[dadoomer]

> > You have to be bad in order to discover what kind of good you want to be (or are able to be). > > Sounds like one of those pseudo-profound woo statements. > > Many people manage being perfect good, well-adjusted humans without going through a bout of "being bad".

The way I read it, that paragraph is not about whether anyone can be a well-adjusted human or not. Rather, it is about how specifically some people discover what kind of good they want to be by being bad.

In that sense, "you have to be bad" talks to those people specifically, and uses "have" to refer to that causal process.

(English is not my first language, so my interpretation may be very wrong.)

[gnicholas]

FYI you don’t have to include a quote of the entire parent post in your reply. People typically just include quotes when they are responding to a piece of the parent comment, and want to make it clear what they’re responding to.

Thanks for the downvotes — mind explaining why? I have literally never seen anyone do this in the decade-plus I've been here, and thought it would be helpful to mention.

[c22]

I didn't downvote you, but it's probably because your comment added nothing to the conversation. We're already down here at the bottom of the page, we already slogged through the gratuitous inline quote, and then there's you telling us something irrelevant we already know. And now I'm here making it even worse. Sorry.

[gnicholas]

If you already knew, the comment wasn’t for you!