My sister in law was watching the television series Blacklist, which she enjoys.
I prefer to think of everyone as having good intentions. But not everyone thinks that way, and I cannot avoid thinking that people who watch a television series like Blacklist think that there are people in the world who do not have good intentions towards the human species in general, or towards people they meet in particular.
If someone from the Church of Satan thought of an idea, which could possibly only be this idea, that would fix many problems in the world, like bring an end to war and prevent adverse environmental change, would people avoid supporting the idea because it originated from someone in the Church of Satan?
One of the underlying ideologies here is that problems exist, but people don't want them to exist, and there is nothing about the situation to suggest that it wouldn't be possible for these problems not to exist. Some people can find no work, but other people work long hours and would prefer to work fewer, and it should be possible for the people with no work to do some work and get paid for it.
If, instead, 99% of people could not find work, then it would not be reasonable to say that there must be a solution that leads to everyone getting paid to work.
Similarly, consider crimes where one human hurts another physically or financially. These crimes are zero-sum, or negative sum, on at least some level; if one person gains $500 by robbing another person, it is only because the person being robbed, or their insurance company or the insurance company's insurance company, loses $500. Since crimes often involve results that benefit no one, like a broken window that must be replaced, we expect there to be some configuration of society in which there are no, or at least fewer crimes. If society as a whole benefits when a "crime" is committed, we would expect society to redefine that action as not being a crime, if the benefits of the action can be redistributed (such as through taxes) such that no one is directly or noticeably harmed by it.
If people's intentions differ, so that some humans want other humans to be harmed, we cannot reach the same conclusions about which problems can be fixed.
I believe humans have good intentions. But I can't stop my sister in law from liking the TV series Blacklist. Anyone who thinks it is possible to convince everyone in the world that all humans have good intentions, without first changing the world, is quite stupid. Anyone who expects people who separate the world into people with good intentions and people with bad intentions not to base some of their decisions around their judgements about intentions, using some metric like whether someone belongs to the Church of Satan, is also quite stupid.
I wasn't dead when I posted this, and it's unlikely I'll be dead (or in jail) when a scheduled post is published on Dec 31 which says that I'm dead or in jail. For anyone who might think it would have been better if anyone could believe that post, you can thank my sister in law for watching Blacklist.
Meanwhile, in the UK, someone uses harsh language to successfully change other people's behavior, which I could never do: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/keckv2/whats_up_with_tom_cruise_all_of_the_sudden/
