Actions are pretty much the offspring of thought. We do things because those things first entered our mind. Often, we turn our thoughts into actions with good intentions behind them. We help old people in crossing streets because we know their reflexes (to avoid oncoming vehicles) aren’t as reliable as they were 10, 20 years ago. We write posts like this with the intention of giving others an alternative point of view when thinking of society issues. The list of examples can go on and on.
Good intention is, to its core, good. When deciding on why we ought to do things (or not), intent is definitely a factor to consider. But intentions alone aren’t enough to justify whatever action we take. Let me elaborate.
In the internet age, people are given a wider platform to do virtually anything. This has led to websites, particularly social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to become a virtual stage for activism. Indeed, many forms of protests have been successfully conducted on the internet.
However, there are some that have totally missed the mark. Sometimes, people become overzealous of their advocacies and will do absurd or outrageous things in the name of what they’re fighting for. A common one, which I pointed out in a previous post, is this trend of making things viral for the sake of it going viral. This has zero value to the cause, as trending topics merely disappear once people stop posting about it, thus has no long-lasting effect despite the adage “The internet never forgets”.
Another example is cancel culture. The internet loves to “cancel” people who it collectively perceives to be bad. The intent behind this is good in that cancel culture people want to rightfully call out others who’ve done problematic things. Dozens of instances have happened where internet users uncover old posts by athletes, celebrities, reporters, etc. that are undoubtedly problematic. These can be racist, sexist, or homophobic in nature.
For sure, those who are guilty of these problematic posts should be held accountable. But the thing is, a lot of those posts exposed by the internet mob are several years old, and born out of ignorance. Most of the perpetrators have long apologized for what they might have said in the past, and have educated themselves to become better people.
However members of this so called cancel culture are often unforgiving, and would rather consider people “over” or “cancelled” instead of acknowledging that people make mistakes and so long as they learn from these mistakes, it is okay to forgive those who’ve committed transgressions.
Indeed, intentions, no matter how good or noble they are, are never enough on their own. Before turning these thoughts and intentions into actions, we must pair them with critical thinking. Our overly-developed brain is, after all, why we are the dominant species on Earth. We need to consider first whether what we do and how we do it are on the same level as the reason we want to do it.
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