There’s a comfort that people take from making moral judgments. Reality seems simple to understand when we’re in a righteous mood. There’s right, and there’s wrong, that’s all there is to it.
There’s just one problem with righteousness. It’s dreadfully dull. When a simple moral truth is discovered, and everything can be centered around that, the complexity of human existence is reduced to that one imperative. Everyone either gets it, and shares the same moral code over and over with each other, or doesn’t get it, and becomes an enemy.
A black and white world is stark and clear. It’s also blind to some of the most exciting vistas.
That’s why there’s such an appeal to the idea of feeling naughty. It isn’t that naughty people want to be bad, really. Instead, what they want is to break free from the stifling binary moral perspective of the righteous. When people are in a naughty mood, they’re looking to disobey moral authoritarians.
Naughty is a word that adults use to warn children not to defy orders. Along the same lines, naughty is also a word that adults use to signal to each other that they’re in the mood to do something sexy or exciting in some other way. The special pleasure of naughtiness is in purposefully doing something others don’t approve of. Naughty is a declaration of liberation from rigidity. It’s an embrace of fluid fun.
Not everything worth doing is nice.
