The Test

I was the youngest at home and I would get busted for stuff thinking I'm so clever. At age four or five, I was constantly in trouble for biting the butter stick and when I decided to do it one last time and never again and made sure no one SAW me, I got yelled at moments later.

No one needed to SEE me do that. I was the only person with a history of such behavior and my teeth are the only ones small enough to match the teeth marks in the butter.

I guess I was born with an innate sense of conscience and prone to feeling guilty, but I also had two highly ethical parents who talked a lot about their opinions of the behavior of people.

The last day of kindergarten, I was bored and took a penny off the desk of the boy next to me and hid it. Like a magic trick: "Where did your penny go?" 

And he couldn't figure it out and I repeated it thinking he would figure it out and pretty soon I've stolen all his pennies. I never saw him again. There was never an opportunity to explain, pay him back, whatever. So I just felt guilty for years and thought long and hard about how to never do anything like that again to anyone.

I have a child who was probably born without a conscience or maybe had one until some nurse was derelict in her duty and left him unattended. I caught him before he hit the floor, but I have reason to believe he was head injured by that at four months.

He thought lying was CLEVER for a time. I broke him of that.

I made sure he understood he didn't need to be a paragon of virtue, but if you are rampantly awful all day everyday, someday that will come back to bite you.

I'm 61 years old. I have no sources to cite. My opinion is most people I think of as monsters are people who did something like steal pennies at age five and instead of feeling guilty like I did, they think they are CLEVER and that was FUN and they decide to get better at it.

And they don't have anyone in their life like me as a mom teaching them "Don't do that, stupid."

If they come from a privileged background, they know firsthand that Dad will literally or figuratively bail them out, the school doesn't REALLY want to make a big stink out of it if they didn't actually murder someone and they will have a different teacher next year.

Our justice system in the US is designed to treat crimes as individual incidents and errs on the side of largely ignoring past crimes when trying you for your latest one. I believe people like Elon Musk who are infamous for their outrageous behavior consciously take advantage of that fact.

Being a career criminal doesn't per se prove you are a monster. It doesn't prove you just LIKE taking advantage of people and have no plans to stop.

It can be helpful to try to go back to the beginning and figure out where this started, like my posts on this site about my sister which suggest she probably had a few youthful indiscrections and likely got dragged into worse crimes because of it.

But I don't think that's actually necessary in most cases.

The Test is if they have the opportunity to change course and don't, then whatever crap they claim is WHY is a BULLSHIT excuse.

If they EXPLAIN to you WHY they do this shit and it in any way boils down "So you need to feel sorry for me and not really expect me to straighten up and fly right." it's an excuse and they don't WANT to change.

If you offer them a meaningful solution to their supposed reason why they can't help it and they start backpedaling, it's probably an excuse.

If they are genuinely plagued with serious problems and you give them a way out, they may change course.

If they are hesitant to accept a genuine solution for any reason, it's probably a cover story. It may be a cover story for a good reason, like there's a worse problem that's scarier that you need to address.

But if you go through all their claimed reasons why and give them solutions and they don't implement any of them or do but still continue their bad behavior, it's an excuse.