Let’s go on a little trip, shall we. Imagine that you and I were walking down the street when, all of a sudden, I was mugged.
You’re standing over me, calling the police, when someone comes up to you and says that they can find the thief, for a small fee of course.
“Are you a Private I?” You inquire you skeptical thinker you. The man lets out a large say and tells that no, he is not a private I, but he’s a great father, got all A’s in high school AND college, and everyone he’s ever met would call him the nicest guy they know. I want you to think about that for a minute, reflect, if you will. Would you give this guy your money to help you out based on what you know? We’ll come back to this in a minute but first…
1. This is going to hurt.
I want to explain something upfront; I do not think any of you are a bad person. As a writer for Wingman I’m privy to our exclusive collecting of our key demographic that we have and, according to the electromagnetic waves we shoot at you from this screen, you’re all handsome, intelligent people who have huge dicks. That being said…
2. The world only cares about the product, not the producer.
Hey! Here’s a link telling you about how big a jerk Steve Jobs was. Did you know that, along with Mark Zuckerberg, they were 5 founders of Facebook not one. I sure didn’t. Why do I bring this up? Well, how many of you have IPhones? Chances are that when you got it, even if you knew Steve Jobs was a dick, you still used the phone because (at least for its time) it was new and innovative.
That’s something scientists have seen over and over again in humanity, we’ll often choose convenience over our own moral standards. The IPhone worked and was convenient so, who cared how the creator acted.
Now let’s go back to that hypothetical I proposed earlier. Would you have given that man money to hunt down the mugger? I wouldn’t have. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not because I’m a horrible person, everyone I met call me the nicest person they know.
It’s because in the end I don’t want to know about the producer, I just need to know the product works, and chances are that that’s how most of you reading this are too. Again, it’s not because you’re a bad person. Psychologists have proven time and time again that sticking to a strict moral standard takes a lot of energy, energy that we frankly can’t keep up 100% of the time. That’s why in the end, as long as the product works we don’t care about how the producer acts or behaves. Hey! Speaking of Walt Disney being sexist…
3. Sometimes you just have to bite your tongue.
This is the hardest thing for people to understand; sometimes, no matter how stupid or maddening it can be, you just have to bite your tongue and not say anything. Let’s use a real life example: I had a teacher, we’ll call him Phil, who was a fundament Christian (before you get all up in arms, I did go to a fundamentalist Christian school.) Ever day it seemed he had some new (normally made up) statistic about how evil gays, blacks, women, atheists, Muslims, or anyone who wasn’t a white Christian male was. And what did I do you ask, I held my tongue. I knew that talking back to him would cause me more harm than good so I decided to just tune him out and think about the NBA or the weekend.
But today, thanks to lower tolerance and the internet, we’re losing people with that ability. Holding our tongues and being kind are how we progressed as a species. And now the lack of that might just be our downfall.
4. Conclusion.
So what can you, the average Wingman reader, take away from all of this? That’s a really good question actually. You see, I didn’t write this to sound mean, or to discourage you from doing anything. Far from it really. I wrote this mainly in response to a question I get asked a lot which is, “How come (insert horrible person here) seems to be doing so well?” And my answer is always the same.
First, you only see the public appearance that said person puts forth, what you don’t get to see is all the personal problems he’s having, or all the good, nice people holding him together. Second, maybe he’s not doing so well after all. I mean, look at Donald Trump.
Originally, I believed that he would go all the way in the POTUS race. I mean, it seemed like he had everything, cunningness, smarts, and an inherent trait to have some people just like him for no apparent reason. But now, he’s losing his spot in said race and we see the media, who had once loved him, now turn against him.
So maybe the world isn’t that horrible after all, and I guess that’s just one more thing to be thankful for on this holiday season.
Wow…there are a LOT of typos in this…