I'm reading Alan Moore's Watchmen. In Chapter 6, we learn about Rorschach/Walter Kovacs through the eyes of a therapist, Malcolm Long. Long says,
It's as if continual contact with society's grim elements has shaped him into something grimmer, something even worse.
Moore's not-so-subtle point that spending time with criminals and focusing one's efforts and attention on the darker side of society can turn you into what you're fighting against is not novel. The work that is indelibly sketched in my mind is the movie 8MM starring Nicholas Cage. In 8MM, Cage plays a private investigator who is trying to determine if a pornographic film is truly a snuff film. Through the course of 8MM, we see in very tangible ways how Cage gets "sucked-in" to the underworld and corrupted by the people he obtains information from and the places he must go to solve this mystery. One memorable outward sign of Cage's downward drift is he picks up smoking again.
It seems this concept, that spending time with criminals will bring you down, may be related to Nightingale's "the strangest secret" that I mentioned in my post on efficiency (the notion that thinking about something will make it come true - Nightingale focuses on success, of course). I also think Gladwell's point about controlling our environment and our experiences to change our subconscious thoughts is related. If we want to be successful and happy, we should surround ourselves by successful and happy people. If we spend our time with murderers and rapists, we become like them, even if we have good intentions. Perhaps this is the lesson of both Rorschach's character in Watchmen and Gladwell's observations on thin-slicing in Blink.
Moore ends the chapter with a quote from Nietzsche,
Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.
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