Years ago, I worked with a therapist who divided the world into three kinds of people: Mindful, mindless, and malicious. (Others might suggest there are really two kinds of people: Those who feel the need to divide people into categories and… well, okay, basically one kind of person…)
I’ve thought a lot about that over the years – what those categories mean, what ratio of people might fit into each, and what value there might be to looking at the world that way. A visit with my mom this weekend (who I got to watch give an amazing talk about women’s changing roles in the Jewish community) got the questions stirring for me again, big time. As I write this, I’m considering a shift in language to:
Mindful -> Responsive
as compared to
Mindless -> Reactive
The alliteration falls apart there because I have yet to come up with a synonym for malicious that begins with an R and really captures the spirit of the word. The closest I’ve gotten is wrong-headed which amuses but doesn’t satisfy me.
Responsive and Reactive go back to my earlier posts about the Pause and slowing down enough after any given stimulus, especially the emotional stuff, to respond with some thoughtfulness rather than react thoughtlessly. It’s the Pause that allows us to more deeply learn ourselves, our fears, and our baggage. It’s the Pause that allows us to opt out of feedback loops that aren’t serving us.
Malice is not only the bugger alliteration-wise; it’s also the bugger in the question of its very existence. Again and again this weekend, and over the last however-many-years, I’ve asked the question of myself and others: Do truly malicious people exist, or are there only reactive people working from bad information, from hurt places, or, in rarer instances, with problematic neural wiring?
Let’s do a thought experiment, shall we? Imagine a bad deed of some type, the kind of thing that comes across as just pointlessly wrong – the kind of thing we might easily define as malicious given a definition along the lines of intending to cause harm or spiteful.
And then ask yourself if there is any information that could arise that might move the deed to the reactive category even if the act itself continues to be problematic or even inexcusable.
Neurolinguistic programming (about which I know next to nothing) has a precept that says we make the best decisions we can given the information we have at the time. Could a seemingly malicious act move to the reactive category if you discovered the deed-doer was working from terrible misinformation?
What if the person had suffered extreme trauma that had deep psychological consequences?
What if the person truly believed the action was just?
Again, I’m not suggesting that any amount of background info could make, say, kicking a puppy suddenly okay. It’s not. Ever.
I think for me, it boils down to my ability to find compassion for people (and myself) in the midst of actions that I find problematic. If I can see the action as a reaction then I may still condemn the act – hell, depending on the severity of the act, I may still draw a hard boundary with the person – and I can do so with compassion, bringing the best of myself into a bad situation.
Alternately, seeing a person, rather than an act, as malicious strikes me as turning a complex and dynamic human being into a two-dimensional caricature of a person. That’s not only dehumanizing to the person in question, I think it could also be more generally dehumanizing to myself and others, much in the way that we can’t just numb bad feelings – we inevitably numb the good ones in the process.
I have no truth, though, just a bunch of thoughts swirling around. I’d truly love to hear your take:
Responsive, reactive, and malicious or just responsive and reactive?