Feeding My Ignorance

In a return to the fine line between "good" and "evil" that I talked about a couple of posts back I have become aware of an interesting, and ever so slightly bizarre, behavioural trait that I seem to have adopted.  In a few situations where I want to be 'careful' that my actions or words should not be misinterpreted I have started to imitate the precise behaviour of someone who might want to hide their true intent!

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I guess this isn't that strange - but I wonder just how many people are aware of it - and probably guilty of it - in this age of ever increasing political correctness in terms of the words we use and the behaviour we exhibit.

As best as I can determine ;-) there is no 'hidden agenda' in anything that I am doing.  I am far from perfect, I make many mistakes, but - if I may be permitted to be ever so slightly presumptious for a moment - they are honest mistakes and when I err I am always keen to put things right.

The problem is that those whose intentions are devious and who would seek to deceive us would (if they are clever enough) follow precisely those behaviour patterns - so - how can an individual tell the difference between an honest, friendly and 'upright' character and a conman?

I remember the one and only time in my life that I have been properly 'conned' - the perpetrator appealed to my emotions, appealed to my natural instincts to help and - in general - behaved in exactly the way you would expect someone in those circumstances to behave.  There wasn't anything like the money scam emails that we all receive - riddled with spelling and grammatical errors - there wasn't anything like the clearly fake behaviour we see when people are acting it up for the cameras to protest their 'innocence'.  No, in this case the situation was, seemingly, genuine and the con was all the more believable because to this day I have no idea what the conman was gaining from it!!

Fortunately, although I was 'conned' there was no real 'cost' to me of the incident, and I can file it away as one of life's lessons that - hopefully - will leave me better prepared in the future.

That isn't always the case - and, indeed, in many cases it can be difficult to tell whether what has happened really is a con, whether it was designed to in some way 'harm' the victim or whether, indeed, both victim and perpretator are innocent of being less than 'sensible' in the circumstances.

Too often the PC lobby - and perhaps more importantly the 'litigation-averse' lobby - impose rules on behaviour that - whilst superficially serving to protect - actually result in an atmosphere and context that makes the job of the "bad guy" ever so much easier as everyone - victim, perpetrator and witnesses all know what the 'proper' behaviour looks like and so remaining within those limits makes it OK.

There is, rightly, a desire to protect our children from those who would harm them - physically, mentally and socially.  So we put 'protection' around them - rules like - teachers are not allowed to touch their pupils - for any reason; a 'safe' number of adults with any group of children; and so on.  The rule makers argue that this "makes our children safer" - whilst many of the rest of us think - that doesn't really work, does it?

I am certainly not one to harp on about "the good old days" because there were problems then as there are problems now.  However, when I was a child, I was not protected by such rules - BUT - I knew that there were people that I could trust, both inside and outside my family.  I knew that when Mrs X put her arm around me she was being friendly, not attempting to abuse me.  I knew that even if I was alone with Mr Y the situation was perfectly safe.

This wasn't just a one-way thing - for a time I was a teacher and was 'trusted' to be alone with the students that I taught - trusted both by the students themselves and by their parents and teachers!

Now, however, we all live within these much more restrictive rules and the assumption is that as long as we do so then everything is OK - no way - this engenders a sense of trust in anyone who sticks to the rules rather than building up trust over time by 'learning' about the person.  Most people are not interested in doing any harm to our children, so why should "most people" be prevented from showing appropriate friendship.

Trust should be earned, not bought by following the rules.  The problem is that once that trust is broken - who does the victim turn to - everyone has, up to that point, seemed the same - one person breaking that trust means that it becomes difficult to trust others.  Instead of being a loner, the person who has abused the trust is now 'typical' of the whole group!!

Rules and laws are all very well - unfortunately they don't necessarily protect the victims - they simply make it easier to prove that the wrongdoer has indeed done something wrong.  Rules and laws that restrict the "good" people in the range of acceptable behaviour - in whatever context - merely make it more difficult, not less difficult, to identify the "bad" people.