Increasingly convinced the core divide in humanity is between those who suffer a traumatic, destabilizing event (as we all do) and believe everybody else should have to, too, and those who suffer such an event and hope they are the last person ever to do so.
It is a big hyper focus topic for me esp after reading about the British boarding school system and the links to colonialism. Industrialised dehumanisation.
Accurate. I always describe it as "There are those that want others to have it better or easier than they themselves had it vs those that are envious and get spiteful if others have it better or easier than they themselves had it."
Not far from the "stern father" vs. "nurturing parent" dichotomy that convincingly explains the different mindsets driving conservative vs. progressive political beliefs.
My conservative, Roman catholic father who beat my ass for being disrespectful or having the nerve to say that being gay wasn't a sin routinely says that single payer is never gonna happen because "no one paid for my heart surgery. "
I got out. Everyone can if we help.
…nazis got that way of reasoning… a way a lumping all people together… makin em vermin… i get it.. makes life simpler… been noticing that same trait among sympathetic reasoners…
it's not just Americans. humans in general seek out ways to abuse those considered "other". not our fault. we are embedded in systems that create this behavior.
There are complexities, but this is a terrific summation.
(Like, a person with childhood trauma is more likely to grow up believing they deserved it & falling into the first category than a person with later trauma & a healthier identity.)
As someone who is the latter, I find it odd that someone would WANT someone to experience destabilizing pain. Especially since not everyone is guaranteed to go through such a thing in their life
the trademark of a majority (not all) of my British friends is acidic cruelty, usual expressed as "humour," and I think the school system is the cause.
One of my all-time favorite bumper stickers was something I saw in a parking lot while visiting my youngest at the retail store she worked in: Show Me a Person Who Hates All of Humanity, and I'll Show You a Person Who Works in Retail.
She had told me so many horror stories about customers!
SO funny!
I've been through some really horrible things in life. I don't wish anyone to go through what I have been through. I do notice that people that have had it relatively easy in life assume that life is easy for everyone. It isn't.
i remember in my deep suffering everyone telling me how i was not alone in my abuse, csa, that many other had expired it as well. no understood or knew what to say when i snapped and screamed that's worst, that the only way i would feel better was if i was the only one or my abuser was dead
I remember when my school officially banned the Senior hazing ritual, the complaints weren't that anyone wanted it back for like... pride or tradition or whatever. The Juniors were just pissed that it happened to them and they couldn't do it to the next generation as some kinda consolation prize.
When my daughter died by suicide, I did some suicide prevention & mental health funding advocacy. Helping people to avoid similar suffering & empathizing with those grieving their own losses made life easier. Revenge over poor care would have been my unhealthy choice. I chose purpose over more pain.
100% agree. I often see the former playing out as: someone is abused in some way when they are vulnerable, when they ask why that happened they are told that is how things are, and they internalize that as there being good reasons for the harm done to them
i attended a codependency workshop, and the dude running it said that both parties of a codependent relationship come from similar trauma but one type gets hung up on trying to "fix" the abuser and the other type adopts the abuser's personality as "armor"
Have also seen it described as “some people want to design social systems to prevent them from being exploited, even if it means some suffer for it. Others want to design those systems to help all, even if it means they are sometimes exploited.”
I came out of homelessness with a burning need to support every unhoused person I meet, yet some people “recover” from homelessness into a walled castle. Well not a real castle but ykwim
Damn. That’s good.
“Do unto others” does not mean that the bad thing that happened to me should also happen to you.
It should mean: I know how to protect you from harm because I’ve been there too.
Thanks for the dialogue Em.
I think that probably maps pretty well on to the divide that I've noticed which is: People who think "we're all in this together" and people who think "It's every person for themselves"
I have to agree, while I still think the claim of the division into these two groups is not wrong. It is quite a bit dependent of what one has endured and how you were able to find a way to handle it. I admire those who suffered a lot, but still are members of the second group showing empathy.
