We have all known at least one person who is socially inept. Socially inept people sometimes say something that offends someone or do something that makes someone feel uncomfortable. They do not intend to cause such offense or discomfort to another person, but they sometimes do so anyway because they are lacking in social graces. Sometimes socially inept people can be mistaken as mean because of the unintended hurt that they can cause.
So when someone hurts another person, how do we know whether the hurtful behavior is a result of social ineptitude or a manifestation of evil inside of someone’s heart?
Evil can be mistaken for social ineptitude
Someone can be both evil and socially inept. Sometimes when people have a reputation for being socially inept or socially awkward, and they say something hurtful or offensive, there is a tendency to attribute most or all offensive/hurtful behavior to the social awkwardness without any consideration to the possibility that some of the bad behavior may be a manifestation of evil in someone’s heart. Indeed, people sometimes like to give others the benefit of the doubt, but as discussed in the Faux Peacekeepers post, giving someone the benefit of the doubt can have devastating consequences.
Below are two ways that one can tell whether hurtful behavior is caused by social ineptitude or evil inside someone’s heart:
1) How does the person react when he/she finds out that his/her behavior hurt or offended someone? Does he/she react with remorse? Or does he/she figure that because he/she did not mean to hurt anyone, it is the other person’s problem and not his/hers?
2) Is the socially inept behavior consistent across many scenarios? Or does the person act like a buffoon a lot of the time, but then become cunning and crafty when presented with an opportunity to fulfill a selfish desire at the expense of others?
Consider socially awkward Raymond from the Everybody Loves Raymond TV series. Raymond acts like a buffoon a lot of the time, but if we look closely, we notice that Raymond can be quite cunning and crafty when he wants to be. In one episode, there was a dispute between Raymond’s wife and Raymond’s mother. The dispute caused Raymond’s wife and Raymond’s mother to compete for Raymond’s affection. Raymond enjoyed this so much that he intentionally pulled off a scheme to prolong the dispute just so that he would be showered with extra affection for awhile longer. Eventually, Raymond’s family found out what he was doing, which Ray’s brother called “taking advantage of the situation”. I do not recall Raymond showing very much remorse for what he had done, and this is not the only time that Raymond did something wicked to fulfill his selfish desires, and at the expense of others.
The story of Mike
I once knew someone named Mike who had the reputation at our school as the “creepy stalker”. Whenever he tried to make friends with female students, he would make them feel like they were being followed. Some students complained that they had to kick him out of their dorm room because otherwise he would overstay his welcome for hours. People who knew Mike well, however, testified that he was innocent. He did not mean to hurt anybody. He was just socially inept.
I did not enjoy Mike’s company very much because he was not a good conversationalist. Even when I did try to force him to talk about something interesting, he would switch from being boring to being annoying by invalidating what I was saying for reasons that did not make sense. I sat with him at mealtimes anyway because he did not seem to have that many other friends.
Two other female friends of mine did not want him around because he made them feel like they were being followed. I told him that he should apologize to them for making them feel uncomfortable, and then they would likely allow him to be their friend again. He refused to apologize, however. Based on his reasoning, if he did not intend to make them feel uncomfortable, then he should not have to apologize. He did not seem to feel remorse for causing them psychological discomfort. I told him that he should try to see things from the other person’s perspective and put himself into the other person’s shoes. He explained to me that he cannot put himself into someone else’s shoes because to do that, he would have to be able to read minds.
Mike did eventually apologize to my other two female friends, but only after they continued to shun him. It appeared that he only wanted to do the right thing when there were adverse consequences to him.
Another female student who felt uncomfortable around Mike was one of Mike’s teammates on the university fencing team. Mike eventually got kicked off of the team for making this other female team member feel like she was being stalked. Mike decided to join the fencing team at a nearby university instead. He was bragging to me about how well he was performing in the fencing tournaments after joining this other fencing team. He said that the members of this other fencing team could not see why he would get kicked off of our university’s fencing team. He did not seem to understand that the reasons he got kicked off of the university fencing team had nothing to do with his fencing ability. The reasons had to do with the well-being of one of the team members, which, ethically speaking, should be higher priority than having the best players.
Mike was gleefully telling me about how our university’s fencing team was having this “civil war” over him because some of the teammates were on his side and some were not. The fact that Mike enjoyed this discourse, of which he was the cause, was yet another manifestation that Mike was not that good of a person. Good people do not want disputes to arise because of them. Mike, in his egocentricity, seemed to enjoy being at the center of attention.
In general, I found that Mike had other issues besides just social ineptitude. He also was egocentric, judgmental and self-centered.
Not all evildoers aim to hurt someone
Have you ever heard someone say “he did some bad things, but he has a good heart?” Sometimes I wonder what exactly the standards are for what constitutes a “good heart” when someone makes this statement. I wonder if people say “good heart” simply because the person in question does not really aim to hurt anyone.
Not every bad person wakes up in the morning thinking I think I will try to hurt someone today. What he/she make think is I aim to get what I want, and I am not going to put any thought into who gets hurt in the process. If someone does get hurt, that is their problem. I will explain that I didn’t mean to and then carry on…
In the case of Mike, he did not aim to hurt anyone. Supposedly, he made females feel uncomfortable around him because he was socially inept and did not know what affect his behavior had on others. If you ask me, I think that the reason he did not know what affect his behavior had on others was that he did not care. He also figured that as long as he did not intend to make someone feel uncomfortable, he was absolved from responsibility. If he were a better person, he would not have adopted this attitude.
The story of Jeffrey
Jeffrey was another person I knew who had the reputation for being socially awkward. On a couple of occasions, he said something to me that I found to be judgmental and offensive. On one occasion, we were talking about an upcoming potluck dinner. I expressed concern that I may not have enough to eat at this potluck dinner because I was vegan and did not eat wheat. In response, Jeffrey accused me of “just going for the food”. I thought that was a mean and judgmental thing to say. The question is: did Jeffrey say this because he was socially awkward and did not know any better, or did he say this simply because he was a jerk?
I had a friend who frequently held potluck dinners in his apartment. He told me that he decided to not invite Jeffrey attend the potluck dinners anymore because Jeffrey was not bringing any potluck dishes, and was instead eating other people’s potluck dishes. My friend thought that it was unfair for me and the others to put effort into making potluck dishes while Jeffrey ate the food and brought no potluck dish of his own. Here, we can reasonably assume that Jeffrey really was an inconsiderate jerk, and not just “socially awkward”.
Bad with women? Or just a bad person?
Ever hear of men (in television or real life) who have a reputation for not knowing how to talk to women? These kinds of men are known for pissing off women left and right. Sometimes culture makes this out to be funny, presenting the image of a man having yet another interaction with a woman where he says the wrong thing at the wrong time, and then walks away with his iced coffee inverted on top of his head. Culture often believes that pleasing women is this special skillset, maybe even an art, that only the most fortunate and savviest of men have.
The truth is that being “bad with women” may be a sign that the man is actually just a bad person. Take the Howard Wolowicz character from The Big Bang Theory TV series. Howard Wolowicz likes to be a playboy, but he is pretty bad at it. We viewers are expected to laugh as he interacts with women and keeps getting rejected, and sometimes even pisses them off.
If we take a closer look, however, we see that Howard’s intentions towards women are malicious. He is a sexual predator at heart. He even gets excited at the prospect of meeting women who have low self-esteem from years of being fat and ugly because he figures that it will be easier to get them to have sex with him. We find out in one episode that he lost his virginity to his cousin. As a sexual predator, he may not be good at fulfilling his evil desires — after all, he is not “sexy” — but he still is acting on those evil desires all the time nonetheless. To put frosting on the cake, we viewers are expected to believe that the reason women do not like him is that he is physically less attractive and too dorky. In reality, women have much deeper reasons to not like him and to avoid him. He is an evil, sexually malicious creature. As I mentioned in a previous post, there are other areas of his life (besides his interactions with women) where he behaves in ways that are wrong.
So when a man is a bad man, why would we not notice how horrible he is when he is around other men? For example, when we see Howard Wolowicz around his friends Sheldon, Leonard and Raj, he seems to act like a perfectly nice person most of the time. How he treats Penny, however, is a different story. In one episode, Penny felt treated so badly by him that she punched him in the face.
For one thing, women are the primary target of sex discrimination. Therefore, when a man has sexist behavioral tendencies, it will show the most in how he treats women. Sexism can be subconscious, so many men who are sexist do not know it. They treat women with a certain kind of disrespect that they would not exhibit towards other men. Then they may wonder why they seem to always be pissing women off. Meanwhile, other men may not notice such a man exhibiting offensive behaviors because they are not the target, women are.
Another factor is that a regular heterosexual man can only fulfill his sexual desires with women. Therefore, a man who is a bad person will have a reason to harass and victimize women that he does not have to harass and victimize other men. Such a man may see women as just sexual entertainment rather than as fellow human beings.
Still another reason that a man’s evil nature manifests itself more in how he treats women is that women are more vulnerable and easier to overpower than men are. Sometimes when someone is evil, his/her true evil nature manifests itself the most when he/she is around vulnerable individuals such as women and children. Take Miss Hannigan from the film Annie. Any of us who watched the movie Annie would recall how cruel Miss Hannigan was to those orphans; but when Miss Hannigan was around adults, she generally behaved much nicer. The reason, I believe, was that she had no position of power or authority over other adults. The orphans, on the other hand, were under her power and authority. They also were smaller and easier to overpower physically. Furthermore, they had no parents to protect them, so Miss Hannigan could treat them any way she wanted, and they had little means to fight back.
Women are a vulnerable group because, like children, they are physically smaller and easier to physically overpower. They also are underrepresented in positions of political power, economic power and social power. Furthermore, they tend to be the prime target of sex discrimination in a variety of settings from the workplace to just everyday conversations. To top it off, as is discussed in this previous post on treatment of women in popular culture, women are sometimes expected to welcome any sexual attention that comes their way because it means they are “pretty”. Such expectations place women into a bad position where men can harass them without feeling any guilt.
Not all men who have bad luck with women are bad people. There are many possible reasons for why a man would have bad luck with women, sex differences being one possible reason. For example, when men are friends with each other, they do not share their emotions with each other as much as women do. Therefore, a man who transitions to being in a relationship with a woman is going to have certain things expected of him that his male friends do not expect of him, such as emotional availability. The woman may want to spend time with him and talk about her feelings with him. He may not be ready for that kind of time commitment.
Summary
A good person will genuinely care about what affect his/her behavior has on others. Even if the good person is lacking in social graces, the good person will put some honest effort into avoiding offending or hurting someone. When offense or hurt does happen, I do not think that the good person would adopt the “I didn’t mean to, so that’s your problem” attitude. The good person would feel remorse.
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