If a high-status member of a community that you participate in is accused of misbehavior, you may want to defend them. You may even write a long essay in their defense.
In that essay, it may seem only natural to begin with a lengthy enumeration of the accused’s positive personal qualities. To extol the quality of their career and their contributions to your community. To talk about how nice they are. To be a character witness in the court of public opinion.
If you do this, you are not defending them. You are proving the point. This is exactly how missing stairs come to exist. People don’t get away with bad behavior if they don’t have high status and a good reputation already.
Sometimes, someone with antisocial inclinations seeks out status, in order to facilitate their bad behavior. Sometimes, a good, but, flawed person does a lot of really good work and thereby accidentally ends up with more status than they were expecting to have, and they don’t know how to handle it. In either case, bad behavior may ensue.
If you truly believe that your fave is being accused or punished unjustly, focus on the facts. What, specifically, has been alleged? How are these allegations substantiated? What verifiable evidence exists to the contrary? If you feel that someone is falsely accusing them to ruin their reputation, is there evidence to support your claim that the accusation is false? Ask yourself the question: what information do you have, that is leading to your correct analysis of the situation, that the people making the accusations do not have, which might be leading them into error?
But, also, maybe just… don’t?
The urge to defend someone like this is much more likely to come from a sense of personal grievance than justice. Consider: does it feel like you are being attacked, when your fave has been attacked? Is there a tightness in your chest, heat rising on your cheeks? Do you feel suddenly defensive?
Do you think that defensiveness is likely to lead to you making good, rational decisions about what steps to take next?
Let your heroes face accountability. If they are really worth your admiration, they might accept responsibility and make amends. Or they might fight the accusations with their own real evidence — evidence that you, someone peripheral to their situation, are unlikely to have — and prove the accusations wrong.
They might not want your defense. Even if they feel like they do want it in the moment — they are human too, after all, and facing accountability does not feel good to us humans — is the intensified feeling that they can’t let down their supporters who believe in them likely to make them feel less defensive and panicked?
In either case, your character defense is unlikely to serve them. At best it helps them stay on an ego trip, at worst it muddies the waters and might confuse the collection of facts that would, if considered dispassionately, properly exonerate them.
Do you think that I am pretending to speak in generalities but really talking about one specific recent event?
Wrong!
Just in this last week, I have read 2 different blog posts about 2 completely different people in completely unrelated communities and both of their authors need to read this. But each of those were already of a type, one that I’ve read dozens of instances of in the past.
It is a very human impulse to perceive a threat to someone we think well of, and to try to defend against that threat. But the consequences of someone’s own actions are not a threat you can defend them from.