I don’t know if I’ve tried this approach. I get heated. Like, I get taken back to childhood levels of dramatic emotion and readiness to break shit when I’m watching something that’s inverting words. If you were to take a quote from MLK Jr. or Nelson Mandela and slap it on a Nazi poster to somehow suggest they were on Hitler’s side, it’s that level of absurdity that still manages to get my blood boiling.
Academically, we’d talk about exploring “rhetoric.” It doesn’t matter if the words are true, just that they’re persuasive.
One of the major motivators that got me started writing was waking up to the nature of manipulation. I was into a girl who was in a typical bad relationship with an insecure boy that did all of the insecure boy shit that imposes guilt, intimidation, and control. As well, I looked at myself, and the relative ease with which I was able to navigate the world through smiling, jokes, or being generally cute. I’m also dispositionally a leader. It’s something people pick up about me immediately and is why I’m constantly asked to teach others, take supervisory or managerial roles, or am capable of maintaining order in a group counseling session.
Another way of stating this, say, even if I was a terrible leader, is that people are eager to thrust the responsibility of things onto me. This can look like blame for the worst things that might happen in a party environment if it's "my" house with 5 roommates. It’s, I would estimate, 99% of the emotional reaction I might illicit from someone after I’ve explicitly stated my assessment of their being if it's less than flattering. I’ve been told, as early as I can remember, some version and at some level that it is always and forever “my fault." Your perception of me is my fault, and as many of them consequences as you need to feel correct.
Now, this is absurd. We’re all to blame all the time, but that’s a specifically incomplete and unhelpful framing meant to equivocate instead of investigate.
There’s a way in which I would be extremely to blame, though. Let’s play out the thought experiment.
I recognize vulnerability. I know how insecure people are. I know how lonely people are. I know they’re looking for excitement, direction, novelty, and acceptance. They think they’re “weird.” They think they’re the only one who is going through their personal story of hell. These are all things I know explicitly and have watched play out in thousands upon thousands of people in one form or another. I don’t care about your job, title, friends, upbringing, I will locate what breaks you almost immediately. It made me an incredible DCS assessor and also lends itself to counseling because I know where not to step too aggressively.
What might I want from someone? Money? Sex? A bubble that affirms everything I say or do? Does it even matter what I want? Is it not already enough to consider me a terrible, evil person by just clocking what I know and finding the comfort and license to let the cards lie as they may?
So you can look for the ones that kind of like you or are intrigued by you. I catch more looks from chubby middle-aged women than windows do from window-shoppers. I make more people chuckle with my turns of phrase and random commentary than I can count. Now, I have your attention. I could ask 1 or 10 questions about you, and elicit months of ways to build rapport. I could innocently start inserting myself into your life, doing favors, picking you up when, again, you’re facing a problem that you and only you have ever encountered ever. And you need me to validate.
We don’t need to really share or talk about our dynamic. It’s something special. It’s crazy how we even found each other, right? Who knew that someone could see right through to your soul and become such a huge part of the directions you can start to see yourself going.
This, mind you, is how I witness a large majority of people’s “loving relationships” playing out. If you look closely at the details or listen to your mouthiest friend, he’s an emotionally abusive child and you’re a codependent internally-ever-crying mess. But damn if you don’t look passable taking a picture at the top of a mountain! The bible of cliches that lend themselves to a “happy marriage” is stapled to your tongue.
Okay, weirdly, we’re still only at the first few stages of how depraved this gets. You don’t really have someone until they’re not just doing things for you, but subverting their entire self in service to anything they even think you might want. That’s proper mind control. Do you want to go to your 9-5 every day? Of course you do, you have to pay the bills, feed the kids, keep your health insurance. Wait, why can’t you get those things any other way? You’ve been bred to follow a certain set of rules and order, so before you’ll learn anything about taxes or blame a billionaire, you’ll get a second and third job.
it’s not large accomplishment to get someone emotionally invested in you. That’s why it’s so cheap and easy to pick out the ones, like a cult leader, who will fuck you first and groom your future child brides. We’ve never established what the goal of doing all of this is because that’s also what makes it so nefarious. The goal is self-gratification and “because I can.” People who do this like this just wish to embody the fact that they’ve done it.
If you own a pet, you can snap that pet’s neck right now. You’d also probably get away with it. Why would you do that? It’s evil, unnecessary, ridiculous, you love it yada yada. Well, you’ve never done it before, and maybe you’re at a point in life where everything feels ambiguous and arbitrary, so, snap? The world doesn’t end. You don’t have to tell anyone. Your other cat doesn’t even blink.
Now, what if you did it because I told you I don’t really like cats. It doesn’t even live with me and I never see it. You’re just so in love with me, so convinced by the narrative we’ve been sharing together, and the emotions are so true and compelling. Is it even really a cat? Does it matter? Is there even a remote chance that I might notice your clothes have less and less cat hair over time, and that might make me happy?
If this feels far-out and gross, as far as I can tell, this is a 1 to 1 correlation of what apologists and con-men and ideologues are doing with every breath.
Who is to blame in this scenario?
If we have healthy minds, we’d instead be asking, at what point can you claim responsibility. When is the above scenario my responsibility? Well, I wrote it. From the jump. If the next time you see me and I’m missing a cat under suspicious circumstances, I can’t blame Trump, or my god, or some level of depression and existential angst. I choose to keep the little fuckers alive, and recognize and respect my capacity otherwise. If I don’t have robust, reliable, good reasons for keeping them alive, I guess all you can do is pray for them?
We’re going to spend, at least, the next 2 years trying to find anyone but us as individuals to blame for what may be the stupidest fascist takeover in history. Who killed my cat!? We will scream at anyone willing to listen. You did, bitch. You looked it dead in the eye, noted how soft its fur was, and with the smallest twitch, cracked that little bone that separated you from the monsters.
Every intellectual who’s out there lending their same awareness that I have to make excuses and apologize for Trump is killing cats left and right.
They aren’t doing the work of killing them though, you are. You tear down our ability to be safe, coherent, accountable, and human. You adopt their hyperbole in tern, you dutiful fulfill your roles, real and imagined, that you think will service the dear leader.
Guess what, at that point, my work is done. All I have to do now is see how long I can last until I eat myself alive or someone capable of bringing consequences shows up. But, I’ve already established that people are incredibly and endlessly eager to thrust responsibility onto me, didn’t I? No one’s coming. If I don’t stop, it doesn’t stop. And why would I stop?
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