No.158952
>ignores the fact that if you're better people treat you better, and that makes facing the world easier.
I mean, that's not strictly true. Maybe to an extent, but it depends on what you call "the world." I cannot honestly look at myself and say "I'm a bigger piece of shit than Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Keir Starmer, and Peter Thiel" - objectively, I have killed less people and fucked less people over and feel less entitled to do those things than those people do. Does the world treat me better?
Not really. Those people are all rich. The world actively gives them money and power, and even the many people who dislike them have not, thus far, endeavored to take those things from them. I work to change that, but there's no assurance that I will succeed in doing so; my odds would improve astronomically with more help in changing this sad state of affairs, but it's quite difficult to find that.
There's a difference between the world treating you worse and people generally having negative opinions of you. There are a lot of people who end up like Hitler, in his last moments, without ever having had the same amount of power or having committed the same level of crimes. There are lots of good people who go through life miserable just because they're born poor, or the wrong color, or the wrong nationality. It's simply a fact of the world today, and it won't just be goodness which changes that; it will be ruthlessness to attain a good result for most of the world's people and not just a few.
So I agree with you, to an extent, that people who treat others badly and behave like assholes are often perceived (rightfully!) as assholes, and often come into unnecessary conflict; but the world as it is today also regularly rewards assholes and fails to punish or stop actively evil people and institutions.