December 3, 2003
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Hmmm, I’m trying to make an entry every day. Oddly I can start typing with very little to say and end up writing volumes, or at least many more paragraphs than I expected when I started. I should really apply all this writing energy to my fiction, but I am bad, bad, bad.
So anyway, the entry… you all are thinking, come on lady, get to the good stuff. And I assume you must think that as I have gotten so many more subscribers and comments lately than I ever did when I first started this blog as a simple poetry forum. Shocking! heh
The entry, yeah…
So the other day, everyone got these shrink reduction packets at work. For those not in retail, this is what they call shoplifting and the reduction of merchandise not through sales.
Apparently only ten percent of the population is intrinsically honest, while another ten percent is intrinsically dishonest. The remaining eighty percent will be dishonest given the right circumstances and opportunity.
I found this incredibly depressing. I know I’m in the honest ten percent. What does that say about my family and friends? If you’re in the honest top ten, what does that say about your family and friends? One of them must be a skunk ready to backstab you at any moment, and the other eight would betray you given the opportunity, maybe conspiring with the skunk-friend given the right circumstances.
It’s enough to make you want to leave the friendly circle of society for the company of coyotes and bears. Least you know they’re not duplicitous. They only react according to their nature. If they’re hungry or you threaten their young, they eat you.
Honestly, I’d trust animals over people any day. No animal has ever hurt me, neither wild nor domestic, but compared to animals, people are deranged and rabid.
I think the study must be skewed. I can’t imagine my mom or granma stealing from anyone. My brother definitely, my sister maybe. The people who conducted the study must have just been more pessimistic than me in regards to human nature.
I hope.
Comments (2)
Clap, Clap, Clap . . .
SilverRaven agrees, caws and nods. Adds own rant-
When did we become a society where people are presumed “guilty” and have to “prove” their innocence?
It depends on what you mean by “dishonest”. I would never fuck over or steal from any of my friends, or any person that I didn’t totally hate. But your packets were talking about shoplifiting and that’s different. I don’t view stealing something I need from a faceless corporation that pollutes the air and exploits foreign workers as “dishonest” (I would feel more guilty stealing something from a little independent store). But anyway, I think that efforts by big corporations like the RIAA or chain stores to fight a moral crusade against things that they call “stealing” are nothing short of disgusting fucking capitalist propaganda. Morality is relative anyway. What they should say is “You shouldn’t shoplift because it reduces our profit margin and our poor executives and recording artists will have to switch from $5000 dollar hookers to $3000 dollar ones (of course, we won’t allow that to happen – we’ll simply cut costs by getting rid of toilet paper and cutting pay)”.