BY BERİRE GÜNDÜZ CS/III)
berire.gunduz@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Do you want to become a bad person? Or do you simply want to know why people around you randomly steal things, break windows, set schools on fire and even harm the innocent? First you need to understand the reasons behind becoming a bad person, some of which I will try to explain here.
1. Boredom
Although it sounds like a silly excuse, boredom can turn someone into a villain. When you’re stuck in a classroom for 50 minutes with a slow-talking, uninteresting instructor who is lecturing about the most uninteresting and slowly developing topic ever, you may want to set your classroom on fire and run away. Or when you’ve been sitting for eight hours in the “silent” part of the library studying this boring topic, you may want to scream, “I’m bored! Let’s play dodgeball” to the other people there. Unfortunately, in both cases you will be committing a crime, and committing a crime can make you end up as a bad person.
2. An unexplainable mental breakdown
Unexplainable mental breakdowns can cause many unwanted psychological results. If you learn that you’re getting an FZ in the course mentioned above, after you studied really hard for the final exam, you may break down mentally and start to hallucinate about Teletubbies telling you to break all the windows of the classroom where the exam was held. Doing what they say may also cause you to become a bad person.
3. Sadistic pleasures
As you know, sadism is enjoying seeing someone else in pain. Just being a sadist doesn’t actually make someone a bad person. But if you are a sadist and make others suffer, that means you are both a bad person and a sadist. Think about the teachers who give you projects and assignments to do during exam week. Giving assignments that will overlap with exam week simply makes them not-good people. However, if they’re laughing while you’re whining about how impossible it will be to complete all those assignments during exam week, that means they are sadists as well as bad people.
4. Lack of information about moral rules
Actions caused by lack of information, such as not knowing that swearing loudly at people is an immoral thing to do, may also cause someone to end up as a bad person. Imagine that you’ve been working hard to complete the part of a group project that you’re responsible for, and when the due date comes you learn that the other group members didn’t complete their parts. In this case, swearing at them will make you a bad person. So you should just kill them, which will only make you a murderer.
5. A broken heart
“What is love? Baby don’t hurt me no more…” Love is a very good tool for breaking your own or someone else’s heart, and having a broken heart is the best reason to become a bad person; this happened to Frankenstein’s monster, for instance, who was hated by his creator. Applying this to your own life, throwing rocks at every cuddling couple you see after you are rejected by your crush is a totally understandable action. So, now you are a bad person who is understood by others. Well done!
6. Envy
Everyone knows a guy or a girl who is handsome/beautiful, smart and rich all at the same time. They own almost all the good adjectives, so there are only bad adjectives left for you. When you think about these people, you may want to kill yourself, but because you’re just a coward, you’ll be more likely to want to hurt them instead. For example, someone may find her/himself breaking the bones of that “perfect person” with a baseball bat. As you know, breaking someone’s bones just because you envy them is bad behavior and will definitely cause you to be called a bad person.
7. Greed
Greed is the essence of human nature. However, when you take it too far, things quickly get out of control. If you are lacking plates, glasses, forks or even chairs in your dormitory, you can imagine yourself stealing some from Marmara. However, turning this imaginary action into reality will make you a burglar. But at this point in the column, I don’t want to say that stealing things from Marmara will make you a bad person. Because I’m not a bad person. If you think otherwise, come and fight me!
Note: If you want to fight me, you can contact me via my e-mail.