I already had a concept of what I was going to write about this morning; something about how the pardon power should be redesigned.
But I’d rather write about a line from the book I was reading last night.
I’m re-reading Terry Pratchett‘s “Discworld” books at the moment, and am currently on “Thud“.
At one point in “Thud”, the leader of the city police force thinks:
Beating people up in little rooms … he knew where that led. And if you did it for a good reason, you’d do it for a bad one. You couldn’t say ‘We’re the good guys’ and do bad-guy things.
This.
This seems obvious to me; self-evident, even.
If you do bad-guy things, that does actually make you the bad guy.
All the gritty anti-hero stories notwithstanding, all it takes for you to be the bad guy is that you do bad-guy things.
Nothing else matters.
It doesn’t matter why you’re doing them, or what your motivations are.
All that matters is that you’re doing them.
Are you running around a city in an unmarked van, wearing a mask and toting a rifle, kidnapping folks off the streets?
You’re the bad guys.
Are you cruising around the Caribbean blowing up boats?
You’re the bad guys.
Are you stomping into a government office with an armed escort and shutting down programs that millions of people depend on for food?
You’re the bad guys.
Are you releasing predators and thieves, murderers and rapists from prison with Presidential pardons and commutations?
You’re the bad guys.
If you do bad-guy things, then you’re the bad guys.
That does not necessarily make anyone you’re opposed to (or who opposes you) the good guys, of course.
To be the good guys, you have to do good-guy things.
Which, yes, does include opposing bad guys.
But that’s not enough.
Because bad guys come in an infinite variety, most of which won’t really get along with each other.
So just fighting bad guys doesn’t make you a good guy.
There’s another relevant quote that I can’t find any reference to in the web search engines, though I think it’s also from Pratchett:
It’s not enough to be less bad; less bad is still bad.
So there’s a national politics thought for you today.
Doing bad-guy stuff means you’re the bad guys.
Just being “opposed” to the bad guys doesn’t make you a good guy.
Being less bad is still being bad.
