July 02, 2025: Moral permission for misconduct malfeasance and wrongdoing
Mantra 1. You should feel comfortable being yourself around those close to you.
I like this mantra but I think the ambiguity in the phrase "being yourself" can be easily abused. Of course there are some aspects of oneself which are neutral or even positive in nature, which might comprise slight annoyances in those around them but which everyone generally agrees they should be allowed to express. But how much can one "get away" with under this mantra? Well of course it depends on how we define "being yourself." Consider first the following
(!) Definition 1. To
be yourself is to act on your desires.
Now most will agree that under this definition, Mantra 1 should not be upheld without reserveration: this encompasses cheating, abuse, betrayal, and pretty much every other nasty interpersonal sin one can think of. However, I claim that, even if we place boundaries on our mantra, and say that it must be closely monitored but is generally true for impulsive or habitual things like smoking or mild negative learned social behavior, this definition is not only wrong but in itself the most common vehicle for abuse of the sentiment.
One might think that because I disagree with this definition, I consider this mantra to be without sacrifice, but this is untrue. Consider someone who is trying to quit smoking. We're going to consider for the sake of this argument that everyone involved believes that smoking is bad; I make no claim for or against this here, but I think it makes for a good example here. Let's say that they have attempted to go cold turkey, and have determined that they can't quite make it stick (which we will believe to be true, for quibbles see the Appendix),
1 so they have decided to taper their use. That person smoking is a negative trait to them, but I would still want this to count under "being themself" under our mantra - the fact that they are smoking is not something they should feel the need to hide from those close to them.
Furthermore, say someone considers smoking to be bad, but has determined that they are truly incapable of quitting (which again, we will believe to be true, for quibbles see the Appendix). I would say that this person is also "being themself."
However, if someone determines that they are capable of quitting by some method, and agree that smoking is bad, and choose to do nothing at all, I would not want this action to be covered under our mantra. Peddlers of this first definition would disagree; you might hear from them something similar to
This negative action, whether I am doing what I can to curtail it or not, is just who I am, and thus by the mantra I should feel comfortable performing it around those I'm close to.
To poison the well they may even propose the following alternative definition to make their own look like the most logical:
(!) Definition 2. To
be yourself is to express your positive traits.
Now admittedly, this is closer, but even with the ambiguity of "positive traits" aside, this isn't what we want either (and not just because it feels icky to say!), as we can see from our examples. So where does this leave us? I propose the following
Definition 3. To
be yourself is to be the best version of yourself that you can be today.
And where does this actually leave us with respect to what we can "get away" with? The answer is another pretty common
Mantra 2. You should feel comfortable making mistakes around those close to you.
Now of course, this must also come with limitations. There are amounts and flavors and culpabilities of inflicted pain where, even if you are "doing your best," you simply do not deserve for those around you to stay close to you. That said, while this does mean that I disagree with
Mantra 3. Everyone is inherently deserving of having someone (living, not supernatural, no loopholes!) close to them,
and I think there are many instances where these limitations have to be invoked, I think that it is vanishingly rare that there is someone for whom there is no person and no dynamic in which they can get close to someone without passing this threshold. Immunity to leprosy aside, most of the interactions that Jesus had with sinners and outcasts and whatnot are pretty repeatable. Though admittedly many of these such interactions were pretty short term, they provide decent blueprints for the sorts of interactions I'm talking about. Moreover, for those with true limitations in this area I think that very often time patience love can expand their horizons and ability to be close to others in a healthier way.
Appendix
Some may have fundamental qualms with our descriptions of people who can't quit smoking, either period, or by one means or another, on the merit of the mantra
Mantra 4. Anyone can stop doing something bad.
My thoughts on this are more in line with those of
Hank Green:
I really like the elephant rider metaphor where, like, our bodies are the elephant, and our consciousness is the person like, driving the elephant? We all have many situations where we've realized that we would like to go somewhere but the elephant doesn't want to go that way and it simply will not. We just can't in that moment stop ourselves from saying the mean thing, from making the bad decision, from finishing the burrito, even though you are stuffed full of burrito.
But while I personally disagree (and I think a lot of the belief in this mantra comes from belief in Mantra 3), we likely agree in the end on Mantra 2 (and on many other practicalities of our sets of beliefs), even though you may believe it stands on its own rather than living within Mantra 1. And lucky you, you are probably more immune to the kinds of manipulation described in this post! Yay!