saying he is just really sorry and he made a terrible choice.

Most reasonable people would agree that them being fired and psychologically tortured for a day or two, maybe even physically tortured, is probably more than sufficient as a punishment. We, as society, can be almost certain they have learned their lesson.

A large part of the problem seems the fact that people, particularly vengeful communities online, forget what it is like to make pathetic choices. They forget how easy it is to act in a completely questionable way. Some people say this is the context we live in, where the human is viewed as completely in control, the master of his body and his choices. If you simply continuously made good choices, which seems rather easy, you would be an angel.

For example, we as a species, at least in the West, find that the romantic sphere of our life is embedded in a movement called Romanticism, which started about 140 years ago, and we appear to be embedded deeply in this movement still now-a-days. This movement, that has shaped our love lives in many ways, all listed brilliantly by Alain de Botton in his book “The Course of Love”, essentially says that we pick our partners based on pure feelings, like a hunch or an intuition, we love our partners in pure and unadulterated ways, we give our partners nicknames like “angel”, and that any deviation or betrayal from this pure, almost Disney version of love, is the end of the dream. Picking partners based on rationality and ticking boxes is seen as cold and against the rules. Within this romantic dictum, one pathetic action kills it all.

In the Twitter community, one wrong word and you are out, and not just out of Twitter, we want you out of society. There have been people tweeting something before getting on a plane, then several hours later, getting off the plane, into the terminal, checking their social media, and realizing that their tweet has snowballed into a massive outrageous scandal and they have been fired from their job. People seem to interpret a bad joke in the worst possible way, and hysterical interpretations of small amounts of ambiguous text are a recipe for disaster, which doesn’t seem to contribute much to the human project.

[picture by Sonia Rentsch and Andrew B. Myers]

Here is the link to the full story of the woman losing everything over a bad joke:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?auth=login-google

So sometimes people make pathetic choices and we interpret them as pathetic and unforgivable. This is definitely the case of the guys taking pictures with Maradona’s corpse. Other times, we seem to be training ourselves to have the worst possible interpretation of other people’s behaviour, even when it is not clear their behaviour was actually pathetic. Interpretations of racism when someone makes any form of generalization or says anything ambiguous or nasty, are dangerous examples of this. If you see racists everywhere, you see the real racists nowhere. And this is a fact that echoes deep across the entire human universe. Jonathan Haidt in his book “The Coddling of the American Mind” points precisely to this, explaining that when you have thousands of new students joining University each year, who come from around the world, have different backgrounds and some of them are statistically on the autism spectrum, you have a recipe for disaster if you encourage these students to interpret things other students say or tweet, in the harshest most unkind way. Rather than train people to constantly label behaviour and to focus on “how did that make you feel?”, we could create a much more harmonious social world for ourselves if we were encouraged to take a favourable interpretation of another person’s behaviour. If we were encouraged to take two steps back and to simply ask the person what exactly they meant by something that sounded off, we would be making massive steps forward.

Did the guys who took the pictures with Maradona make a pathetic choice? It absolutely seems so. Are we misinterpreting their behaviour, probably not, as it seems it was actually disrespectful behaviour motivated by a crumb of attention and publicity. Are these guys angels who are expected to always behave angelically? Probably not, they are men who made pathetic choices and who have likely been gifted a very low IQ.

I will conclude these ramblings on Bad Thoughts, Text, and Choices by telling a little story about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which teaches us that even when someone says something that is entirely unambiguous it doesn’t mean the person actually believes it, at least, not all the time. There is a brilliant man and leading expert on OCD called Steffen Moritz, who is the head of a psychiatric unit in Hamburg, and when I was just a boy I reached out to him for advice on a little Bachelor project I was doing on OCD. Instead of simply ignoring the random email from a student in Scotland, Steffen answered it in a brilliant way and shared with me some of his latest discoveries on the subject, and was phenomenally helpful. What I learned from the material was incredible. Apparently everyone is flooded with ideas all of the time, and many of the ideas that reach our consciousness are total rubbish. And we know they are rubbish. It just so happens that some people attribute too much importance to their rubbish idea and they enter a state of deep anxiety because of it, forcing them to create some little distracting behaviour (i.e. a compulsion), to relax themselves and distract the mind. Frequently these silly ideas that the mind produces are sexual, and they end up haunting those who give these ideas too much importance. Examples are people who have thought of kissing another person in inappropriate social contexts, or people walking in busy transport thinking about their hand reaching out and grabbing another person’s crotch, or people imagining shouting out something obscene in public. People with OCD get fixated on the fact that they had these ideas in the first place, giving maximal importance to their random idea, rather than favourably interpreting it as just a silly idea, and moving onto the next idea their brain produces, which might be more or less silly.

The OCD literature can tell us so much about the dangers of attributing too much importance to your thoughts. Reminding ourselves of this can be useful both when we have a silly thought and we are tempted to communicate it, and it can also be useful when we have to interpret dubious statements and choices made by our fellow human beings. Ultimately these people who took the pictures with Maradona are just flawed humans who’s brain produced a terrible thought, and it seems fair to say they have been punished enough.