Can you hurt someone because another person did a similar hurtful thing before that moment? If you hurt someone, will the law pass a fair judgment in your favour because you were once hurt?
Now, if you direct the first question to a lot of us, we’ll all shout, “No oooh! I can’t transfer that aggression” — but funny enough, it’s what most of us do on a daily basis, and we don’t see anything bad in it because, in clear terms, the act is practically a means of balancing one’s feelings.
Haven’t you seen or heard of people stealing someone’s phone because theirs was stolen some days or weeks back? Maybe you haven’t heard that, but haven’t you heard of someone transferring hurtful aggression to another person who’s being nice to them, just because they were treated badly at their workplace, home, or in their relationship?
But in all these, what is bad is bad and what is good is good. A gunshot at someone’s heart will instantly lead to death, and that person is definitely going to be charged as a murderer whether they did that out of annoyance to justify a previous hurt someone did to them or not. Any act of such is a crime and shouldn’t be handled in a pitiable manner in favour of the person that committed the crime.
As ugly as this may sound, I once involved myself in this act, and today I laugh over how everything happened. To be honest, I didn’t feel bad about it back then.
Oh yes, I’m coming out clean on this...
Back in the days when Ponzi schemes were very rampant in Nigeria, I had a large amount of money swallowed in the game through an investment I made. I was hurt alongside other people that belonged to my WhatsApp group. Along the line, when it appeared that investing alone in a Ponzi site couldn’t give someone what they wanted, I and some group of friends decided to own our own Ponzi scheme. And to be truthful, the intention was to make money, but we didn’t plan to scam investors. We planned it in a way that we would invest the money from investors into something profitable and then pay our investors from the profit made.
Little did we know that it could never work that way. Ponzi is all about robbing Peter to pay Paul, no matter how smart the strategy is planned.
Long story cut short, when my team saw that we would run at a loss if we continued, they initiated the idea of closing up and carting away with the money left, which was investors’ money. It was clear: “We’ve been cheated and scammed before when we were investing, so it’s no big deal if we do it to others.” These were the words we agreed on, and it justified our acts in every ramification. That was how we closed the site and went away with the little money remaining.
I remember then, one of those people who was known to be among the team got angry and showed me a photo where he wrote my name and dropped it in a shrine, and I couldn’t stop laughing.😂😂
But the truth is, if we had been taken to court, we would have been charged for scam if Ponzi was against the law, and the court wouldn’t pity us because we were once scammed.
Thanks for reading.
This is my entry to Week 185, Edition 01 of the Weekly Featured contest in Hive Learners Community
Image: MetaAI