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?

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

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Most likely, she should end the marriage.

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

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And that might be right.

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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.

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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."

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

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

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

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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.

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We have no past relationship.

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Is love then irrational?

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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?

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

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

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

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

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

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I love that lad.

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

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I love him for being who he is.

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

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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.

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

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Just recently, Robert E.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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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,

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as well as a biased comparison.

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

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You can easily input your own opinions.

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

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

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No other article I saw mentioned that detail.

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

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

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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?

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Something smells ableist.

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

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

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I find this helps people think critically about why certain issues

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

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

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

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

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

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Now where were we?

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Ah yes, loving murderers.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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So my son recently discovered 4chan.

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How do we save him?

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

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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.

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

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

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

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limited, imperfect beings.

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

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Yuck.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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

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Quote, we learn about love in childhood.

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Love was always and only about good feeling.

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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.

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Why was harsh punishment a gesture of love?

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

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

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Here, Bell Hooks raises love to a higher standard.

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Love is different than care, different than good feelings.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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He refuses to show affection to her in public.

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

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But then we get his backstory.

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

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Or is it Beta?

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I always get Sigma and Beta confused.

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

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

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It makes him scared of intimacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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People with ADHD can be forgetful.

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People with ASD can be more sensitive to certain stimulation.

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I had a friend with OCD once tell me

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

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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.

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And like, that's just not always true.

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

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

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

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

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Definitely can be abusive and toxic.

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

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

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

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

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

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It just gave you the language to do so.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I definitely ended up doing that.

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

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

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

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Please, please don't.

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

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Please let me know what you thought in the comments.

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This is a very, very interesting topic to me.

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

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Have you ever loved someone who was a bad person?

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How did that turn out for you?

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Thank you so much for watching.

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

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Bye.

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Bye.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

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

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