Apology lust

Do you know when to say "I'm sorry?" Do you know when not to say it? Stanley Bing writes at Fortune,

We live in a culture of gotcha and sorry, and Twitter TWTR -0.05% drives the hostile, accusatory, triumphant conversation. And even when Twitter doesn’t initiate the apology-generation ritual, it’s the enormous echo chamber in which every offense, from large to small, is amplified and played out until the inevitable outcome—the career death of the apologizer.

...The fact is, very, very few individuals or business entities can stand up to the kind of relentless professional scrutiny kicked off by a professionally conducted witch hunt driven by apology lust.

...Now, I’m not saying there aren’t some actions that require an apology. You falsify emission results. You ignore all warnings and your oil rig explodes. You steal billions of dollars from unwary grandmothers. You are caught on video running over a puppy. In such cases, yeah, you’ve got to say you’re sorry. And then expect to reap the well-earned consequences.

Otherwise? Ride it out, baby. Play dead. Wait for the angry badger to get tired of sniffing you and depart to look for something tasty in a nearby garbage can. They always do. Badgers are hungry, but they’re not that smart, and as for attention span, forget about it. 

“Character is what you do when no one is watching”

Jonah Goldberg writes at National Review,

I always liked the old line, “Character is what you do when only God is watching.” The alternate version, “Character is what you do when no one is watching,” is actually theologically and philosophically a very different statement. But both have their relevance in the age of the Digital Panopticon.

...The only way to guarantee you don’t get “outed” as an adulterer is not to commit adultery in the first place. Behave as if God is watching you and you won’t much care who else is watching you.

...The phrase “Character is what you do when no one is watching,” is really a way to get you to imagine that someone is watching you. We are relearning that someone is watching us, but we aren’t being taught that that someone is God. We’ll see how that works out.

Read more here.