UPDATE: Monday, Feb 26, 2024 · 7:34:11 PM +00:00 · Gaelsdottir
Update: Many many thanks to all who have read and all who have commented thus far — I’m sorry I haven’t been able to reply to all the comments but I’m doing my best to make sure each is acknowledged.
A quick admission. Where you see the horizontal lines in this diary is where the parts of a series were going to break — so this is the whole thing in one sitting. I had a handwritten basic outline and no real notes because this is distilled from being sixty-eight and “different”, and doing a lot of reading and worrying over about forty years.
Am glad it came out cohesive enough to be useful and I thank everyone for the positive input. That sounds like a platitude but I mean it with my whole soul.
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So a year or more back I wrote something here about how snark tags actually do a public service — they help non-native English speakers, and people whose first interpretation of language is literal, to know when something is not literally meant.
And I explained what it’s like to be one of those people, because as luck would have it I *am* one, high functioning autistic, AKA Aspie. Realized fairly young that some of the things people said which confused me, were confusing to me because there were actually at least two ways to interpret what they meant. Started figuring out those alternate interpretations. It took me awhile, and I’m still not as adept at it as neurotypical people usually are [or as I want to be], but I’ve learned a bit about the hunting of the snark.
The response to that diary was touching and sobering. People shared their own distress, and other people shared how distressed they were for loved ones facing similar conundrums. There was nowhere near as much trolling of that diary as I had expected and prepared for… that came later, when people referred to it during subsequent pleas for others to label their snark. That’s when you find out who the trolls are; they’re the ones who gloat over your distress, especially when they’ve gone out of their way to cause it.
This diary won’t be about snark. This one’s about hate.
Hate is a drug.
It begins as anger looking for a home. That anger is often a natural response to some form of abuse — physical, emotional, economic. I include sexual abuse in physical abuse because the coercion involved is often though not always physical, and the contact itself ALWAYS is.
And of course these aren’t really distinct categories. All abuse will have emotional impacts, economic impacts, even physical impacts [as my own elevated blood pressure has been reminding me, lately.]
Hate is, among other things, the emotional fingerprint of abuse. It’s the natural desire to stop, end, even destroy, the source of pain. There are only two problems with this: hate doesn’t think, and in fact it hinders thought; and hate is massively addictive. It feels like a power surge. In the grip of hatred, people feel invincible.
Like cocaine.
And this is part of the reason why battered children sometimes grow up to be batterers themselves, and why children of emotionally and psychologically abusive parents sometimes grow up to use emotional and psychological abuse as weapons themselves. The hate behind it is intoxicating. That sense of power.
Power. Hold onto that word.
What’s abuse about? What is it for? It must serve some evolutionary purpose, however warped; its prevalence alone suggests that.
Simple answer, but substantive: it’s about power. About getting it, and about keeping it. And who wants to get and keep power?
Intraspecies predators, that is predators who prey on their own species; and those they have harmed.
-But Gael, that’s just about everybody!
-Damn right it is.
Let’s take some examples from history. We can begin with slavery, which has existed in one form or another for as long as there have been people.
- There is the captives and spoils of war form, upon which Greece and Rome were maintained; you see this also in some older indigenous cultures, in both Americas, including the use of captives for immediate rather than long-term sacrifice.
- there is the cultural form, upon which the “household division of labor” was maintained for centuries [women, remember, were chattel, whether nobly or basely born; and a faction in this country wants to return us to those times and has worked hard towards that end]
- there is the economic form, which involved the kidnapping and forced labor of millions of people from one continent, by people from another, who traveled to their home lands purely to kidnap and enslave them, for centuries; nowadays it involves the debt peonage and forced labor of millions of people from lower socioeconomic levels, by people from the upper ones.
- there is the sociopolitical form, which involves mass subjugation of a population — physically, mentally, and definitely emotionally — to an autocrat [whether a person or a Party]. This is not always forcible; self-subjugation happens. Make America Great Again!
OK, that’s pretty extensive. What else is there? Well, the above examples are actually “prosocial” in a warped, distorted way; they tend to define the “society” that they are “pro” as the people at the top, their families and friends, although they don’t necessarily label their perceived human livestock as such; terms like “villein”, “serf”, “peon” exist for a reason.
So what about antisocial examples?
- Start small. There’s your common or garden troll, someone whose favorite form of recreation involves harming others in small or large ways. Disrupting potentially productive discussions online, sowing discord, ‘sealioning’, cyberstalking, cyberbullying.
- Sometimes these people aggregate, and then you get bully cliques, among other problems. Think Middle School Mean Girls and their adult counterparts, like Moms for Liberty and similar. Also think Manson, Ruby Ridge, and Cliven and Ammon Bundy, as examples.
- Sometimes they REALLY aggregate and you get the Klan and its plantation-owning forebears, Birchers, the Tea Party. At this level you may begin to see the influence of larger actors [where DID the NRA get all that money? And how many Congresspeople and Senators did they eventually own?]
- And occasionally there’s a Troll With A Talent. More successful sociopaths, malignant narcissists. Here is where “antisocial” becomes “really sick prosocial”, because these trolls require an extensive support system in order to remain in power at the level they prefer.
- You know my litany. Mao Tse-Tung. Pol Pot. Hitler. Stalin. Their right-wing wannabees in places like Hungary and Brasil. Idi Amin Dada, Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier. Mohammad Bin Salman. Kim Jong Un [murdered his uncle and aunt, a half brother, and many more].
- And of course, Putin, murderer of Chechen rebels, countless Ukrainians, Boris Nemtzov, Alexander Litvinenko, and most recently, Alexei Navalny. apnews.com/…
- And then there is Trump.
That’s what power will do for you, dear readers, if you amass enough of it. And, of course, that’s what power will do TO you as well.
And if you’re sitting here thinking, “wait, it looks like the prosocial and antisocial forms converge”… you’re absolutely right. From the point of view of the people at the bottom, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them.
So here we have a collection of abusive systems, from massive [entire nations] to tiny [an abusive family, a middle school mean girl clique]. What, besides being abusive [and abuse is fractal], do they have in common?
They run on hate. They use hate to amass and channel power, from the bottom to the top. They follow the paradigm articulated by Lyndon Johnson: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
So the folks at the bottom? Are “encouraged” to hate one another. Which makes them feel powerful, but of course it’s illusory, except for having the power to physically and emotionally harm those closest to them. And the folks one layer up? Encouraged to hate one another and the folks at the bottom, whom they are likewise allowed to harm. And so on, and so on, up to the top layer, where the clown at the apex hates everybody and harms everybody and needs no encouragement.
There is an interesting variant in which everybody hates EVERYBODY, hating those “below” and resenting the ones “above”. This is unstable in most configurations, even when the person at the top is absolutely relentless and ruthless, because sooner or later someone is going to have aspirations and get lucky. Just ask Moammar Ghadaffi.
Now.
Hate keeps these systems going. It provides the emotional driver, and in many cases, it is its own reward, horrifically enough.
Hating feels good. It’s a hot rush. You get to feel better than someone else, and virtuous, and powerful. Of course, it’s also all a lie. Hate does not ennoble anyone, nor does it confer virtue, and the power it generates is the power of a fight-or-flight reaction, which is ultimately going to destroy the body that harbors it.
But it is very, very effective at one thing: keeping people from joining forces against a common enemy. Does that seems odd, since the whole point of hatemongering is to aim groups of people at preselected enemies? Note that. Note the “aim” and “preselected”. It’s not odd at all, really. It’s a form of crowd control, kiddos. “Don’t look up here, look over there!” And taken to an extreme, crowd weaponization.
Ok, here we go.
Hate is a natural, human response, usually to profound injury [bear in mind, for a narcissist like Trump, any injury, real or imagined, is “profound” and more than enough to trigger hatred].
Hate is also physiologically stimulating — that fight or flight thing — and FEELS empowering. It may be putting your BP into the stratosphere and setting you up for a stroke or heart attack, but it FEELS good. You don’t feel those other things, not until they happen, after all.
So it’s also addictive, and like other addictions, if you don’t do something about it, it can
- clean you out financially [send all your money to Orange Man!],
- drive away family, friends, loved ones [enough about how all the Trafalmadorans want to murder us in our beds, Aunt Ginnie, Trafalmadorans don’t even exist! Not another word!],
- get you into serious legal trouble [ask the J6 rioters who’ve served their time, also ask the ones still in stir] — which is another good way to be cleaned out financially —
- and eventually even kill you [Hello, I am the Angel of Death. I’ll be your escort this evening. We have a varied menu available tonight. Your options include massive stroke, heart attack, perforated ulcer, aortic or abdominal aneurysm, being murdered by someone you flipped off in a rage, being murdered by the cops when you flip off someone in a rage and they report you, or being buried alive in your home under a ton of hoarded Trump memorabilia. Do you need a few minutes to decide? Would you care for some sparkling Water of Lethe to start?].
yeah, sometimes the process can take years, even decades. It’s not usually a pleasant journey, even so.
So what can anyone actually do about it? Assuming one reaches the point where the game is no longer worth the candle.
Couple things.
First, learn to look for the strings, and the hands that are pulling them. When you encounter something that really tugs on your emotions in a negative way, delicious clickbait flashing neon HATE! HATE! HATE! … maybe take a step back, and look to see where the insistence that you should HAVE EMOTIONS! RIGHT NOW! is coming from. Who wants you to put emotion over thought, and why? Who does someone want you to hate? And why? And why NOW?
Second, try not to need enemies. Yeah, that’s easy to say, not so easy to do. I’m not talking about being an out-of-touch blissed out type, either. I’m just talking about not needing to define yourself in terms of who you’re against. Who and what are you *for*? Who and what lights your eyes and gives you joy? Go there, define yourself in those terms instead of how fast you can alienate someone. Here’s a sad little secret you already know: if you live authentically and bring your best self to the table, you’ll have enemies anyway; trolls cannot abide that, and you’ll hear from them, oh yes.
Third, and closely related to the second one: try to see just how much of our society depends on the “rat race”, depends on people thinking that all of life is a neverending contest, and every single encounter lifelong is something where you have to defeat another person. A lot of good human things come from cooperation — in fact, the best human things do. Maybe that’s why we don’t have as many nice things in our society as we used to; maybe we should stop seeing everyone in our vicinity as a potential enemy, and think about how we might actually combine forces for mutual benefit. [Hint: unions. Coalitions. Activism at all levels.]
And last but definitely not least, for this list anyway: try not to need to hurt others. Yes, I said that. I really went there, yup.
Many times the response to pain or injury is an instant desire to turn around and retaliate. It’s human, it’s understandable, all kinds of other critters do it besides us human ones. But what happens when there’s a power imbalance and you can’t hand that pain back to its actual human source? There’s a choice then.
- Either you decide that you’ll try to somehow accept that, transcend the situation, consider it, and avoid being the kind of person who hurt you;
- or you decide that since your preferred target isn’t accessible [or they have perhaps passed away and can no longer be reached] a substitute target will have to do. [Umm, no? What does that build or heal? All that does is increase the amount of pain in the world, and possibly just propagate the abuse and hatred you yourself wanted so desperately to escape. in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re not exactly looking at a shortage of either abuse or pain, just now].
How do you do this stuff? Mostly, you stop to think first. Yeah, it can be that simple. When feelings rise, when you start to feel flooded, stop. Think. If you can, step away from the situation for a moment. Make a decision. Not something grandiose, not “I shall never ever snap at a stranger on the internet again”. But “I will not snap at this stranger on the internet today”. Or “this afternoon.” Or “in the next five minutes”, on those days when the fertilizer is hitting the ventilator in a steady stream. Or “I snapped at this stranger and that was inappropriate, I need to own that and apologize — then DO IT.]
On bad days at work I used to put a rubber band on my wrist, and — remember, I’m an Aspie — when I felt that I was close to melting down [which for me usually took the form of scathing and memorable sarcasm, things truly best left unsaid], I’d snap that band lightly against the back of my wrist. Not enough to sting or make a mark, just enough to feel, which would distract me just enough to break the spell. It worked for me. And then, if I could manage it, I’d walk for a few minutes. Lucky me, with a desk job and the ability to do that. One brisk stroll up and down the wing where my office was located, and back to the salt mines. But it was enough. And I wasn’t out of reach, anyone who needed me could simply call me over. Distraction, yay, I’m all for it.
Options. Hold on to options. They’re not a panacea, not world peace, just options, a chance to take a breath, change perspective, make a different choice — make a choice, period, rather than reacting or being played.
Now, THAT is power worth seeking.
I’m away most of the day, but I decided to put this out there anyway. If you read it, and find it useful on any level, take whatever helps you and leave anything that doesn’t. When I’m back I’ll check in. I hope this will be useful to someone. It basically summarizes a series of posts I’d intended to create here some years ago.
And this VVV is here because I love it, and because I’ve loved it for years and years, and because I think the title is really, really appropriate. [It’s the full playlist, finally! Finally! On YouTube.]
Edit in: that is him singing, on the second and fifth tracks; and the good news in the title is, IIRC, that he got word about the birth of his firstborn — mother and baby doing fine — just about the same time he won a major competition for bluegrass fingerpicking, here in the US.
Enjoy.