Shadowing Practice: it's okay to love bad people. - Learn English Speaking with Video

What is more terrible than the discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being?

It is much more terrible than death, for death does not prevent the beloved from having lived.

Who we love is commonly thought to reflect who we are and who we want to be.

Love is a creative project that people take on through each other.

And out of all the people in the world, I chose to love you because you have qualities, ambitions, and values that I like.

If I am kind, I will also love someone who is kind.

If I want to learn how to see beauty in seemingly ordinary moments, I may love someone who paints the shades of blue others

forget about." This seems to be why we get disappointed when people choose to love morally impoverished individuals.

When Taylor Swift dated Mattie Healy, it felt contradictory to the feminist soapbox she preached from.

When someone is close friends with an asshole, it makes us wonder what they see in them.

How are they able to overlook their assholery?

were puzzled by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and outspoken liberal feminists' close public friendship with conservative anti-feminist justices,

notably Justice Antonin Scalia and Brett Kavanaugh.

But surprisingly shared the closest friendship of all the justices.

Why don't you call us the odd couple?

The 86-year-old spoke about, well, controversial Trump appointees, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch at a DC event saying,

quote, my two newest colleagues are very decent, very smart individuals.

Our disappointment might make us think that love is a sort of moral perception.

Love will see or pay attention to things in morally significant ways.

Bad love is like having blurry vision.

Yet from another perspective, some might think that love is not tied up with morality.

It can seem fine to love someone who is not a great person.

For example, we might think that parents have a duty to love their child

and prioritize their needs even when they act in morally bad ways.

We may understand a mentor who deeply cares for a seriously problematic mentee.

Through her work in psychoanalysis as a therapist, Jodi Messler-Davies theorized that children who grew up in abusive households had to hold two realities at once.

The abusive parent would project a toxic reality of the child as being inconsiderate, manipulative, stupid.

These toxic descriptions would feel totally opposite to how the child saw themself.

the only way for the child to gain the parent's love

was to agree with the parent's perverted experience of reality and accept this all-bad self-image.

Quote, To feel sane, I must forgo love, and to feel loved, I must render myself insane.

Then when they grow up, they project all that badness they've been forced to identify with onto someone else.

This is the only way in which they can cope with their parents' toxic projections, to see the badness as existing outside of themselves.

But this puts the adult child in a paradox.

If the object of the projection does act in toxic,

despicable ways, then the adult child deeply hates them because they align with this horrible reality that they experience.

However, if the object of the projection is actually kind and understanding, then the adult child has failed to project their badness outward.

The badness remains within themself.

Davies writes about this paradox with her patients.

Quote, and

dissociated sense of internal badness.

When the therapist is experienced as nurturing, it fills the patient with shame and not warmth.

So in loving her patient, it makes the patient act cruel towards her.

This causes both parties to harbor resentment towards each other and then themselves.

They both want to strangle the other person and then they both hate themselves for having that cruel desire.

But in a way, it is through being cruel bad people together that they can finally like each other.

Davies writes about her patient saying, I hate myself most of the time.

She tells me almost in a whisper, deep inside I'm evil.

The only time I feel good is when I find the evil parts of other people, like with you.

It makes me feel less alone.

For some philosophers, a loving relationship can even require us to do bad things.

Someone who tends to be honest may lie to defend their romantic partner's image.

In Alexis Elder's paper, Why Bad People Can't Be Good Friends, she writes, This

reminded

me of a tweet I saw a while ago which was like, When you hate on someone, make fun of a stranger, tear them down, what are you really accomplishing?

You're making your friends laugh.

And that's the best feeling in the world.

A loving relationship may require us to devalue certain lives, to choose the well-being of a certain person over the well-being of many.

If 10 people are drowning but one of them is your wife, love seems to require that you devalue the other 9 lives to save your wife.

We've reached the central question, is it okay to love bad people?

The definition of bad is not going to be deeply explored in this video, I'm just going to use it in a loose, common sense way because you can't expect too much from a 20-30 minute video.

There's a long, long literature that cannot be covered no matter what big video essay wants you to believe.

The purpose of video essays like this are to kickstart your thinking, not to complete it.

This is also not an advice video.

Everyone comes to love with their own biases, personal histories, fears and desires.

These are just my half-baked thoughts with some various sources thrown in to see if any resonate with you.

But it's okay if they don't.

Let's start by exploring two philosophical theories of love.

One that thinks of love as a mental attitude and one that conceives of love as action.

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

Do you think love is an attitude we have towards people or is love defined by the actions we take?

If you believe in love at first sight, in loving a family member you've never met or rarely see, then you may fall into the first camp,

which believes we don't need to have any sort of active relationship to love someone.

This is the view of philosophers David J.

Velman and Kieran Setia.

Both Velman and Setia argue that love is an appreciation of someone's value and for them, everyone has value.

Thus, it is rational to love everyone.

But what is this value grounded in?

For Velman, he adopts Immanuel Kant's conception of value, which states that all persons have value in themselves simply by existing as rational,

autonomous beings who can choose their own ends.

Because of this, Kant thinks the appropriate way to respond to someone's value is to respect them.

Respect fixates our attention on a person's autonomy

and consequently arrests our self-interested motives to use them as a means to our ends.

Hence, the behavior that follows in attitude of respect is one of self-restraint.

We try to not get in their way.

We respect somebody by letting them be.

However, while self-restraint seems to be the right response to strangers we respect, we often appreciate the value of people we love by actively getting involved in their lives.

We finance their hobbies, we help them quit smoking, we stop them from re-entering unhealthy relationships.

Or at least we try.

So for Velmen, love and respect both fixate our attention on someone's value grounded in their rational autonomy, but they motivate us in different ways.

Love is such a deep appreciation of someone's rational autonomy that it shuts up our fear of being emotionally open, at least for a while,

and motivates us to engage with them for their well-being.

So love is just respect, but to its maximum degree.

By contrast, Kiran Setia thinks that people have value simply in being human.

To love someone is to appreciate someone's humanity.

Despite Velmin and Setia's different conceptions of value, both philosophers claim that because everyone has value, everyone is worthy of love.

So their answer to the question, is it okay to love bad people, is a loud and clear yes.

Now before you dismiss this as repackaged hippie beliefs, Setia asks us to think about people in abusive relationships who say that they love their partner.

Do we just dismiss them as crazy and naive, or do we trust that something's there in their judgment?

100

Quote, The abused wife should not want to advance her husband's interests as he conceives them.

101

Most likely, she should end the marriage.

102

It is easy to imagine oneself saying to her, You need to move on, forget about him, let go.

103

And that might be right.

104

Her husband should not occupy her thoughts, but she need not cease to love him and so to wish for him sincerely and profoundly a better life.

105

What is irrational is to love someone in the wrong way, possessively perhaps or self-destructively, it is not a mistake to love them at all."

106

I think you often hear a similar sentiment in solidarity-focused spaces like abolitionism, black feminism, and indigenous talking circles.

107

We want to recognize that serious harm has been done and that perpetrators of harm should be held accountable,

108

but also hope that those perpetrators become better people and live better lives.

109

Quote, To take a more fantastic case, suppose that I discover that we came into existence an hour ago and that our memories are false.

110

We have no past relationship.

111

Is love then irrational?

112

I think the answer is still no. If you were to learn that your shared past is an illusion, would you stop loving the people you took to be your friends and family?

113

For Setia and Velmin, there is a clear distinction between our love and our actions.

114

You can love someone and plan to never see them again.

115

You can love someone and want them out of your life.

116

When you read the testimony of parents of murderers, several of them say that they still love their child.

117

The father of Peter Sutcliffe, better known as the Yorkshire Ripper, once said, He deserved to be hanged.

118

I love that lad.

119

I don't love him for what he's done.

120

I love him for being who he is.

121

When Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered, his parents were devastated and grieved heavily.

122

Setia would say this love for their murderous child is totally rational, but that doesn't mean they should defend their child or invite them on the next family vacation.

123

They should act in ways that hold their child accountable and bring justice to their victims.

124

Just recently, Robert E.

125

Cremo III, who was accused of murdering seven people and injuring dozens more in the Highland Park Parade shooting of 2022, rejected a deal to plead guilty.

126

In the front row of the trial was Robert's father, who had sponsored his state gun license knowing he was at risk of killing others.

127

His His father pled guilty to his charges and served some jail time, but he did so out of love for his murderous son.

128

He wanted to stop potential key evidence about his son's case being disclosed to the public.

129

He wanted to ensure that his son still got a fair right to trial.

130

There has been tons of news coverage on this story, which is why I want to thank the sponsor of today's video, Ground News, for helping me read through it.

131

I'm going to share this wonderful link with y'all at the end, but Ground News is an app and website

132

that gathers related articles from more than 50,000 sources across the world

133

and political spectrum in one place so you can compare how different outlets cover the same story.

134

Every story comes with context on the source's political bias, credibility, and ownership, so readers can critically think about how these factors influence their reporting.

135

For example, when I'm looking at the story about Robert rejecting the plea, I can look at the key points made by 60 news sources across the political spectrum,

136

as well as a biased comparison.

137

Of course, as a prompter of critical thinking, you don't just have to accept these summaries.

138

You can easily input your own opinions.

139

When I have all these sources here, I like to compare their headlines.

140

For example, when I look at this New York Post article, the headline makes a point to say that Robert was in a wheelchair.

141

No other article I saw mentioned that detail.

142

This reminds us that the news is written by human beings with intentions.

143

It's not just some objective thing that floats onto your phone.

144

So this makes me ask, what is the New York Post trying to imply by associating wheelchair with this murderer and even making this detail headline worthy?

145

Something smells ableist.

146

One of my favorite features of Ground News though continues to be their blind spot feed

147

which shows you stories that are over or under reported by the left and right.

148

I find this helps people think critically about why certain issues

149

get more attention from one side of the political spectrum than others.

150

I had posted these stories on Instagram once about the alarming lack of media literacy online

151

and I really think Ground News is a a great way to combat that.

152

You can head to ground.news.com or scan my QR code to subscribe today.

153

You can sign up now to get 40% off the same Vantage plan I use

154

or try it out for less than $1 a month.

155

That's cheap even in this economy and especially for the media literacy skills you'll be training.

156

Now where were we?

157

Ah yes, loving murderers.

158

Perhaps this calls for a distinction between equal relationships and unequal ones.

159

Friends and romantic partners are supposed to take each other as equals, whereas other relationships don't necessarily have this quality.

160

For example, parents can love their children without thinking that their desire to play Riz Tag at bedtime should be taken seriously.

161

Mentors can love their mentee but value their own opinions much more.

162

However, part of being friends or romantic lovers means taking each other's lifestyles and values seriously.

163

You're more willing to try new music that your romantic partner recommends versus a stranger, even if you don't typically enjoy that genre.

164

You may scowl at pro-life protesters on the street, but take time to discuss political disagreements with a good friend.

165

As such, friends and romantic lovers have a greater potential to influence us, and we might worry about that influence being bad.

166

So my son recently discovered 4chan.

167

How do we save him?

168

Yo babe, have you heard of this site called 4chan?

169

Evan told me it's pretty sick." So maybe it's bad to date someone who's deeply misogynistic, but we can't blame Andrew Tate's mom for still loving him.

170

Now you might wonder, if everyone has value that we can appreciate, why do we only love a small number of people?

171

Velman and Setia say this is because while the grounds for love are universal,

172

our attitudes of love are partial because we only successfully perceive the value of a select few number of people.

173

limited, imperfect beings.

174

Love moves us to let down our emotional defenses, but that makes us vulnerable.

175

Yuck.

176

I don't want to do that for most people.

177

Drawing from Iris Murdoch, she writes, Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

178

Some of you might have watched the previous section and thought, wow, okay, we're just really throwing around the word love like it doesn't mean something very special.

179

Love is reserved for relationships that we commit time and effort to, that we find mutual growth through.

180

Of course we can't love everyone, and parents absolutely shouldn't love their child who has murdered people.

181

You might also think that being able to separate the attitude of love from how we act is a privilege.

182

In this short article titled The Luxury of Loving Bad Men, It's Not Afforded to Everyone,

183

the writer touches on how men are more able to maintain a loving attitude towards someone who has done bad,

184

unloving acts, because men aren't usually the ones getting hurt by those acts.

185

Quote, To navigate this world as a woman is to encounter not just predators, but legions of men who insist on being loyal to them.

186

These men are not the ones cornering you, leering at you, using their position to coerce you.

187

They are the ones who choose, after such malfeasance by someone they are close to has been unearthed, to say, I don't condone these actions, but I love the guy.

188

If what I've said in this section has resonated more so far, then you might be inclined to think of love as an action.

189

Bell Hooks is known to be a big proponent of this love is as love does view.

190

Quote, we learn about love in childhood.

191

Love was always and only about good feeling.

192

In early adolescence, when we were whipped and told that these punishments were for our own good, or I'm doing this because I love you, my siblings and I were confused.

193

Why was harsh punishment a gesture of love?

194

As children do, we pretended to accept this grown-up logic, but we knew in our hearts it was not right.

195

Although lots of children are raised in homes where they are given some degree of care, love may not be sustained or even present.

196

Here, Bell Hooks raises love to a higher standard.

197

Love is different than care, different than good feelings.

198

You do not actually love someone if you do not act in the right ways.

199

So to the question, is it okay to love bad people?

200

The answer is either no, because if they act immorally, then love, which involves relational acts, cannot work even if you're a good person.

201

Or sure, you can love a bad person, but just remember that they don't love you back.

202

The motto, love is as love does, is nice to believe in and it definitely holds some truth.

203

There's a reason why bell hooks All About Love is men's favorite, oh no, I dropped my feminist literature book.

204

And I think bell hooks presents a nice ideal of love to strive for.

205

But in our current non-ideal world, love happens in the context of structural inequalities.

206

And a lot of the time, it's hard to act in ways that does this love justice.

207

Some of the feminists in the 70s and 80s, like Andrea Dorkin, Audrey Lord, and Catherine McKinnon, were highlighting how intertwined domination was with sex.

208

4B is a feminist movement in South Korea right now where women are refusing to date, marry, sleep with, or have children with men because patriarchy be working overtime.

209

Structural inequalities have just caused many people to be victims of intergenerational trauma.

210

And anyone with trauma knows how difficult it can be to feel in control of your own body or mind.

211

Thinking back to psychoanalysis, past mistreatment will impact your actions on an unconscious level.

212

Spoiler alert right now before you go any further, I've been watching the show Baby Reindeer and I felt an immense amount of sadness for Donnie, the main character.

213

If you've watched the show, I think you know which episode I'm talking about.

214

Before I knew about Donnie's traumatic past though, I thought, what a dickhead.

215

He can't report his stalker to the police because he secretly likes the attention.

216

He's a transphobic coward who lied about his entire identity to his trans partner, Terry.

217

He refuses to show affection to her in public.

218

And he failed to stand up for her when she experienced a racist transphobic attack from his own stalker.

219

But then we get his backstory.

220

Donnie already starts off as a lonely, insecure, financially struggling Sigma.

221

Or is it Beta?

222

I always get Sigma and Beta confused.

223

To make things exponentially worse, he gets routinely groomed, drugged, and raped, and then stalked.

224

It's just traumatic events piling on top of one another.

225

It makes him scared of intimacy.

226

His inability to be present and connect ends his former relationship and, of course, plummets his self-esteem.

227

He harbors so much shame and anger about what happened that makes him unable to explain the stalking situation to the police.

228

The whole time I watched this episode, I was thinking, yes, this is exactly why action-oriented theories of morality are flawed.

229

Philosophers and common folk alike usually think that we have these pure, rational wills that can make choices completely untethered from any influence.

230

We can calculate what the right course of action is free from any bias.

231

In reality though, our will, if you want to believe in one, is constantly being shaped by things that happen to us and things that we perceive in the external world.

232

When we're faced with a moment of choice, most of the choosing is already determined by how our attention has shaped our will.

233

This has consequences for how we think about love, Because if you think morality and love are intertwined,

234

aka if you think we can or should only love good people,

235

then our definitions of good or bad should not rely on general maxims like five red flags for any relationship.

236

Instead, they should take in the particular details of an individual's life and how they've been affected by structural systems.

237

If you're interested in hearing more about a moral theory that focuses on particular details rather than general rules, Maybe watch this video after.

238

These general maxims for love, like five red flags, no matter what relationship you're in, can be inaccurate in non-moral ways as well.

239

People with ADHD can be forgetful.

240

People with ASD can be more sensitive to certain stimulation.

241

I had a friend with OCD once tell me

242

that she couldn't kiss people because of how disgusting wet saliva felt to her.

243

I can already hear TikTok love gurus responding to this by going, if they're not willing to kiss you on the third date, then they're not into you.

244

And like, that's just not always true.

245

It's sometimes and maybe even often true, but not always.

246

We should not define good and bad in ways that classify people with neurodivergence or other mental disorders as unlovable.

247

As someone who is very well acquainted with borderline personality disorder, people with BPD can seem like very bad people.

248

And I'm not going to try to downplay the things someone can say or do when they split.

249

Definitely can be abusive and toxic.

250

But unfortunately, the way people overuse psychiatric terms like abusive,

251

toxic, delusional, in everyday conversation has stripped these terms of their real meaning.

252

You might have heard people online refer to this as therapy speak.

253

Western psychology and therapy has bred a lot of abusers, manipulators, and gaslighters.

254

Y'all have turned your sadism into self-care, your barbarity into boundaries.

255

It just gave you the language to do so.

256

Y'all would rather pick up DSM-5s than do a little self-reflection.

257

You have learned to pathologize why you are a bad partner, friend, child, or parent.

258

Instead of just saying, why would I want to help you move?

259

You say, I don't have the space for that right now.

260

instead of saying I don't want to listen to all the bullshit going on in your life, you say I can't have you trauma dumping on me.

261

There's a lot going on for me right now.

262

Also, as this creator puts it, mental health has become so hyper-individualized that taking on any pain

263

or difficulty to help someone you love has become too much emotional labor.

264

And I don't even want to get into the crazy girlfriend tropes that dehumanize women with personality disorders, especially BPD.

265

All this to say, maybe love isn't quite as love does, but love is as love is cultivated over time.

266

I guess I kind of lied when I said I wouldn't analyze the term bad.

267

I definitely ended up doing that.

268

Whether it's okay to love bad people or not hinges a lot on what makes people bad.

269

I'm still using scare quotes around bad though because there is no set definition I've been using.

270

A repeated disclaimer, nothing in this video is advice for you to get back with your ex that ruined your life.

271

Please, please don't.

272

I honestly don't even know how to think of love myself and I'm still figuring out what theory seems right to me.

273

Please let me know what you thought in the comments.

274

This is a very, very interesting topic to me.

275

I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on anything I said in this video or your personal anecdotes.

276

Have you ever loved someone who was a bad person?

277

How did that turn out for you?

278

Thank you so much for watching.

279

Let's keep talking and I hope to hear from you soon.

280

Bye.

281

Bye.

¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?

Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.

Shadowing Practice: it's okay to love bad people. - Learn English Speaking with Video

Who Will Benefit from This Video?

Words & Idioms Worth Stealing

How to Get the Accent Right

¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?