Posts by Justin Brooks58

Paul Thompson3 said:Not true. Weakness is probably the most obvious human trait.
When someone does something truly horrific because it's just their nature, it doesn't matter if they deserve pity or an explanation. The point is they need to be punished and stopped.

Take a predator, for example—someone born with those impulses. They aren't "guilty" of being born that way.
Eventually, they realize they can't control the urges and it's only a matter of time before they hurt a child. If that person had any sense of integrity—if they weren't so weak—they’d know what to do: end it themselves or seek medical intervention to stop the impulse.
Since those cases are rare, and it's much more common for people to buckle under their weaknesses despite knowing they'll cause harm, we're back to the same conclusion: most people are weak.

Why do average people hide their opinions when they don't align with the crowd or aren't "socially acceptable"?
Why do they step on others just to save themselves?
Why did ordinary Germans follow the Nazis so easily?
Why is it so simple to manipulate people into doing exactly what a dictator wants?

And maybe the clearest example: why, when someone is getting beaten up in the street, don't bystanders jump in to stop the attacker?
Because they're weak.

Why does some man stubbornly live by righteous principles, staying kind and gentle even when society calls those traits weaknesses? Because he's strong. Most of our species is weak, and the fact that we have sayings like "only fools die for ideals" just proves how pathetic we really are.

The user claims he was just born that way. So, he's saying it wasn't caused by his environment; he was simply born with that wiring. Concepts like "right" and "wrong" are relative, and while he surely has some sense of morality, he clearly doesn't view his pedophilic tendencies as "wrong." It's unrealistic to expect a person to fight their own nature, especially since, as Descartes noted, "Of all things, reason is the most equitably distributed."

All these questions could be framed as weakness, but the answers could also lie in the desire to belong, the pursuit of personal advancement, basic survival instincts, or just getting swept up in a cult of personality.

Morgan Bishop4 said:Yeah, they’re definitely weak, and honestly, that’s exactly why they act out like that in the first place...
Look, the whole thing about you being unable to forgive someone isn't actually about how much "malice" they had or how bad they acted... it’s really more about your own capacity to let things go, if you think about it...
And let’s be real, the people who actually end up causing the most damage are the ones who desperately need our help... I mean, look, you can't really save a total psychopath; those freaks thrive on the chaos and the carnage, so they're basically a lost cause... But someone who grew up in the gutter, someone who started stealing just to put food on the table and then spiraled into even bigger crimes because that was the only life they ever knew? That’s where the real work is. Even with predators... they need intervention to learn how to actually control those twisted impulses before they ruin more lives...

Of course, it's not all black and white. There are varying degrees of extreme "evil," and yes, there are people who are genuinely weak (I might have overgeneralized in my last post by grouping everyone together), but we shouldn't label every "bad" person as weak just because of them. Some people are just born bad.

Right, and I wasn't talking about forgiveness at all; I was talking about empathy.

Paul Thompson3 said:Some are good, some are bad—most are just a blank slate. If the world is truly a mirror of humanity, then it’s pretty obvious that people generally aren't great, though a few individuals actually pull their weight.
I don't think humans are inherently evil so much as we are just pathetic. We're fragile in every sense of the word, with far too few people possessing the actual strength to stick to what's right—and even when they try, their own weaknesses often turn those "right" intentions into something completely wrong and disastrous.

To me, this sounds like the most basic excuse in the book. It’s a nice little way to dodge accountability—convincing ourselves that nothing is our fault because we're all just "pathetic" and "weak," so we might as well just drift along with the current and see where it takes us.

This whole idea of human "frailty" or being "pitiful" just makes me feel sorry for the logic, not the people. Do actual monsters deserve pity? I'm talking about murderers, rapists, predators, sadists. Would you ever sit there and try to "understand" someone who committed an atrocity against your own family just because they were "too weak" to resist their impulses? Of course not. That's nonsense.

People can be anything, but let's stop pretending they're weak.