Subject: Re: The toxicity of trolls From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 26 Sep 2002 04:18:44 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3242002724064420@naggum.no> * Kenny Tilton | Compassion will then arise in anyone at all mentally well. I think I understand your problem. Please let me know how I help you. | Self-justifying fiction. I see your pain, but I cannot share it. Would you like to help me understand what made you make this hurtful statement? | Abuse only makes them dig their heels in further, becoming more and more | attached to their delusion/confusion with each exchange. Somewhere along the line here you managed to read "abuse" where no such intent was present in the articles you read. I can see that your sensitivity towards "abusive" people has caused you to see them where they do not really exist, but it is difficult for me to sympathize with you when you think in such openly hostile terms. Please reduce your hostility towards other people and do not accuse them of favoring abuse. Try to understand what they meant, and try to see that as different from what caused you to feel pain. | They do /not/ miraculously discover their own confusion (what a concept!) | and seek help, they sink in deeper. You are so patronizing towards these suffering people. Why do you speak on their behalf with such authority when you seem to want to evoke compassion? Your confused and self-contradictory verbalizations indicate that you both want to protect and to control a lower class of people than yourself. "They" are no longer subject to their own willpower, but need your assistance. The problem with this is that you replace compassion with a desire to manipulate other people. You treat a whole class of people with a single statement that shows that you actually harbor dehumanizing resentment towards them. Again, I can sense your pain and your desire to protect others from your own painful experiences, but really, you should trust each individual to cope with his own set of experiences on an individual basis. While some clearly would sink deeper into whatever psychosis they suffer from, many others essentially wait for somebody to give them a jolt to get out of their rut. | But break off the attack and they can find their way back to clarity. Then | "catch them" being normal and reinforce that. Again, there is much evidence of your pain and suffering, but although you cry out for compassion with your plight, you turn patronizing, arrogant, and even dehumanizing towards a large number of individuals by pretending to be able to know them all. You define what is normal /for/ them. This would not be so bad if it were possible to ascertain that you are normal, or generally that one is normal. The desire to be normal is so strong with people who fear having a deviant psychology that they hunt the literature for evidence that they are within at least one definition of "normal". However, there /is/ no "normal". There is expediency of actions and reactions. Rationality is not acting in particular way, it is using the feedback from the world that is acted upon to modify the actions. You declare someone other than normal and irrational when you cannot understand them, but more often than not, this has been abused by both the medical and other professions with power to judge people to mean that if a group of people who consider themselves "normal" are unable to figure out the reasoning behind your actions and reactions, then you are not normal, irrational, and possibly mentally ill. Since people with average intelligence tend to be "normal" more often than not, and people with very low or very high intelligence tend not to be "normal" more often than not, this system has caused very highly intelligent people to be mistreated and encouraging the myth that very high intelligence is indistinguishable from madness. However, among a group of people who believe in reincarnation, there is a different set of "normal" reactions and lines of reasoning than among a group of people who consider the belief in reincarnation to be prima facie evidence of insanity. The stereotypical nutcase believes he is Napeleon Bonarparte or Jesus or some other historical figure. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, very serious people go looking for the reincarnated Dalai Lama and usually find him in young boys. If you hear voices tell you what to do, you are classified as insane in our days, but Joan of Arc heard the voice of God tell her what to do and led a nation of co-believers. "Normal" is such a tainted concept that anyone who speaks of it should replace it with the much more honest and appropriate "just like I am". | Two things help the reality-challenged: psychotropic drugs and compassion. Add firm feedback from other people and a refusal to blame other people for their coping problems. Compassion does not mean yielding, but many "soft" people tend to think they serve people by providing a cushion-like reality for them, creating a buffer between them and reality. This is an insult to their ability to deal with the world, abrogating their ability to cope in the absence of such buffers. Many psychotropic drugs have the same effect of dulling the perception of reality and their reactions putting people into a contourless world of blurred grey instead of the stark black and white they see in their "natural state". Notice also how some people reach for a stupid accusation that other people think in black-and-white terms -- they do nothing but highlight their own fears of the kind of mental illness that people they think are insane have an all-or-nothing reaction to things. Real compassion means standing fast, being a firm reference point upon which others can lean and judge their own coping and the reality around them. Real compassion is /not/ to change to suit the person who needs it. | We can offer only the second. Imagine a mile in ilias's shoes. Indeed, you should try to imagine his continued need to post. | disclaimer: pardon the holier-than-thou tone. Your tone is that of someone who has been hurt and who has now found a mission to protect others from similar pain by placing yourself between the reality you believe some people cannot cope and those people, but actually only preventing them from learning how to cope more than anything else. -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.