petty revenge, The Mechanics of Virtue, Matt Berry, aphorism 79

79
It is impossible in this awareness to pity – with sincerity – an enemy who actually craves our sympathy for his misfortune.  We can no longer indulge in the petty revenge of looking down on another through the label, “sympathy.”  And on the other hand we are not built to refuse our sympathy without ourselves suffering from an unavoidable sense of inhuman behavior.  But now this unfortunate soul, in craving a sympathy that we withhold, believes we are cruel precisely where we sought magnanimous behavior.  Hypocrisy here is not so much the best as it is the only course of action.  And for this hypocrisy, the unfortunate yields us his gratitude!  It is either him or us ... at first glance anyway.  We looked again and found a symbiotic arrangement.




A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism



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