A comment worth saving

I know this now, because in the last month or so, I’ve been struggling to identify my “top-level” master control circuits.

And you know what I found they were controlling for? Things like:

* Being “good”
* Doing the “right” thing
* “Fairness”

But don’t be fooled by how harmless or even “good” these phrases sound.

Because, when I broke them down to what subcontrollers they were actually driving, it turned out that “being good” meant “do things for others while ignoring your own needs and being resentful”!

“Fairness”, meanwhile, meant, “accumulate resentment and injustices in order to be able to justify being selfish later.”

And “doing the right thing” translated to, “don’t do anything unless you can come up with a logical justification for why it’s right, so you don’t get in trouble, and no-one can criticize you.”

Ouch!

Now, if you look at that list, nowhere on there is something like, “go after what I really want and make it happen”. Actually doing anything – in fact, even deciding to do anything! – was entirely conditional on being able to justify my decisions as “fair” or “right” or “good”, within some extremely twisted definitions of those words!
-PJ Eby