Usefully Toxic

Some random guy on the internet, that you've likely never heard of, has been accused of sexual harassment. Said guy was a moderator in an online community, and so there were calls to have him removed from that position. Within short order, he'd stepped down. But the criticism of the community didn't stop with that, and it seemed that a few people had joined the community specifically to complain about the moderator who was no longer a moderator and/or complain about the treatment of people who had complained before themselves.

I doubt that I saw all of the complaints - I only check social media in the evenings between dinner and before bed on weeknights, and at random intervals on weekends, so there was a lot of time for things to get past me. But there was one thing that the complaints I did see had in common. They were really obnoxious. It didn't take long for them to seem more or less like mid-level trolling; the kind of stuff that people do to a) let their targets know that they don't really care about any damage they might do and b) show off to others in their tribe that they're doing it. In other words, it struck me as a variation on the sort of behavior in which a man might go up to a woman in public and deliberately position himself as a potential threat in order to both intimidate and belittle her, and to perform this in front of his buddies. That is to say, toxic.

My first thought was that this is to be expected. The social justice movement is large enough that it's entered the social consciousness, and like any group that's large enough to have done that, it's too large to not have any assholes in it. That's just the nature of groups: put enough people together in one place, and some non-zero number of them will be assholes. But thinking about it a bit more, it occurred to me that one of the primary drivers of rudeness can be the understanding that manners are a form of weakness, and that politeness is simply a, well, polite form of grovelling. After all, I suspect that I have met my share, if not more, of people who seem to think that the ability to be openly disrespectful of others is a prerequisite for respecting themselves.

About three years ago, I found myself in a me-against-the-world online argument with a number of self-professed Social Justice Warriors, and one of them made the following point. "Telling other people what to do and 'talking down to them' creates environments in which people are threatened with shame for not [complying]. It's dirty, but it gets the job done." Behavior that we understand to be "toxic" therefore, may be dirty, but it's too effective a tool to forgo. And there's a fairly direct danger in that:

He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

What makes it so easy, I think, to become a monster is that monsters don't see themselves as such, when they look in the mirror, whether we recognize that or not. And I realized that most of the monsters that people march out to war against saw themselves, once upon a time, as monster fighters. Everyone is, after all, the hero of their own story. Sometimes, they had society's blessing in this; other times, they didn't. But this doesn't change the fact that if we understand that the only way to fight monsters is to create and nurture monsters, we will always have monsters, even if we think that we can control them.