laralaralara:

greyhairedgeekgirl:

Schur loved not only the central thesis of “What We Owe to Each Other” but also the book’s title. “It assumes
that we owe things to each other,” he told me. “It starts from that
place. It’s not like: Do we owe anything to each other? It’s like: Given
that we owe things to each other, let’s try to figure out what they
are. It’s a very quietly subversive idea.”

It is, in a way, deeply un-American — an
affront to our central mythology of individual rights, self-interest and
the sanctity of the free market. As an over-the-top avatar of all our
worst impulses, Eleanor is severely allergic to any notion of community.
And yet her salvation will turn out to depend on the people around her,
all of whom will in turn depend on her. What makes us good, Chidi tells
her, is “our bonds to other people and our innate desire to treat them
with dignity.”

source

thedreadvampy:

egyptiann:

exigencelost:

closet-keys:

why none of them got into The Good Place

What I love about this is its acknowledgment that Jason had no intentions at all

this is all 100% true but it always made me really mad that Chidi’s “crime” was having a severe anxiety disorder like he needed understanding and therapy, sending him to the Bad Place for something he had literally no control over was incredibly fucked up

I feel like a less-surface theme of the show is that they’re all in a situation where they have been forced into bad patterns by forces outside their control – Chidi has SEVERE anxiety; Eleanor was forced by abuse and neglect to adopt a self-centered attitude from early childhood and, like many people with traumatic pasts, responds by not dealing with difficult emotions; Jason was very overtly raised in an environment where he got no education and all his models for behaviour were criminal and/or self-destructive; and Tahani has been raised in an environment where everything is performative and she is shot down for any genuine expression of unhappiness or non-material want. Just as Michael and Janet are made one way but changed by their experiences, the moral of the story is that things outside your control shape you but you can move away from them. That could easily be really insulting, in a sort of ‘just get over it’ way, but the idea isn’t that they change solely because they decide to be better – all six of them change because their circumstances change and give them the OPPORTUNITY to be better, because they’re finally given the support system they lack.

I like The Good Place because the whole show has since day 1 been predicated on the idea that black and white moral judgements made in a vacuum are bullshit, and that moral choices are informed by things outside our control, whether that be education, behaviour modelling, unfair treatment or mental health issues. That doesn’t mean we aren’t responsible for our actions but it DOES mean we have to understand morality in the context of people’s varied experiences AND asks for the possibility that if their environment is improved, their ability to function as moral agents also improves.

closet-keys:

why none of them got into The Good Place