I recently noticed that many people are obsessed with what they believe your intentions are, not with what you actually do.
I was walking in the woods with my kids. And we passed some kind of hippies that had build a small hut from some dead branches and leaves. It looked nice and the kids liked it.
Then we moved on and found a huge fallen over dead tree. The kids had a lot of fun ripping up the dead branches and hitting the decaying wood. Until the hippies arrived and started to lecture us how bad our behaviour is and that we are also walking off path and destroying the wood.
Factually us and them were behaving in a very similar way. Both of us walked off path and changed the appearance of the woods. Both of us not in a very significant way. So I was wondering why the hippies were so upset. Do they think that small kids (below the age of 5) playing in the nature would be able to actually destroy it? Every wild boar is making more of a mess. Do they not think that especially freely playing outside will teach them respect and appreciation for nature? Do they maybe love that tree, or the bugs that live in it?
I was confused until I found out what their problem seemed to be. It was not about what we did. It was the perceived intention behind it. Their building of simple structures out of dead wood was a creative, positive action, expressing their apparent harmony with nature. But ours was destructive, in their eyes showing a deep disrespect for the woods. It was not a factual problem, but a spiritual one.
And this post-factual perception is deeply woven into the minds of people. The farmer that is spraying poison on the field is not having 'bad' intentions, they are just doing bad things. But the angry kid that kicks a flower is evil. The butcher is just doing its job, but the hunter is a problem. Not primarily because of killing animals, but because they like it.
I am sure there are many more examples. What matters to others is just your ideology, expressed through your actions rather than your actions yourself. You can do bad things and still be perceived good and vice versa. And this flawed perception seems to affect mostly everyone. Not really sure what my conclusions are at this point, just an observation.
