Topics Emotion

Question Why are all people sometimes mean? Robert (12 years old)

Accepted:
October 22, 2005

Comments

Robert, this is a good question, but it is hard to answer because people are mean for lots of different reasons. Sometimes people are mean because they aren't thinking about how other people feel. Sometimes they know how other people feel, but just don't care. And sometimes they actually want to hurt other people, and this might be for lots of different reasons, like they are jealous or something.

Maybe it is because there are so many different reasons why people may be mean that you are right that all people are sometimes mean. If you are right then that is sad, but we should also remember that at least almost everybody is also sometimes nice, and maybe a lot of people are nice much more often than they are mean.

My daughter Rachel, who is now 12, used to watch the Rugrats--she was, maybe, 6 at the time. Often she asked me, "Daddy, why is Angelica so mean?" All I could muster, back then, was something about how difficult a question that was to answer. But we went back to the question as she got older. I began with the distinction between reasons and causes, and suggested to her that we could ask "why?" in two different senses. Eventually I blamed Angelica's parents: a wimpy dad who gave her everything she asked for; a superaggressive, selfish, self-absorbed, absent mother. (I can hear Ray's mother, Marie Romano, exclaiming: "It's always the mother!") The genesis of evil (and of good) is a question philosophers and other scholars have grappled with for a very long time, going back at least to Socrates and Plato. Angelica has her share of Original Sin. Blame Eve. Due to Natural Selection, humans are by nature egoists--the selfish gene writ large. Bad people are really only ignorant; if they knew more, or knew what they knew more accurately, they wouldn't be (so) bad. Abuse breeds abuse. And so forth. I have a question: do we ever have a right to be mean? Or even: do we ever have a duty to be mean?

Question Why are all people sometimes mean? Robert (12 years old) Accepted:October 22, 2005

Question Why are all people sometimes mean? Robert (12 years old)

Accepted:
October 22, 2005