#incivility

Incivility

Whitkin

You create the monsters you fight. And Nietzsche was brilliant on this; he said “Be careful when you fight monsters not to become one.” There’s some weird thing where you’re creating monsters of “the other,” and you become a monster fighting it. Bad people will always do bad things, a small percentage of people for whatever reason—they don’t need an excuse—but to get good people to do bad things you need to give them ideology. You need to come from a place of purity culture and that’s when you get good people to do bad things, because that’s when they will do bad things in the name of love. They will do bad things in the name of “beautiful soul.” They will do intolerant things in the name of tolerance. To get good people to do bad things you need ideology.

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War is the inability to have conflict. Conflict is when I can sit down with you and say “You don’t like me and I don’t like you, but hey, we’re living in the same place; we’re going to have to sit down and work this out.” That’s conflict. War is when I say “I cannot tolerate being around your otherness, so I’m going to kill you. I’m going to get rid of you, purge you from the world, vomit you out. Now that petri dish creates more and more violence because, as I mentioned, when you treat people in such a way that you see them as intolerant and evil and irredeemable and stupid and you put all of that onto them, they will—to some extent, some of those people will—acquire that projective identification. They will take that into themselves.

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Heigl says that every time you think you know what utopia is, death is around the corner. Stalin’s the perfect example of course, who talked about the end of history. So you can justify anything if you’re doing it “for history” or “for God” or “for humanity” or whatever in some capital-H, capital-G way. But what happened in the troubles was an apocalyptic moment. Everybody had to set down their vision of what the perfect society would look like. Everyone had to set down their idea of “Oh if only we got rid of you, it would be great” and say “Okay, let’s put everything on the table” … When it gets so bad we’ll either end up completely destroying each other, or we’ll have to sit down with our enemies, and not say we like them or we love them or anything like that—no, say we hate them—but say like “I know you hate me too. Let’s talk about this.”

This quote is just ridiculous.

Throwback to the time when I hung out with a bunch of people, some older, some the same age; who relentlessly gossiped about others, spoke of stalking their target’s social media, exhibited superiority, discussed others’ private medical conditions, and on the surface - surgery sweet. Honestly I enabled it, and didn’t like who I became as a result, but good manners doesn’t always work. Good manners can be seen as complicit, and you absolutely do not have to respect people who disrespect you, or others. 

These last few weeks have taught us that. 

"Across the three studies, we found consistent evidence that women reported higher levels of incivility from other women than their male counterparts," Gabriel said. "In other words, women are ruder to each other than they are to men, or than men are to women.