Tillmann Prüfer is a member of the editor-in-chief of “Zeit-Magazin”.
I started the new year with a lot of good resolutions, which I don’t have to go into here because most of them have already been broken by the time these lines are published. I am ashamed of my passivity.
I’m just a much less strong, good person than I’d like to be. Less disciplined and less able to implement things that have been recognized as correct.
Carrying my indiscipline as a casual character trait in front of me is not enough for my sloppiness. I always make some effort to keep things in balance, it’s all insanely exhausting and moderately successful. All in all just average. But that’s not so bad, because I like to look at people who are doing even worse than me. I can be absolutely indignant about it.
All the bad guys and ne’er-do-wells serve me well in that sense by letting me judge them. I actually do this all day.
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I do this when people take a quick drag on a cigarette before jumping into the elevator with me. Or listening to bad music too loud on the bus. I also get very angry at SUV drivers who drive through the 30s at 50 km/h, at people in my house who don’t sort garbage properly, and at dog owners who don’t properly scrape the piles of their four-legged friends off the pavement . It’s this constant tide of badness that keeps me somewhat morally afloat.
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This is even philosophically covered. I read an article in the New York Times by philosophy professor Crispin Sartwell who wrote that people shouldn’t be judged solely on their good deeds or their bad deeds. They should also be judged by the conceivable bad deeds they did not commit. “I deserve great credit for all my restraint,” he writes.
His reasoning: If we see failure to provide assistance as just as problematic as an act of violence, then failure to act maliciously must be evaluated as positively as good deeds. So if you consciously don’t do something bad, then you can praise yourself for it.
You could have shot through the traffic-calmed zone in an SUV, dumped the residual waste in the waste paper, or had a big, fat dog soil the sidewalk. But it wasn’t done.
So my resolutions in the future should be to do nothing more. And others should continue to fail morally. So it will be a good year 2023.
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