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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I solicit psychoanalysis. There are some behavioral patterns that bug me a lot! But I have a hard time articulating what exactly. And why exactly.

Read: Failures in Kindness, The Asshole filter. The aforementioned articles capture some of them, the class of behavioral patterns I am talking about.

Both the articles describe 5 distinct behavioral patterns that I can best describe as sloppy. What they have in common are:

  • They achieve the opposite of what they intend.
  • They are female (low agency, low assertiveness) coded.
  • You can make the case they betray a lack of social awareness or how people work in the abstract

Note that these patterns are not negligent, malicious or particularly difficult to oppose.

Nevertheless, my flight or fight response kicks in when I even imagine someone doing any of these things. Why? I am not big on trying to introspect why I feel the way I do, afterall my brain is a mushy piece of shit running caveman software, and I am best of ignoring what ticks off the lizard.

But seriously why? Why do I feel such scorn, revulsion and anxiety at even the mere thought of these behaviors ? Like I literally think you are a lesser being if you ever committed any of these things.

My guess, extrapolating from my own similar albeit weaker feelings, is that it's something along the lines of corruption of virtue. Taking what should be positive qualities and wasting them or subverting them. Similar to a beautiful delicious barbecued pig falling into the dirt and feeding the flies and germs instead of a person. Turning from something nourishing and healthy to people into something that only feeds rot and disease.

That is, kindness has the potential to do good things and have value and make the world a better place. But misplaced kindness that rewards bad behavior will incentivize them and make them more prevalent. The vast majority of toxic behaviors we see in society are there not because the people who do them are stupid people who can't figure out how to be kind, but because they have been systematically rewarded for those behaviors in some way or another. Being toxic works, at least on some level for some people. To the extent that toxic behaviors are analogous to disease, systematically feeding them with misplaced kindness is comparable to someone going out and feeding expensive high quality meat to a wild rat colony, or a beautiful woman allowing mosquitoes and hookworms to feast on her blood. Not only are they wasting something good, but they are actively allowing badness to reproduce for everyone else to have to deal with. It's disgusting.

I feel less scorn and revulsion for people who do this accidentally than I would for someone doing this on purpose. And less for people doing this on a social level than with literal diseases. But it's still gross in a similar way.