You can ruin almost any social system with enough bad faith.
It takes very little cleverness to go to a toilet with a sign reading “please do not flush paper towels,” flush gravel until it breaks, and then declare victory.
But victory over what? You haven’t debunked the warning sign or the plumbing system; you’ve just abused them. You have not made a persuasive case that the warning sign should read “please do not flush paper towels or gravel,” because obviously your wise ass is just waiting to see that sign so you have an excuse to flush a third inappropriate thing. You also haven’t made a persuasive case that the toilets should be continuously guarded and all visitors frisked for non-flushable objects, because the vast majority of people aren’t as big of a jerk as you.
“This system can be broken by someone who exploits its rules in the most malicious possible way” is true of many otherwise fine systems, and unless the system is safety-critical or there’s a very large group of people motivated to break it, it’s not really an important point to make.
There is nothing original, helpful, or insightful about pointing out that one person with a firehose could ruin a whole sand-sculpture competition. Yeah, it’s true, that is a risk we are taking. Please don’t show up with a firehose just to prove your point.
This is how I feel about people who create fake donation posts, and take actual money from real people, to “teach them a lesson” about being too kind. It’s obvious that they don’t care about people getting tricked out of their money, because if they did, they wouldn’t be so eager to do it to people themselves. What they object to is kindness, and they’ll do anything they can to destroy it where they find it.
I’ve seen several posts about health insurance, welfare, paid maternity leave + + (that have all turned out to be written by americans, just saying) that go on about how if we help a bunch of people, SOME are going to take advantage of the system and that’s unacceptable. And.. what IS that? Why is it that helping 1000 people among whom 5 maybe don’t need that help, is seen as worse than helping no one? Why is it so terrible a risk that kindness may fall upon the occasional individual who doesn’t deserve it as much? If ONE of your guests turned out to have already eaten, would you cancel dinner? No!
There are ALWAYS gonna be a small amount of people who take advantage of kindness, but it seems to me only a very fucked up society would consider that a solid reason to not be kind.
That’s a really good point. I’ve had this exact conflict with people many times; “this system is bad, look, if I act in bad faith, it doesn’t work”. Okay, so stop doing that?
Published
Marshmellowmilktea 