Final Boss of the Liberal Disease
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It's just motivated reasoning. There no reason whatsoever to believe that guy who stole it actually needed or valued it more than you.
It was free for him, he didn't work for it, it doesn't hold the baked in value of what it cost him to get it and statistically speaking criminality has a strong negative correlation with conscientiousness, so he likely doesn't even value the things he did have to pay for as highly as the average Joe. There's a good chance he just rode it as a single use conveyance and dumped it in a ditch somewhere so as to not get caught, there's even a small chance he used it to aid in committing another, even more harmful crime, decreasing total happiness even more.
There is a chance he sold it, but even then the guy who ended up with it traded money for a bike, he's not ecstatic about that transaction, he's marginally more happy with it than the goods he traded for it, that's the essential pattern of commerce. And someone who would buy shady bikes off a stranger (or a guy they know, and know steals bikes) is also likely low in conscientiousness and tends to feel no great care over anything they own. But maybe against all the odds it ended up with a good-natured but desperate guy, down on his luck and just looking for a way to get to work because he couldn't afford to fix his car. That'd be nice, right?
The only time it's actually more likely than not that the theft somehow ended up with more people being happy is in the extreme circumstance where the bike you owned meant almost nothing to you, either because you're filthy rich or you hated it for some other reason. But you were bummed initially, so it doesn't sound like that's the case for you.
People want to feel better about the events that lead to their bike being stolen and being unable to recover it and restore the rightful order of things. Some people get mad and bitch and moan for a while. Some people are just good at letting it go. And sometimes people who are concerned with concepts like "total net happiness" chose to believe in the fraction of a fraction of a fractional possibility that somehow it ended up helping someone who deserved it more, rather than the most likely outcome that it was just a selfish cunt who benefited at your expense. To me that's no more rational than drinking the spicy kool-aid on the fraction of a fraction of fraction of a chance that Mr. Jones was right and it will actually take you to Nirvana.
It's also kind of understandable though, in a pitiable kind of way, people who do have a lot of empathy are bombarded with pleasant sounding lies like "revenge is always bad", "it's always better to just walk away" and "the only thing you need to do is tell a teacher and everything will be fair in the end" from early childhood, and some really do internalize them out of pure goodwill for everyone else. Accepting that they did everything they were supposed to and were just complicit in making the world worse is a bitter pill to swallow after all that time.
Then there's major the flaw in "total net happiness" itself. It's a broken system that assumes everyone's happiness is equally valuable and fails to account for which actions actually deserve to result in happiness. Come to think of it, you can basically just sum it up as emotional communism instead of financial communism. For example, one way to maximize "total net happiness" in that situation is hunting down the guy who stole your bike, kicking his ass, taking your bike back and smashing both his kneecaps, you just have to make sure to really fuckin enjoy the process, so much so that it outweighs his suffering. Seems pretty messed up, right?
You can take it even more extreme if I have to. A guy works extra shifts for a month to save up and buy his son his first ever game console. But the kid is at school half the time and can only play in the evenings. Across town three child rapists share a cell and would really enjoy that console since they're in locked in their cell 23/7 to prevent them getting shanked in gen pop. So the father decides it's best to give it to them instead. It's not actually a very happy world, it's just fucked up. It's also a very simple world, you don't have to make value judgements about what is good and bad, just who has more and who has less, the more confused and insecure you feel, the more appealing the simplicity is.
There's been lots of game theory around how altruism even came to exist as a naturally selected heritable trait in humans, and the general conclusion is altruism is abused and goes extinct in every environment except one where altruists can recognize each other and only extend their selflessness to each other instead of the entire population. Likewise an honor system only lasts for as long as there is someone willing to enforce transgressions against it, and enforcing the rules is actually kind of unpleasant for empathetic, honorable people. So the fairest system is if everyone accepts a small portion of that responsibility themselves to punish transgressions, instead of absolving themselves of making the instinctually unpleasant but necessary hard choices.
So bike cuck is just an exemplar of that kind of abdication of personal responsibility for making the world better, all wrapped up in an air of morally superior martyrdom, which is gonna extra piss off the people who refuse to live in that happy delusion and want to actually save good people from a life of crushing oppression by selfish assholes.
I never said anything about the person who stole it, only the person riding it currently. It's far more likely that it was resold rather than ditched. People buy/sell shit secondhand all the time.
All I know is that I haven't had any sort of negative thoughts about it since it happened. I barely thought about it until I was reminded of it here. I choose to believe now it's being ridden by someone else. Because ultimately, who cares? What's the point in being upset about possible negative outcomes? I'm already moving on to what I want for dinner.
If that pisses someone off...oh well. That's their problem. Why should I care? Why should I do anything different? I'm not doing anything wrong, they just don't like my philosophy.
^It was right there all along.
And that is dead weight behavior, either you're just pretending concerned with community wellbeing, or you're just embracing being delusional. I'd prefer to actually live in a world where good people don't finish last instead of just posing about how I'm above the society that feeds and protects me.
I will continue to shame people for that, all this childish "whatever man" bullshit is precisely how we ended up in a situation where the worst people in society are benefitted the most by it.
Okay pal. You're free to think that. It literally does not matter to me.
I'm finishing out on top pretty well. I've got a great condo, heated parking, a fresh new bike, great social life, and I attribute a lot of that to people seeing me as good and want me to have around, hence I don't just hope my community well being is healthy, but I actively contribute to keeping it healthy. I'm not pretending at all. I just don't see what my other option should be. What betterment does it provide if I'm instead seething about my bike still, almost four years after the fact? Tell me what the harm is in just thinking it might very well be in the hands of some down on his luck fellow?
For the record, I don't actually think that's where it is. But I'm curious where the harm, at all, is in thinking it. What is the actual, tangible, consequence? What is my thought process directly contributing to?
I really would like to address it directly, and I hope you don't say something like "oh it's obvious I can't just tell you blah blah" (I get a lot of that on this site, unfortunately). I genuinely just don't see your point. I assure you I am of sound mind and am very open to hearing your logic, so I hope you'll take the time to walk me through the consequences of my line of thinking.
I'm not above the society that feeds and protects me. I don't know why you believe I think that.
Well for a start you're not just thinking it, you're out here advocating for believing in the improbable fairy tale version of events as a valid coping mechanism, which is de facto advocating for negligence instead of people playing their part in converting a theoretical framework of right and wrong into reality.
And it is negligence, albeit a mild one. You're supposed to seethe a little bit when your bike gets stolen, and yes you're supposed to do something to stop seething about it. But that something's not supposed to be deluding yourself into thinking it ended up as little timmy's christmas present. You're supposed to ask why your bike was stolen with no consequence even though we as a society have agreed that theft is, in fact, wrong. You're supposed to think about what missing safeguards would have prevented that and advocate for their instatement, or if someone was negligent in their duty to already an already existing safeguard you give them a hard time about it. It won't bring your bike back, but you do it so the next guy's bike is just a little bit less likely to be stolen. Failing that you at least resolve to yourself to intervene if you ever think something fishy is going on with a bike, embarrassment be damned.
And I don't doubt you are thought of well in your community, and that that definitely does pay dividends. The most prosperous communities still tend to be the ones with a high level of sharing and collaboration. It's a real chicken and the egg situation there, collaboration leads to general prosperity, but it's also very easy to ignore little frictions and work together when everyone is already doing well for themselves. Eloquent avoidance and permissiveness is a tremendously safe and effective strategy for appearing good in those circumstances for little actual cost, the more superficial the community interactions are the greater the cost/benefit outcomes become. You can prove you're good to ten people through direct individual interactions, or you can just do one good thing and make sure to bring it up a hundred people who aren't really paying much attention to your day to day life about it, but have enough resources to throw a little something your way anyway. Appearing good in those circumstances is a social capital that is ripe for conversion into real capital with minimal effort, that's the essence of the empty virtue signalling grift. But appearing good and doing good are very much decoupled in a superficial community, appearing good is a social game to which actually doing good is a sub-optimal strategy for being so inefficient.
It's not like our forefathers wouldn't also feel sympathy for the security guard who just forgot to lock the gate, they just knew that if they chewed him out about it anyway he's still more likely to remember next time than if they just quietly let it slide. Sometimes you have to look like the bad guy superficially and burn some social capital sometimes to do actual good things long term. But somehow the majority of people with generally good intentions have become so gelded politically that they don't even think they can make hard decisions or initiate any conflict without making things worse instead of better.
The cumulative effect of years of proverbial bike cuckoldry has left all the real decision making to an insular elite with no such compunctions about wanting to be good handicapping their will to power. And have left a prosperous and oft well meaning middle class of naive socialites on the precipice of collapsing into a lower class who now either hates them because they were once richer, or hates them for effectively being highly competent freeloaders, benefitting maximally from society's stability and contributing minimally to protecting it, all whilst subjecting them to the whims of their silly social games. On an individual level it can make for a lovely to person to know, which makes it all the more of a shame that on a societal level it feels like watching cute and fluffy lemmings waving to the predators below as the cliff edge is beging to crack and someone is making off with all their nest eggs.