Why Presuming Good Faith is Critical to Your Happiness and Success

Attacking the Bad and Stupid People
So, America, are we pissed off at each other enough yet?

It is seductive and easy to get pissed off at bad people. Stupid people.

You know the ones. The idiots out there on the other side. The fake news ones. They are ignorant. Selfish. Hateful. They deserve whatever bad things happen to them.

Doesn’t it feel good to be righteous? To defend your truth? To fight for something you believe in?  To tolerate the good stuff and be virtuously intolerant of what they’re doing?

Doesn’t it feel good to attack and denounce the bad and the stupid? Pat yourself on the back for making another tweet or Facebook post that points out their stupidity and evil with a witty and nasty retort.

We need to stop.

We need to stop this incessant, mean-spirited attacking of others. The attacks are stupid and self-destructive. Our attacks destroy our ability to live together as Americans; they threaten our own national security; and the more we attack each other the more it changes us—you and me—into ugly and mean-spirited people.

None of this attacking helps us achieve success and happiness as individuals or as an American nation. Let’s stop.
Bad Faith, Prejudice and Bigotry
Think about it. Most of our attacks start with the presumption that our opponent is bad and stupid. That’s why we are attacking them. We’ve probably never met the other person. We just know that they are bad because of their race or class or job or their pussy hat or MAGA hat or where they live or their political thoughts. And that justifies being mean to them.

We don’t really know them, but we’re willing to pre-judge and attack them based on their race or class or whatever. That’s prejudice.

We make no effort to know or understand them before we attack. We don’t listen to what they say in good-faith to understand them. Nope. Instead, we interpret everything they say in the worst possible way so we can have another opportunity to attack. Our attacks are in bad faith and prejudiced. That makes us bigots too.

When another is that bad and stupid, they aren’t a real person. Or at least they don’t deserve to be treated like a person. They are evil. They are demons. And so, they should be treated like demons.
Demonizing Others Destroys Us
But demonizing “others”, treating them like things, not people, has a long history of turning into truly evil situations like genocide, slavery, internment and mob lynchings. When you dehumanize others in your attacks, you begin a walk down a very dangerous path.

There’s more.

Attacking and demonizing others destroys your ability to develop good relationships with other people. It divides us deeply and emotionally. It poisons future opportunities for a relationship with that person or those people.

We lose the ability to come together as a community or nation to solve problems. That makes life much harder for everyone.

Demonizing others can destroy our own family and friendships. When we attack, we can find ourselves throwing away decades of friendship over a disagreement on some election.

And perhaps most important, when we are mean to others, when we attack and demonize them, we change ourselves. We become what we do, what we practice. It becomes a habit. It becomes part of our character, of who we are. We become mean-spirited, hateful people.

Every time we demonize another person we take another step on a path to mean-spiritedness and hatefulness. That meanness will inevitably seep into other aspects of our lives.

We know from an earlier blog that Happiness in life is all about high-quality relationships with other people. We know that work success depends on having great relationships with our clients and our co-workers.

Happiness and success—everyone wants that, right?

Well, demonizing others destroys our Happiness and success by destroying our ability to have high-quality, high-performance relationships. Demonizing others poisons the trust needed for...