Stop Enabling Immaturity
Have you ever been sitting in a meeting or listening to a presentation held by a toxic person? Still, you laughed – sort of – at the right places and gave them polite applause. And so, did everyone else in the room?
Toxic, immature people can spread poison and cause pain because we enable them.
Immature people, from annoying victims to cruel dictators cannot achieve anything on their own.
Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot needed massive support and millions of people who put their words into practice.
Imagine Trump with empty stadiums?
“The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote those words three years before he was executed by the Nazi regime.
We are the stupid enablers of the immature. We are all guilty, but some more than others.
All the bad in the world is not caused by a huge number of bad people.
All the bad in the world is caused by a small number of bad people with a massive number of enablers.
The active ones and the passive ones.
Typical Enablers
The Mimicking Sheep
A typical enabler is the gullible sheep.
They mimic and mimic, follow the herd and may contradict themselves from one day to the other. You wonder if they ever have a single independent thought. Baa-baa.
“In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that has taken possession over him.”
Those were the words of Bonhoeffer, on stupidity, but perfectly describe the enabling gullible sheep.
The Indifferent Layabout
The indifferent layabouts also constitute a large group of enablers. These are the “I don’t care about politics“ people. In fact, they care about little but their own path to pleasure. They lie on the sofa eating crisps and drinking beer, while the Andromeda galaxy crashes with the Milky Way.
Why do we let all this enabling happen?
Are we just stupid?
Well…
Some days I wonder if that is not the case. If we make ourselves extinct it is because we deserve it.
Why Do We Enable the Immature?
“I don’t imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.”
―
Henrik Ibsen wrote that 140 years ago, and it is hard not to agree with him, despite all the other progress we have made.
Our flawed brain is a strong reason for all our harmful enabling.
We jump to conclusions. The less we know the more dead certain we are. We refuse to admit we are wrong. We believe what people around us believe. We do anything to live up to our own image, however outdated it might be. “ I am that kind of person, and don’t you dare tell me otherwise!”
We are easily fooled by shiny wrappings. We are lazy and resist thinking – at any cost.
These are not excuses. “Sorry, evolution has progressed too slowly, nothing I can do.”
“Nobody made a greater mistake”, said Edmund Burke, “than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
“So what little can I do?” – you may ask.
What To Do
If, we gave up “liking”, excusing and accepting all the Immaturity around us, it would have a tremendous positive impact.
Your everyday behaviour matters. What you watch, what you like and what you comment on.
Stop propping up all the immature people in the world.
No more “She didn’t mean it.”
No more “But he is good at his job.”
That sounds viable, doesn’t it? You do not have to aim for the marathon.
More to come on the subject of Enabling Immaturity and
how to stop it.
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