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I've been thinking of Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse". Like its even darker cousin " L'appel du Vide" (the appeal of the void) which is about impulsive thoughts of self-destruction, I see the Imp as a more generalized momentary recognition of an opportunity to do something bad or harmful.

As a kid, my dad would take me to a lot of antique-y stores and craftsman saleshops, and I got a reasonable stern rebuke once for asking "Wouldn't it be cool to go to one with a baseball bat and just start swinging around." No, it would not.

Yesterday, taking a solitary night walk to the beach (I'm staying briefly with my folks on the Jersey coast on my way back from a family reunion) I saw a few pairs of sandals and shoes left at the beach entrance, and just marveled at how trusting those folks were, how easy it would be to run off with the shoes and make their lives a bit more miserable.

But I'm pretty well-regulated, so it was just a stupid and cruel (two adjectives that so often travel together) fleeting thought. (And I think most people are similarly built, so that leaving your shoes like that is a reasonable thing to do.) The most elegant remedy I have for such thoughts is recalling "Wheaton's Law 'Don't Be a Dick'". It really does provide a simple mantra to counter the Imp.

Wheaton's Law's eloquence (boosted by its vulgarity) makes it compare favorably to Rabbi Hillel's famous summary of the Torah: "That which is hateful unto you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole of the Torah; the rest is commentary."

And a large part of society depends on folks refuting the Imp. Societies where everything is as locked down as it possibly can be, and/or dependent on the threat of discovery with accompanying retribution and punishment are much less pleasant.

(The one that gets me is litter. So full of scorn for the ass I saw throwing a half full coffee cup from the passenger seat of a pickup I was driving behind. Or, worse, some of the fellow people at the bootleg swimming lake where I live who just throw wrappers and anything else down on the ground. Like what the hell? Who do they expect to clean up after them, how are they so incapable of basic empathy with people doing the same thing at the same place after them? Of course at some point it becomes a self-sustaining cycle; they might feel more free to be lazy careless assholes because they had to tolerate the garbage that was already there from earlier arriving assholes. But still, we're already in a gray zone of (moderately risky!) prohibited behavior, enjoying wading and swimming away from lifeguarded areas - why give ammo to those who would call for tougher enforcement by being childish pigs?)

I think there's implications for broad stroke (or even somewhat sloppy) thinking about what's behind conservative vs liberal values; conservatives and the impulse to favor a circle of trust shrunk so that empathy comes easier because the people in it are more clearly like yourself, and with harsher penalties for people who violate the social contracts, vs the sometimes naive liberal impulse to expand the circle so that you have more shared benefits and drawbacks. It's not always easy progressives such as me to think past the refutations of other folks goodness and trustworthiness, but it's still a goal worth pursuing to get to a world worth living in.

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