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The cleansing virtue of virtue
Why you should talk about virtue with people you want to screen as friends.
Virtue — however it's spoken of, rationally, or perhaps even merely expressing your emotions about someone else's behavior — has a potent smell. That smell drives bad people away from your life.
What do I mean?
Think about this:
If you've ever talked about any sort of virtue to a group of people, and some of the folks around started throwing wrenches in your conversation, that was a direct signal that told you loud and clear: the people who tried to sabotage you or block you from making your point, were terrified and intimidated about the direction the conversation was going towards. They didn't want to listen to the conversation as it developed, because they felt guilty about their own shortcomings, and they decided that the best course of action was to sabotage you, rather than to revisit their own feel-good conclusions.
So now you know — that's the simple reason they tried to ruin your conversation.
What's the tip here?
The tip is simple: being mindful of sabotage gives you a good signal which you shouldn't ignore. Such conduct reliably signals to you that you're extinguishing creepy-crawlies out of your life. You aren't just stamping them out your life — you're probably also cleaning them away from your friend circles ("friends" meaning people who actually value you for who you are, rather than just accept whatever B.S. gossip they hear) and possibly even protecting your own family from the disaster that is compound lies from people who want to undermine you. Your straight talk always scrubs bad people out of your life, and normally also out of the lives of people you love.
People who are liars, fraudsters, treacherous, people who tell themselves (and each other) pretty lies... they will always betray you too, because their own ethical bar lies below betraying themselves, and their brains are primed to trigger in that direction. Talking virtue unconditionally — and living virtue unconditionally — will keep your life squeaky clean from those characters.
Do it for yourself.