3 minutes reading time
In my life, whenever I run into people radiating that "good guy" aura, the ones overflowing with saviour complexes and moral purity, my gut instantly recoils. Experience has taught me a simple rule: people who are obsessed with convincing the world (and themselves) that they are the "good guys" are almost always the most toxic, hypocritical cunts you will ever meet.
Psychology calls it moral licensing. When someone decides their core identity is purely virtuous, they give themselves an unconscious pass to behave like absolute garbage. They don't ask "was what I just did right?" because they've already answered the easier question: "am I a good person?" Once the answer to that is an unquestioned yes, any cruelty, lie, or abuse becomes justified. It's for the "greater good." It's for the cause. It's because the other side is "evil."
I got a front-row seat to this exact brain rot last month. Right after Modi pulled his sudden demonetisation stunt in November 2016, the RSS fanboys and internet nationalist crowd went into full moral overdrive. They spun this insane fairy tale about how the new ₹2000 notes had magic nano-GPS chips built into them: chips that could supposedly beam signals to satellites from 12 meters underground so the government could catch black money hoards in real-time.
When I pointed out basic, high-school-level physical reality (that you can't put an active GPS transmitter and power source inside mass-printed paper currency) they didn't engage with the physics. They couldn't. Instead, the self-righteous mob deployed their moral binary:
"Are you against catching black money hoarders? Are you anti-national? Why do you hate soldier standing at the border?"
That’s how the saviour complex operates. Because they had framed demonetisation as a holy war of moral cleansing, pointing out basic engineering constraints made me an enemy of the nation. Believing their own goodness was beyond question meant they didn't need to debate facts; they just needed to burn the heretic.
The most dangerous people aren't the ones who know they are assholes. The people who call themselves assholes often at least keep a running list of their own flaws and mistakes. But the bastards who think they hold a monopoly on virtue (whether they are nationalist sanghis, religious zealots, or corporate CEOs hiding behind spirituality while scamming customers) will bulldoze anyone in their path and sleep like babies.
If someone can't say "I was wrong," or if their entire defense boils down to how pure their intentions are while their actions wreck real people's lives, get the fuck away from them. Trust the self-aware asshole over the self-righteous saint every single time.
Image Credit: Vintage Books at Tulane University - Rhetorica Christiana.jpg via Wikimedia Commons