He's pretty far to the left; so, you can imagine how often we see eye to eye. Still, he's older; so, he's not a screaming, maniac, college kid who thinks he knows everything.
Obviously, we didn't have time to unpack the moral philosophies of Kant and Bentham, and unpack the question of free will.
Still, it was enough to get his mind cranking in regard how we should think of the worst of us -- namely the racists of the world, the "Gas the Jews" people of the world.
The short conversation was enough to bring up the fact that some people are born into families and environments that teach them to hate from the cradle. They've known nothing else. In fact, most of them know that, if they ever leave, they'll lose everything and everyone they've ever known.
It was at that point that he responded, "So, even some of these awful people are victims themselves."
I didn't say it. He did. Still, I'll say it now. Yes, a lot of the people that we regard as evil and irredeemable are victims themselves.
The better we understand that, the better we can start the healing.
And, as I said earlier today, and the point landed with my co-worker -- if the rest of us show that we'll never forgive people for what they believed and said in the past, we're making it that much harder for those people to leave there family and former friends.
It's not hard to see that this phenomenon of offense archeology is mostly a practice of the woke left. I also must lament that a a trade-off of the huge rise in secularism is a fall in a belief in forgiveness.
In reality, the men who were in the Klan, who left via the work of Daryle Davis, are probably better people, and better anti-racists than 99.9999% of Ivy League white kids who go to Ibram X. Kendi events. The ex-Klan members have been on the other side and rejected it. They know what it's like to be in their own minds; so, they know what it's like to be in the mind of a Klansman. They know it and proudly rejected it. None of the leftists who are gonna dig up old photos and social media posts of ex-racists have that perspective -- and they've never been through that struggle.
If we simply did a better job of exploring ethical ideas, and understanding how our own circumstances can compare and contrast with our enemies, we might be able to become slightly more tolerant.