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Glimmer of hope

Beliefofmine

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Does a person with good intentions change a larger operation that's rooted in bad intentions? Or do they too fall into bad intentions by association?

Kind of the inverse of does a rotten apple spoil the bunch. Does a good apple in a barrel of bad apples change?
 

Rook

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Both, either, and neither.

A good person(define that as you may) can sway a million
So too can a tyrant.

An innocent can be pressed to accept bad habits by peer pressure, organizational doctrine, simple necessity. So too can a bad man become moral(or at least maintain a non-violent facsimile of morality) if circumstances demand, or if life flows that way.

Two examples:

A convicted murderer's child is born two years before he is to be freed. Once free, he devotes his entire life to his family doing odd, honest jobs, until he starts his own diner and ensures his child's future.

A moral man's child is born, and at first all is well. Soon, though, the pressures of his high-paying job coupled with a month's restless nights when his child was beset by flu drove him to a bar. From there it went downhill, with drunkeness becoming his weekly and then daily escape. He lost his job, his family, and ended up robbed and stabbed under a bridge.

Above examples simpler than OP's question, but I think it demonstrates that so much can happen, with chance, personality, culture, instinct etc. I'd say there isn't a general trend, and there are far too many spheres of human interaction to gather all the relevant data to form one, imo.

One schoolyard bully can spoil five childrens' childhood, or it can be the push to bravery that one kid needed, setting the bully in place and creating an amiable atmosphere on the playground.

A single corrupt officer can lead to the deaths of his entire police unit if either the price is right, or the hook the mob got in him is barbed enough. So too a single honest, determined officer can lead the district into an era of crimelessness.

In my experience, reality usually tends to less extreme expressions of these dualities, and it's usually more 'grey', where the good guy at work beats his wife at home, or a person who means well ultimately ends up causing harm through attempts at good deeds. Then you get those ex-criminals on the radio, talking about their business success and how their confinement taught them the value of cheating the system from within the system, thus creating jobs and feeding families.
 

Beliefofmine

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I had a conversation with someone who was a fighter in a war. They felt that their actions were justified, but in the greater context of the war, can they be? I think we often look at things from one side. In a war the person you're fighting thinks they're justified and in the right as well. So is neither party right and neither party wrong, and both?
 

mikrokosmos

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^ Your posts are so well-thought out and lovely to read, Rook.

I agree with Rook here. With questions like the ones you're asking, Beliefofmine, I think the person's answer tells more about that person's perspective on life than what exists in reality. The world is so complex and interwoven that finding trends of behavior definite enough to be predictable is (in my opinion) nigh impossible. Focusing on individual cases is more feasible, I think, but for the most part we can only analyze an individual's behavior and make tentative predictions about how they'll respond to an environment.

Although it makes problem solving infinitely more difficult, the grey areas make the world more nuanced and interesting.
 

The Grey Man

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I agree, any answer to this question can only be valid for so many cases.
 
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