There is an individual I know who has probably pissed off entire communities with a lot of ambiguously moral situations. People don’t keep it a secret they don’t like her, and occasionally someone who notices her object to how they treat her will quip “if so many people wreak of being shit to you, maybe you should check your own shoes”.

Once in a while though, I noticed she would respond to that statement with “if it were my own shoes, it’s also the shoes of the local authorities, as they have no problem with me, only those of you they’re stepping on do”. Oddly enough, this is completely true. I see situations like this where it’s the masses VS people in positions of wisdom (with situations like this making you wonder if the people in positions of wisdom are enough to outweigh the masses) and I am intrigued because it makes you ask why both exist, and it makes me wonder if people who spend so long not putting salience into a systemic process of conflict mediation have trouble navigating how to deal with it.

I would wonder if they reflect, and reflect, and reflect, until some trivial detail triggers a eureka moment, for example two people might be fighting bitterly with each other and it might be difficult to put one as more moral than the other, until you realize one of them had been previously banned from the place they’re fighting in.

The last time you had to assess who was the asshole in a certain situation, what was that tipping point, that last straw, the tiebreaker that made you realize there was a slightly larger moral weight on one side than the other?