To remind: re the designation of this post as “philosophy,” I am not a philosopher. “Philosophy” just sounded smarter to me than “Musings” or “Thoughts” or whatever. But at the same time, my own “personal philosophy” or whatever you want to call it also plays a big role in the content of these posts, so various philosophical ideas may or may not be apparent in some or all of these posts, to people familiar with those ideas.
Or, maybe not. It’s possible that my own personal interpretations of various philosophical ideas are wrong, and that these philosophies were (possibly) misunderstood by me and misapplied by me. And if that’s the case, I say so be it. 🙂
At any rate, this post is based in personal experience, and it can be applied in a wide variety of situations. It’s not rooted specifically in one philosophy or religious tradition, but what I feel to be the “spirit” of the idea is present in several philosophies as well as religions, including Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and probably Islam too, I am just not as well-versed in the texts related to Islam as I am in the other 3 religions I mentioned here.
But instead of quoting scriptures, I will just get to the point: in life, you will occasionally find yourself in a situation where you want to say something or do something in retaliation for what somebody else has said about you or done to you.
The point of this post is to tell you that retaliation is most likely not going to help you in any tangible way. So, this post is somewhere in the philosophical area of “turn the other cheek,” but it isn’t quite that radical. I advocate hitting back, I mean. 🙂
At the same time, I know (from experience) that there are people in the world who will hit you, just so they can run tell the teacher when you hit them back.
So to speak. 🙂
And the thing about these people is, the teacher’s gonna believe them, because for one they’ve been kissing her ass all year, and for two, they’re gonna tell every kid they see in the hallway on the way to the teacher that you hit them, and by the time the teacher hears about it, all the other kids are pointing their fingers at you.
So, if you find yourself in a situation where you want to retaliate, first consider the very real possibility that the other person wants you to retaliate. So they can run tell the teacher about the horrible thing you did to them or said to them that wasn’t half as bad as what they did or said to you.
Why do people do stuff like that? Who knows. Another thing you should know is that wondering why people do stuff like that is also a waste of time, generally speaking. They just do.
What can you do about it? Nothing.
That’s right: do nothing. They are trying to start a fire. Don’t give them any fuel and they can’t start one. 🙂
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