It’s this time of year again: we can witness thousands of people (mostly men of course) come up with ridiculous excuses to defend a powerful man who has been (once again) accused of misconduct.
And you know what, this exact behavior is part of the reason why men in power (yes, in our society it’s almost universally men) are so often ignoring the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior. It’s because everyone around them is only telling them how great they are. All their flaws are politely ignored or even actively denied, so they never bother doing anything about them.
But your heroes are mere human beings. Regardless of their great achievements, they will have flaws. And without anyone telling them to stop, they will just keep doing the same harmful things over and over again until decades later the whole thing blows up publicly. “Hey, what happened, this was always fine?” Well, maybe not quite like that in this particular case, I’m reading that many people did tell him to stop.
Either way: you can be grateful for the person’s achievements without idealizing that person and ignoring the harm it is doing. Please by default believe the people speaking out against powerful men – it’s a fight that will typically achieve little while costing them dearly, so your knee-jerk reaction “they are probably lying” is very wrong 99% of the time. No, the remaining 1% isn’t itself a valid reason to distrust testimonies.
I want to live in a world where people in the positions of power use that power responsibly. This isn’t going to happen unless their peers hold them responsible.
Yellow Flag /
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2024-10-14 22:22:28
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2024-10-14 22:22:28Event JSON
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