Yes I did something good for a bad person and now I feel like shit
Discuss. Obviously being nice to homophobic Palestinians, or douchebag homeless people is cool but where do you draw the line based on how shitty a person is and how shitty their conditions are?
it's probably the best policy to help anybody who sincerely needs help - and that you're realistically capable of helping - without doing a bunch of moral calculus based on unknown variables. Nobody's a saint.
Just help folks. If they're shitty, maybe your not-shittiness will rub off on them. Their shittiness isn't your problem, morally speaking. But yours is.
I'm not saying go out of your way to do favors for the town Grand Wizard. If some of the variables in the moral calculus are in fact known, y'know, your helping resources may be better allocated elsewhere. But I think the above is a decent guide.
Maybe there's some misinterpretation going on here but your advice on how I should live my life in the last paragraph totally just sounds like a moral compass
"Hey sir, I see you car has a flat. I can help you fix that just as soon as you fill out this 5 page forum so I can do a Marxist analysis on whether me helping you is moral."
This isn't something that needs to be thought of at length. If they're a shitty person and you don't like them, don't do them any favors unless you're forced to.
On the balance of things the odds that you accidentally saved Hitler II are pretty low. I wouldn't worry about it too much.
Depends on a lot of factors, but in the end, any goodwill earned might mean that person will be a little open or accepting to your ideas and make them fractionally less ghoulish.
There's a certain point where behaving with the correct compassion burns you out more than it helps the recipient. Finding that point is an inexact art, and like @JackidyClack said you can't go around asking everyone to do a moral exegesis before taking any action.
I work at a shelter and struggle with this a lot. One guest is very out of touch with consensus reality and will go off on homophobic tirades. For a long time, I would just ignore it and not take him seriously as a person. Eventually, I realized that that wasn't appropraite either and it wasn't good for either of us for me to continue working with him so I tapped out.
In general, my thought is that its revolutionaries who fail the people and not the people who fail revolutionaries. If you are working with someone who does not have an explicit commitment to fascism and is in the popular classes, you should probably help them if you are able. (with the caveat to ability mentioned above!) The amount people's attitudes can change being helped and forced to humanize/relate to someone they would otherwise ignore or hold reactionary attitudes towards is enormous! At the same time it can suck being the person causing that change!
The people are stupid babies who cannot feed themselves, it’s absolutely the peoples fault and not the revolutionary’s when leftists fail to make inroads in marginalized communities. The only solution is to take away all agency from everybody and have society run by a small group of communists
Hitler had popular support, how the fuck are you supposed to fix something like that without subjecting the wider population to random rehabilitatory violence?
how do you imagine people will respond to 'random rehabilitatory violence'? how do you beat someone into liberation? in what way is venting against misguided workers revolutionary violence?
Well, working with the homeless is not 'praxis'. It is a good moral thing to do, but not 'praxis'. It does not build a revolutionary movement as the homeless do not have any means, theoretical or otherwise, by which to leverage power within the system. We know this because the wobblies already tried it better than you and it failed. As such, radicalizing the homeless is probably not high on the list of agenda items you should have. You can do it if you want, but if it fails, so what?
Ugh this whole thread sucks.
Yeah, but without specifics it's morally totally meaningless. And the only reason to find morality in 'radicalizing' someone is if you think it's praxis, which was the seperate specific issue I was addressing, to which I said, helping the homeless is a morally good thing, but radicalizing them is neither here nor there.
If the person is privileged AND shitty, fuck them.
Especially in terms of wealth, if they are not poor but still shitty, fuck them.
I cant think of a ghoulish person I'd feel inclined to do a favor for.
I agree, but that's only because most morality is just following what the bourgeoisie have deemed as acceptable
For me personally, I don't really care that much about most people and my class interests lie closer with the bourgeoisie so the only reason that I try to be a good person is because of my own moral compass
Which is why I asked this question because my morals kind of shape and define my entire life
I'd pull a real asshole out of a river, but I wouldn't help them with their taxes.
Our kindness is weaponized against us by the cruel.
That's too bad because kindness is part of what defines and separates us from the cruel.
are they paying my salary/wage? If not I’m not going to do jack shit. But if I only found out after helping them, there’s no point in losing sleep over it. Just make sure to ruin their lunch next time
