I’m the guy who is trying to throw his arms around the world when I’m out drinking. I hear stories, and want to offer “good advice”. What I often realize the day after is that I am not sure if what I said was helpful or not.
The desire to help others is affective, it is a blessing. At the same time, ACTUALLY helping others requires perception. You have to work hard at it, and you have to understand that you will at times be stupid. What you cannot do is blissfully leave a trail of wrecks behind you and congratulate yourself for your generosity.
As an example, I’m not a fan of most forms of talk therapy. I think it encourages moral weakness and whining.
The “sexual revolution” did not make most people happier. I think it diminished actual emotional intimacy, which is necessary for actually good–satisfying beyond the purely physical–sexual relations.
As I often say, Leftism “works to”, in Hayekian terms, moral and economic collapse.
You can’t absolve yourself from responsibility for consequences simply because you wander around sowing, as you see it, flowers, if they in fact come up weeds.
Put as simply as I can, if you don’t care about the consequences of your actions, you are not a good person, regardless of your affective state. I have in mind in particular people who smell of patchouli and who talk about compassion, but who to this very day have not realized the role they played in the horrors that followed the Vietnam War; and who to this day are not willing to see the horrors which fill this world, the potential role of military force in ending them, or the strongly pernicious effects of the economic and politically implemented social strategies they embrace.
Put another way: stupid people are not good people. You have to be willing to tell hard truths to yourself, and if you aren’t, you are a useless–generally counter-productive–child. To be clear on this, simple and stupid are two different things. Common sense is in fact common, and only corrupted by most contemporary forms of “higher” education, which we might more properly call “intellectual dehabilitation”. IQ and the capacity to do the right thing are quite distinct.