Your Unforgivable Sin
Betrayal of Virtue
Few sins cannot be forgiven, even after honest remorse and a committed desire to make amends — there are no margins of opportunity left for you to try to fix the unfixable.
One unforgivable sin is betraying the few good people who accepted you, especially when you were down, and even admired you for who you truly were, for the values you held, not for your relative value to society. I’m talking about actually good people, not the losers who cling to just anybody to exploit you until they don’t need you anymore. I’m talking about the people who had options yet still saw worth in you, the integrity, the values, the virtues, and all their mutually held ideals.
You ignored, discounted, and dismissed them so that you could focus on desperately seeking the meaningless approval of the masses, the many, the bad people who never liked you, precisely for who you were.
Why did you do that? Why did you throw away a one-in-a-billion blessing to run after the many dime-a-dozen corrupted?
You threw away quality for quantity because of economics — the law of scarcity. You were so conditioned to being treated like an object, so you treated yourself as one too. You thus learned to objectify humans, to treat them as items of a singular and linear value metric that you measured according to popularity: market demand. You focused on volume, on perceived quantity, not objective quality.
In economics, and ceteris paribus, we value a given item more if it’s in relatively less supply, and even more if it’s in relatively more demand. So, you didn’t value the people who were in high supply to you — the good people who liked you for seeing the hidden qualities and potential in you. You instead focused on the people who disrespected and ignored you — the people who were in short supply to you, and who seemed to be in a lot of demand from others at the same time. This is what you get when you treat humans as objects: you value them according to market supply and demand instead of virtue.
The principles of economics work well with soulless items, but not with humans and higher ideals. If someone loves you (meaning they are in high supply to you), then you should go against the principles of economics and love them back at least for that: for loving you first, and for being there for you. Similarly, if someone is in less demand in the world, that should be a marker of quality, because we see what the masses cheer for, what they applaud, what they demand: meaningless trash. So, measuring the value of humans goes against the laws of economics.
I say “you should value them” as a conditional imperative. You “should” value people who are in less demand and more supply, but only if you don’t objectify yourself, and by extension, others. If you objectify them, then you value them according to economic principles of scarcity, and supply and demand. But if you see people as more than just objects of trade, if you value them for their priceless virtues instead, then economic principles do not apply: you instead value oversupply and you discount overdemand.
Still, it’s ironic how the rare person’s approval of you is more valuable than that of the vapid generic unit of the collective masses. From this perspective, this is an economic principle applied to human value after all.
Your punishment for objectifying yourself and humans is harsh. For failing to appreciate their value, to be grateful for their blessing, and for betraying their extended hand, you must suffer the irreversible and unstoppable passage of time. You must experience the torturous realisation of the possibilities you lost as you mourn the unlived life.
More heavily than the value you lost from dissociating from virtuous people is the burden of guilt, knowing you weren’t there for them when your presence might have soothed their pain. The worst part isn’t the happiness you yourself could have received from them.
The greatest pain comes from knowing you didn’t show the few good people the same acceptance when they needed it too, the same acceptance you so easily discarded, rejecting them like you were rejected by worthless others…
…and for what? To get some cheap, meaningless acceptance from trash people whose opinion doesn’t even matter to anyone that matters?