Anger, Insults, and Hurt Feelings

I wrote this quite a while ago.  I think I should listen to myself.  I’ve strayed far from where I was back then.

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I often hear atheists and Christians insulting each other, either as a substitute for arguments or as a supplement. They find it satisfying to try and hurt their target’s feelings, and many members of their audience find vicariously satisfying. In their minds the target of the insults deserves emotional pain because of something he or she did or said. They think it is just but what they are really doing when they lash out in this way is revealing something about themselves.

I don’t mean that they are just immature that is certainly part of it, but there is more to it. We seek justice when we are hurt. When a person tries to hurt the feelings of another, it reveals that the one on the attack was hurt and is acting out of emotional pain.

Being hurt causes anger, as does seeing the innocent in pain. Anger is satisfied by causing more pain, so by its very nature, anger is hypocritical. Ask in combination with pain to propagate itself like a virus. When someone insults you, it is an admission to having hurt feelings. Understanding this, the best response is patients. Unless you are the reason the attacker feels hurt, there is no reason to take anything negative they say personally. They don’t mean it.

To pass harsh judgment on a childlike mind that is in capable of channeling emotional desires is unfair. After all, a penguin can’t be faulted for being unable to fly. It doesn’t matter to them that their whole world isn’t the source of their pain. They only think about themselves. Emotionally they are no different from young children, and the only thing that will satisfy them is to cause much suffering to others as they can.

Not everyone who casually insults others with little or no provocation is indiscriminate in this practice. In fact, I’d say few are. Only a sociopath would be. Typically, some kind of trigger is required for an individual to become the target of childish taunts by an emotionally damaged person. A difference of opinion on even a trivial issue can be enough. So can a personality traits; a racial, ethnic, or religious identity; a physical feature; or lifestyle choice. It’s not the same thing as bigotry, but it’s not too different. Of course, the biggest trigger is an insult, whether it was intentional or unintentional. You have to be careful when dealing with emotionally damaged people. If you’ve inadvertently triggered one or more of them, it is very easy to feel the need to retaliate and cause them to feel justified in what they are doing.

To continue radiating unpleasantness, they will sometimes fiercely defend their ignorance by offering excuses like “I’m just a nasty person” or reiterating the trigger and declaring it to be justification for your mistreatment. It feels so good to spread emotional pain, it can be very hard to let go of even the pain. It is psychologically addictive, feeling relief from pain. In fact, relief feels even better than just feeling good.

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I never finished writing it for some reason, but it kinda resonates with what I’ve been going through lately.

An open letter to my parents

(Some names have been altered for the sake of their privacy.  I’ll mark them with funky characters.)

Hi, parents.  I’m writing this to you like this because I know you’ll never read it and that other people will.   I could write more stuff to preface all this, but I don’t want to right now, so I’ll just dive in.

You had too many kids.  I’m very happy to have three awesome sisters, but it was too much for you two.  You handled it very badly.  There were good moments, but there were also many times when we were neglected or abused.  You taught us that yelling is a way to communicate and that physical violence is justified when one is angry.  Worst of all, you know now that it was all wrong, but you’ve never apologized, and  you never will because whenever we bring anything up that you did wrong, you clam up or get defensive.  We can’t talk to you about this, so we can never really forgive you for it.  We all love you both, but we also kinda hate you.  Well, I can’t exactly say that for {{Monique, Estrella, or Sky}}, but it’s true for me.  I could have turned out so much better if you hadn’t used threats and beatings to gain our compliance.

Through your negligence, {{Monique}} and {{Sky}} became the victims of Henry Wolfe’s pedophilia.  They sought your protection, and you failed them.  Through your use of violence to punish us for your anger, you gave me a skewed view of authority, and I’m amazed that I didn’t turn out to be an abuser myself.  You nearly ruined my life, and it will be a struggle to get to a point where I can live a successful and independent life.

There are those who think that you, mom, desire to keep me in a state of perpetual childhood so that you can continue to take care of me and feed your pathological desire to be needed.  You have deep issues that I fear you will never face because you are just too old now and too set in the habits you’ve developed over your life.  You hate {{January}} because she has taken me away from you and is helping me to become an adult.

Dad, it’s easy to see how you got screwed up.  Ten kids in a poor catholic family, it’s a recipe for abuse.  {{Monique}} told me that she once beat your dad at a card game or something and he shoved her into a wall.  What a prick.  I don’t care that he’s dead now.  He was a monster, and he turned you into a monster too.  You still talk about child abuse like it’s a legitimate way to discipline a child.  It’s not.  Hitting a child is wrong.  Using a weapon to hit a child is wrong.

Maybe I’ll write some positive stuff later.  I just wanted to get some of this off my chest.

They ruined Sid’s life

I’m talking about Toy Story again.  In the first movie, Woody breaks what seems like the most important rule that toys have and talks to Andy’s sociopathic neighbor Sid about his mistreatment of toys.  Sid’s toys, desperate to end the abuse, were quick to agree to Woody’s plan.  Surely no one would believe Sid when he told them that toys are alive.

But what is learned cannot be unlearned.  Once Sid knew that all toys are actually alive and have feelings, his life could never be the same.  The audience is supposed to laugh triumphantly as the brat gets his comeuppance, but if you think about it, realizing that toys are alive is a huge thing.  Sid could not have possibly known that he was doing harm to sentient beings.  Sure he was a horrible child with deep emotional problems, but what Woody did to him must have tipped him over the edge.

Woody didn’t simply have a chat with Sid Phillips.  He got the other toys to surround him and put on the most frightening display they could come up with.  They didn’t just want to let him know he was hurting them.  They wanted to scare him.  They wanted to punish him.  They wanted to scar him for life by letting him in on a secret that nobody else knew and that nobody else could possibly believe.  They’d have been far kinder if they had simply killed him.

Gun control, Australia, and Nukes

I’ve had a few conversations with Australians who are happy that the government has taken complete control over who can own guns.  A video I saw yesterday said that there have been 13 mass shootings in the last 18 years, and since the gun control laws were passed, there have been none.  It sounds like a rousing success, but in my opinion, Australia has taken a major step toward the collapse of its society.

Not everybody agreed on the gun control laws that were passed.  If they did, no laws would be necessary.  Everyone would have simply given up their guns, and the mass shootings would have ended without the government doing anything.  It had to be a law because people disagreed, and if people in favor of gun control laws think that the laws are the only reason that mass shootings haven’t happened, they think that the only people who disagree with them are people who want to go on mass shootings or people who want mass shootings to happen.

Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe they’ve taken the other side’s arguments into account, whatever they were, and decided that they weren’t convincing.  Whatever the case, the people got together and decided to punish everyone who disagreed with them about gun control, and they cite the absence of mass shootings as vindication.  Just to be clear, when I say that they decided to punish everyone who disagreed with them, I mean they set up the law so that whoever is caught violating the rules they decided on, the rules that they themselves disagree with, will be sent to prison.  If they don’t let the police take them away, they will be physically attacked or even killed.

But gun control doesn’t make society better.  The best argument I’ve heard for it is that it lessens the severity of people’s violent psychotic episodes.  Fewer people die if a psycho runs around with a knife than a gun.  Fair enough.  But why did Australia have such a terrible mass shooting problem in the first place?  Why are there so many psychos there?  It’s not because they had guns.  Guns don’t drive people to shoot into crowds.  Those people needed help, and they didn’t get it.  Society failed them, and society paid the price.  All gun control laws did was lower that price.

To go off on a seemingly unrelated tangent (but it actually is quite related, I assure you), nuclear weapons prevent wars by assuring all parties involved in a dispute that if negotiations fail and violence becomes the only option, it will result in the total annihilation of everything and everyone.  They raise the price of failure to compromise to the point where nobody in their right mind would ever want to pay it.  Getting rid of nukes would open the door once again to armed conflict, which would result in fewer deaths and therefore lower the price of failure, but it would also discourage negotiation and compromise.

Ridding a society of guns mitigates the damage done when the system fails to help someone who badly needs it.  When a society decides to disarm the populace in order to lessen the damage done when a person loses their marbles, it is pledging to not help the people who need it the most.  It’s turning its back on the least fortunate.  Society needs guns so that we are no longer willing to pay the price for this failure.

Edit: It seems like my last line has upset a lot of people.  That was never my intention.  It disappoints me that so many of you misunderstood my meaning.  I thought it was quite clear.  I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will.  I do not intend to perpetrate any mass shootings or any other “terroristic” type activities.  I believe in the nonaggression principle, which means it is wrong to take aggressive action against people who are not hurting anyone.

Striking a better balance

This is something I handwrote more than a year ago.  I read through it a few days ago thinking that it was probably some stupid thing that I don’t agree with any more, but it’s actually quite good.  Here it is.

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For a long time, I have thought of the purpose of my life as being to spread a message.  I thought this even before I really had any idea what that message could be, and I continued to think it when I thought my message was something that I now understand to be incorrect.  I’m not saying that I understand completely what my message is now or even that I think of my life in that same context any more.  What I do know for sure is that I’m ready to share a message, or at least to begin.

I don’t know how long it will take to convey this message, but I won’t rush it.  It’s too important to rush, and I have to figure out how to translate it into a form understandable by anyone.

To sum it up, my message is this: The only true understanding is a logical one.  To explain it, I have to first explain what I understand of emotions.

Emotions are a part of the brain, and all animals have them.  They are necessary for survival on both an individual level and a species level.  Happiness serves as positive reinforcement to cause us to continue behaviors  that help us to survive.  Sadness is negative reinforcement, getting us to discontinue behaviors that hurt our chances to survive.  Fear helps us to escape danger.  Anger helps us fight when we need to.  If we don’t listen to our emotions, we miss out on cues to take actions that are important to our survival.

As advanced and intelligent as we are, human societies are dominated by emotions.  All art is meant to stir or evoke feelings.  When we look at or talk to each other, we can’t help but share how we feel.  Everything we want is to fill an emotional need.  Even the desire to live is an emotional one.  Without feelings, there is no point in living.

To understand the reasons why people behave in manners that they do, one has only to understand the emotions that each behavior stimulates.  All behaviors can be assumed to be geared toward obtaining rewards, avoiding punishments, or both.  Survival itself can fall into either category, but most often it is seen as a reward because only while alive can future rewards be enjoyed.  A life full of nothing but punishments is a punishment in itself.  Anticipation of such a life is a major factor in the decision to commit suicide, though many people have done it in anticipation of rewards in a life beyond the current one, and  many people continue living lives full of punishments due to threats of greater punishments in a life beyond the current one.

In any case, the pattern of obtaining rewards of positive emotions and avoiding punishments of negative emotions can be found at the root of every human action, decision, intention, and reaction.  With this understanding, everything people do makes sense.  But within this explanation are further explanations that allow us to not only understand human behavior but also predict and control it.

I’m a genius

Well, I’m a genius in one area.  Yesterday I finally got my Asperger’s Syndrome diagnosis, and part of it was taking an IQ test with a psychologist.  I scored 124 overall, and in one of the 4 areas where I was tested (language or something like that), I scored 143, which the guy said was ridiculously high.  So there you have it.  I’m a writing genius, and blogging is what I should be doing.

Speaking of blogging, I have a blog at examiner.com that you should go look at.

http://www.examiner.com/user-the-mighty-ankh

Toy Story: The Dark Truth

There once was a toy cowboy named Woody who was the favorite toy of a boy named Andy.  He enjoyed his position and used it to justify reigning over the other toys as leader even though they barely respected him.  One day, Andy got the latest fad, a toy called Buzz Lightyear, who, unlike every other toy ever made, didn’t know he was a toy.  Normally it took a long time for the inevitable process of insanity to take hold, but Buzz had it built right in.  Woody was insanely jealous, but at first his reaction was mild.  He tried to put Buzz in his place with ridicule and bullying, but Buzz was far too self confident and delusional for that to work, so Woody eventually attempted to murder him by pushing him out a window and framing one of his fellow toys, an innocent radio controlled car named RC.

The murder attempt was fairly successful.  Buzz did indeed fall out the window, but it didn’t go as Woody planned.  He was caught, and the other toys seized the opportunity to overthrow their leader and toss him out the window as well.  Only one toy, the girls’ toy Bo Peep which Andy played with for some reason, tried to speak in his defense, but her pleas fell on deaf ears.  They were too enthusiastic about finally having an excuse to get rid of the arrogant Woody.

Though he was angry at the assassination attempt, Buzz refused to retaliate, and he even accepted Woody’s “help” to get back to Star Command, which was actually just a trick to get them both back to Andy’s room.  In the process, Buzz’s delusional bubble burst, but he quickly came to terms with reality and worked with Woody on a plan to escape Andy’s sociopath neighbor Sid and return to the far-too-preoccupied-with-toys Andy.

With no help from the other toys, and in fact one attempt by them to kill Woody just before he and Buzz succeeded in reuniting with Andy, the two unlikely friends came back to their human friend.  Buzz even foresook the company of the other toys in the moving van to land in the luckily open sunroof of the car that Andy rode in, perhaps because he realized his station over them, or perhaps in recognition of their shabby treatment of Woody.

This is Toy Story.