Thinking about bad things does not make you bad

It is very convenient to suppose that people who spend, for example, all day thinking about war and violence and horror might become desensitized to it, and therefore default to violence as a solution more easily, the same way that you might suppose that someone who is addicted to sexist video games becomes more comfortable with or sympathetic to sexism, or on the other hand, someone who works in health care or education might have a more practiced and gentle touch when dealing with someone in a difficult situation.

But it is self-evident, or at least evident to me, that there are plenty of elected officials and big-brain decision-makers, now and throughout history, who know next to nothing about the harsh realities of war or violence or worse, and if anything this position of ignorance makes it easier to send people to the frontlines and to their death.

And similarly, we all know someone who loves to perseverate on violence, perhaps by watching action movies or reading true crime novels, who would never dream of hurting another human being, may even be a vegetarian.

And anyone who has ever been to school (so almost everyone who can read this post) can attest that some teachers are in that profession for the wrong reasons and use the classroom to imprison students in a fantasy of power and control, and perhaps you can also relate to the phenomenon of so-called “empathy burnout” that lets your doctors and nurses perform perfect kindness at the side of a sick patient but, behind closed doors, snap at their loved ones or inferiors.

What you can conclude from this is that the human soul is not a robot arm that just does what it’s programmed to do; we have such a thing as megacognition, which lets us spend a lot of time thinking about a bad idea and then conclude precisely that the idea is bad.

Once you understand this, you begin to grow suspicious of people who want to change society by changing the “inputs,” for example by banning books with gay sex in them to prevent people from having gay sex. (Edit to clarify, I don’t think that gay sex is bad, but those who want to ban the books do.) People are going to come to their own conclusions about what’s right and then do that; you can make them ashamed of it, but you can’t stop them from thinking and knowing deep down the difference between good and evil.