Plenty of monsters with support systems, plenty of decent people who have been beaten down by life and left to fend on their own.
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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Plot twist: op was ironic, meaning that with a large enough support network, even mosters can manipulate the public opinion to appear as decent people, while without such network, even decent people can be unjustly flagged as monsters and will be helpless to prove their innocence
I wasn't ironic but you make a very important point: "even mosters can manipulate the public opinion to appear as decent people,"
This, or, "monsters" can manipulate the public to the point that what their opinion of what is "good" is accepted as a fact. See: religious extremism. See: fucking TRUMP.
Which then leads to: "even decent people can be unjustly flagged as monsters and will be helpless to prove their innocence"
A person cannot control their reputation, but they can control whether it's true or not.
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I'm pretty sure I'm a decent person and I've never had a support network. Kind of had the opposite, really but at very least I try to be a good person and I feel remorse when I fail.
How did you learn what a decent human is?
By knowing how shitty it felt to be treated badly and not wanting to make others feel that way, unfortunately.
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If he's American like me, TV probably.
I had no support either and I'm ok. Not everyone is strong enough without support though so I'm just lucky I was smart enough to recognize bad behaviors. (Not including the self destructive kind sadly)
She, Canadian, and not from TV. Most of my growing up we didn't have TV. I just didn't want to make other people the way people made me feel.
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LMAO this thread is a case study in short circuiting people's sensibilities.
This is close to the "if people were educated they wouldn't be evil" fallacy, as if people like Henry Kissinger didn't exist, lol.
No, as Hume brilliantly pointed out: shoulds and ares are fundamentally disconnected. You can be extremely smart and knowledgeable about the world and still conduct yourself viciously (at times, monstrously so). What's the name of that physically disabled physicist that cheated on his wife and was just chilling with/close to Epstein?
Anyway, sticking more to the topic at hand: the only real difference between a moral person and a monster is that the former 1) believes that, for every occasion and decision, some acts are visibly, objectively more moral than others; 2) believes they should always privilege righteousness before vice, and do the moral thing. That's it. One of my closest male friends is literally illiterate and he's an excellent dad who chooses virtue regularly, my dad was a lawyer and that didn't stop him from being abusive to his family and from cheating on his wife, lol.
So no, stop it, that's not how it works. Good people are good because they decide to be good (which is easy to see, you don't need degrees, you don't even need to know how to read or write!), every day, and even when they slip they still know that they DID slip, they don't just rationalize their mistake as something virtuous (because they believe in objective morality and etc etc.).
You’re mixing up two things: knowing right from wrong and having the capacity to act on it. Hume’s right: you CAN be brilliant and still vicious. But that’s not an argument for inherent morality; it’s proof that knowledge alone doesn’t shape behavior. Your literate friend ‘chooses virtue’ because he can. His life gave him stability, models, and the luxury of slip-ups. Your dad, the lawyer who cheated? He had power without consequences, which is its own kind of support system: one that rewards harm. The difference isn’t ‘moral vs. monster.’ It’s who had the tools to practice what they preached. and who didn’t. You’re arguing that ‘good people’ are the ones who succeed at morality. I’m saying morality is a skill, and skills require resources. No resources? No skill. Just survival.
He was raised in the streets and used to sell drugs, which is why he ended up in jail for 7 years. To this day, he doesn't know his mom or dad. The man had no support. Fair enough, "morality is a skill" as in the more you choose right over wrong, the easier it gets, it becomes a part of your identity you're proud of, but I don't think it requires resources the way you see it. Also, people can be and have been self-sacrificial, even in the absence of resources. The poorest people are the ones that give more to charity, there's more union and prosociality in Gaza amongst the bombs than in any American neighborhood... Idk man, I'm not buying this. I think that it's a variable that can affect your decision making, especially if your moral framework is flimsy, but not the main variable behind moral decision making.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, TBF.
You're seeing a "self" or an "identity" where there are only conditions. My point is that your friend didn't "choose" virtue in a vacuum; he finally encountered conditions - perhaps a moment of stability or a specific mentor - where pro-social behavior wasn't actively punished by his environment, or it was even rewarded in ways that aren't immediately obvious.
In places like Gaza, prosociality isn't a miracle of "free will"; it’s a survival requirement. When the external world is hostile, the internal community must be hyper-cooperative to survive. That is a reinforced behavior.
If you put a "good" person in a system that rewards predation and punishes kindness with death or starvation, that "virtuous identity" eventually collapses into survival. We aren't essentially "good" or "bad", we are reflections of the resources, safety, and reinforcements available to us. Character is just the name we give to a long chain of causes and conditions that happened to go right.
I think that a support network can help people be better. But that is relative to the reality of the support network. Like ... be better what exactly ?
Isolation and solitude cannot socialize a being. It is antithetical to socialization.
Idk I'm a shit person and I have a great support network. Honestly they're the only reason I haven't killed myself yet.
I think there's a thin line between monster and hero. Like most human behaviors, I think the divide is much smaller than we might like to think.
Personally, I think we just have weird brains that tend to want to explain everything, even if it there may not be one. And we like to fill in those gaps with imagination, rather than accept ignorance. I forget the name of this scientific fallacy.
Anyways nice showerthought
First of all, please don't kill yourself.
Second, if you think you're a shit person and want to kill yourself... how are you a shit person? I mean I'm merely assuming here that you think you're shit because maybe you sometimes do shitty things, and because of that you should kys. If you at least recognize that you can do harmful things, you aren't irredeemable, you can start taking steps to avoid doing that.
Everybody does shitty things sometimes, some more than others. I don't think anyone deserves death but in terms of just shittiness, people who don't even recognize that in themselves are way more unpleasant to be around. And if you have a great support network, maybe they don't entirely agree with your self-assessment.
This is not as insightful as ya think.
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