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bloody-cute-yandere · 4 years

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Hello I have written a dissertation about a phrase I hate

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right?

So I guess to start off this train of thought, I should explain what started it. I love listening to commentary channels on YouTube. They ARE my reality TV, except they seem to cover more important topics. One of the commentary channels I follow is CreepShow Art. I have listened to her videos for quite some time, and while she doesn’t show as much by way of scientific or empirical evidence in her videos, I do feel she is a pretty credible source because she does reference public posts as evidence for her claims, and a lot of what she talks about is readily fact-checkable. Over the past few weeks Creepshow has made a few videos about another youtuber Without A Crystal Ball (who I will abbreviate to WACB for brevity), who is another commentary channel that allegedly has questionable research tactics and reporting skills. She also is prone to being defensive and seems to have the mindset of “any criticism is hate”. Creepshow made a video first about how WACB had dug around in an inappropriate way to gain information about Tati Westbrook and then reported her findings in a more skewed way, which ended up painting Tati in potentially an unfairly negative light. WACB responded….. badly to the criticism she received from Creepshow and other channels that criticized her. She, among other things, went onto a livestream of another channel and doxed Creepshow in the chat. Also, potentially unrelated but someone has allegedly been repeatedly attempting to hack Creepshow’s social media platforms, along with several others that criticized WACB’s behavior. WACB also sent an email to Creepshow where she insinuated that Youtube itself was pushing the entire conflict between the two of them to be handled privately, but were watching the issue at hand. Creepshow responded by showing the email to her audience, which did include showing the email WACB used to reach out to Creepshow. WACB became upset that she had been “doxed” by Creepshow (though it is worth noting that the exposed email address in question happens to be attached to all of her social medias, and not any private information).

During WACB’s most recent response to being “doxed” she used the idiom “Two wrongs don’t make a right”, and I have been stewing on that particular idiom ever since. I’m sure that isn’t an unfamiliar phrase for most people reading this, but for those that haven’t heard it before, it runs akin to the idea of not stooping to someone else’s level when in an argument. The idea is that if someone hurts you then you should be the bigger person and not react in a bad way, because that won’t help the situation become resolved. To a certain extent I believe this idea is absolutely correct; if you want to resolve a situation with another person, you don’t want to make the situation worse by lashing out if they’ve done something to you that is hurtful, because then you just have more hurt feelings you have to resolve in the process of moving forward. However, this idea also hinges upon two crucial truths that must exist in order for it to apply. One: that the two people involved in a disagreement must or want to resolve the conflict at all, and two: that the first offense is not an act done with malicious or cold-hearted intent. It also depends on a moral compass that is entirely determined by outside influences as opposed to an internal value system.

The first assumption “two wrongs don’t make a right” depends on is the idea that both party members do actually want to resolve their current disagreement. If the two people in the middle of an argument are emotionally close (or tied together in other ways) and no one in the situation wants to (or can’t) cut ties with the other person, I would say that this assumption is valid. In the case of Creepshow and WACB, however, this is not the case. According to Creepshow they don’t know eachother. Speaking frankly, this means that there is no relationship that needs to be protected. One could argue a necessity for professional courtesy seeing as how they share the same platform and roughly the same content ideas, however the Youtube platform is so vast already that two single small to moderately sized channels having a feud shouldn’t in any real sense have any effect on the other’s job. In a more general sense, if person A cases a fight with a person they don’t know very well or don’t interact with much, there is no social consequence if person B stoops down to person A’s level (whether or not there are legal repercussions is a separate issue). Neither person A nor person B will have any sort of ripples in their own separate circles as a direct result of the negative exchange because their individual social groups will be biased to agree with their persons’ interpretation of the events. The social distance will also save person A and person B from any future unpleasantness through the mere virtue of anonymity.

A similar argument can be made for people who have no interest in maintaining a relationship they had previously had with each other; even people who had been previously close to eachother can decide to break contact with each other over egregious offenses. In these cases, there is less care about whether you’re behaving in a “good” way because you have no investment in the relationship progressing. In either scenario, it doesn’t matter if you stoop low in an argument if you’re willing to accept the consequences of that behavior, or if there won’t be any appreciable consequences for that behavior.

The second truth that “two wrongs don’t make a right” depends on is that the first offense is not a heinous vindictive one. For example, Doxing. Doxing is the illegal spread of personal information to the public. The act of doxing can leave the victim severely vulnerable to more violent crimes such as stalking, theft/ mugging, rape and murder because their location or other personal information is now known to people that may be willing to cause them physical harm. It’s a dangerous and illegal act. Other potential heinous actions from person A include any other illegal activity (such as assault or other forms of violence, theft) or can be something that technically isn’t illegal but is a severe breaching of boundaries or someone’s own comfort level. If you know someone personally you probably know things that would really upset them, and the act of going through and performing those actions KNOWING that they will be upsetting to your victim is cold-hearted and cruel. At that point in a disagreement, person A isn’t trying to resolve a problem, they are simply lashing out with the sole purpose of destruction. That is not constructive, nor is it ok. In these cases such as these there’s a high likelihood that person B will no longer want to associate with person A if they originally did. example: I knew a person a long time ago that was TERRIFIED of gnomes. They hated them. So, what would happen if at some point this person and I got into a disagreement and I decided to give her a garden gnome as a present? It wouldn’t be illegal by any stretch; it’s a gift. However, it’s a gift that the person would have HATED, and I would have known that. Between them and I it would have been a declaration of war, not a peace-making offer. Furthermore, it would have been proof that I was willing to use this person’s personal deep fears that they confided in me out of trust against them; even if our relationship survived the original disagreement it would probably never be the same. Who, in that case, could really blame this person if they responded in kind? It would be a human response and, in a way, I would absolutely have deserved it because I had breached her trust in an unforgivable way.

At risk of this becoming a dissertation, I happen to especially dislike the idea of the person who committed sleight A being the person to scream “two wrongs don’t make a right” after person B responds to them in the way that WACB responded to Creepshow. To me, that seems like person A is trying to put themselves on a pedestal of superiority, despite the fact that they hurt person B first. “I know what I did was wrong, but you’re not supposed to hurt me back! Two wrongs don’t make a right!” Person A is just trying to avoid consequences for their actions at that point. Because really, what happened to “treat others the way you want to be treated?” I know this begins to sound victim-blamey, but what right does a person have to be upset for (not really) being doxed after they knowingly decided to dox someone else? They’ve already shown that doxing is definitely something they’re ok with, so if they’re going to argue that the original doxing wasn’t a big deal, why is it suddenly a big enough deal to them now that they are the victim of it? I hate hypocrisy like that.

My final note on “two wrongs don’t make a right” is that the entire phrase depends on each person in the disagreement depending on an external source for their moral compass as opposed to having their own internal value system. Morality is, overall, an incredibly gray concept in any society. It is informed by each person’s individual moral ideals which can come from religion, family values, upbringing, influences from social idols and more. Even universal truths like “murder is wrong” become smudged quickly when ideas about self-defense are considered (which becomes even murkier when you begin to question what sorts of actions require “self-defense”). This means that there can be vastly different views about what is and is not ok about any particular topic within one society. There will also be some people that have a very strong internal moral compass within that society, and some people that depend more on the community to act as their compass. If a person who uses an internal moral compass to guide themselves, then they will behave in a manner that falls in line with that compass regardless of how their peers may respond. If, however, a person does not have a strong internal moral compass, their behavior will be largely influenced by those around them because they depend on that social structure to guide their behavior. For someone that has a strong internal compass that they rely on, the idea that “two wrongs don’t make a right” probably won’t have much value to them, because their morality is already determined regardless of what the people around them may say. If person A does x to them, then person B’s moral sense will determine what is and is not ok to respond with, and whether others say that response is right or wrong is irrelevant because they already believed they are justified in whatever response they had. For a person that relies more heavily on their peers for their moral compass, however, “two wrongs don’t make a right” might sort of work as an appropriate guide because it comes from an external place to encourage what socially would be considered “good” behavior, though that itself then depends on what is considered “right” and “wrong” by the surrounding populace, which has already been established to be a bit of a crap shoot.

Overall (and I cannot stress this enough), I don’t believe that a disagreement of any sort should come with responses like doxing or assault or theft or a breach of trust like the examples I gave above. I believe that all people should strive to be better and act with dignity. I always try to act as though everything I do will be posted online for the world to see, and if I wouldn’t want to receive the backlash I could get for a particular action then I tend to not do that thing in the first place. I also believe that hypocrisy is one of the more disgusting personality traits someone can have. If someone doxes another person, clearly they believe that doxing is a justifiable action, and to then have that person be upset when someone behaved in the same “correct” way (As far as person A has shown of their moral values), that is just plain gross. Don’t do to other people what you wouldn’t want done to you, and also don’t be surprised if you’re not the only person willing and capable of lashing out at your level if you decide to stoop low. If you don’t want to give someone else a pass, then don’t deign to believe that you deserve some kind of special allowance to stomp all over others.

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