In which Seanan ponders people.
Someone I know -- not quite a friend, because we only know each other in passing, although we run in the same circles quite a bit; call it a fond acquaintanceship, which could become a friendship, if we run into one another enough while sober, clothed, and not possessed by the ghost of an eighteenth century barmaid -- was recently silly enough to participate in one of those charming 'tell me what intimidates you about me/why you're scared of me/why I totally suck ha ha ha' memes. You know, the ones where they let you post anonymously and people thus feel that it's safe to get really, really, really mean? I'm talking 'meaner than cheerleaders smacking down their ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend, the skank', here. Very little that I have encountered in my lifetime campaign of being a girl, and thus surrounded by girls, can approach or rival the levels of mean inspired by anonymous Internet bitching posts.*
(*Girls, you understand. Guys, you may not, because you've never been girls. You know how we're generally regarded as pink and frilly and sweet and all that happy crappy, and it's not okay for us to take out our aggressions by beating the snot out of each other? Yeah, well, they start socializing us that way in kindergarten, while you guys are still viewing the good ol' shin-kick as a valid form of communication. Since we're not allowed to hit with fists, we learn how to do it with words, and the meanest of the mean girls quite possibly can kill with an insult. Which is not to say that all girls are good at it -- there will always be the people with no natural defenses -- or that some boys don't learn the art of Catty-as-Fuck Fu, but for the most part, Girls Are Meaner Than You Think They Are. Black eyes and bloody noses might just be kinder.)
People, unsurprisingly, got mean. People do that. And no matter how much you say 'I will not take this personally' when you sign up for a meme like that, you will. I would, you will, heck, Mother Teresa probably would, if she weren't, y'know, dead, and had lots of time to spend hanging out on LJ. And all of this, of course, made me think, because that's basically what this sort of thing tends to do. My brain is sometimes frustrating like that.
Part of it is the question of, 'well, are these people obligated, in any way, to like my friend? To like me? To like anything?' The answer to that is, of course and undeniably, no. No one is under any obligation to like anything, no matter how close to perfect it's supposed to be. Unless you're a hundred dollar bill, not everybody's going to like you, and even if you are a hundred dollar bill, there are going to be people demanding to know why you're not a thousand dollar bill. This latter trait is part of what makes the Internet such a hostile place, in some ways: because there will always be people who figure, and all too often rightly, that if they keep complaining, they'll keep getting what they want. Bitch about that hundred bucks for long enough, and it will become a thousand, if only because people are praying that you'll be quiet.
Fact #1: You can't please everyone. Partially because there are some people who will refuse to be pleased, no matter what you do.
So fine. The folks who don't like my friend -- we'll call her Betty, just because 'my friend' is really tiresome to keep writing -- aren't under any obligation to like her. No matter how fine, wonderful, upstanding and generous of a person Betty may happen to be, the whole world can hate her, if that's what makes them happy. I won't contest that. If hating me makes you a happier person, go right ahead! It's no skin off my nose. By the same token, no matter how rotten, horrible, evil, awful and perverse a person Betty is, you're not obligated to hate her. Loathe the holy and embrace the profane; that's your right as a human being, and no one's going to stop you. They may try, but they'll probably fail. What we're talking about here isn't whether you have to like Betty; this isn't a screed in her defense, or 'Why My Friends Rock And You Suck, By Seanan, Age 9'. This is an examination of why, precisely, liking -- or disliking -- Betty makes it okay to be mean to her.
Why are people mean? Like any behaviour, they must get something out of it, simply because most human behaviours, learned or unlearned, are selfish at the core. We have to be taught to share; we don't have to be taught to take. Taking is instinctive, and starts with babies screaming to be fed, to be given attention, and to generally be the center of the world as they perceive it. Since cruelty seems to be more instinctive for most people than kindness is, it must come with some sort of reward to justify it. Otherwise, we'd all just stop.
After polling a variety of people silly enough to hold still while I asked them questions, I have come up with a short list of Reasons Why People Are Mean:
1. It's harder to be nice.
2. Because they're jealous and don't want to admit it.
3. Because they're lonely.
4. Being mean gets you attention.
5. They desire to create schadenfreude.*
6. Being mean makes other people feel as bad as they do.
7. It lets them punish people for being happy.
8. Because they suck.
9. Boredom.
10. Because they feel attacked.
(*A German word meaning 'taking pleasure in the misfortune of others'. Ironically, it was not the German respondent to my informal poll who came up with this one.)
Even tossing out number eight as being a little, well, mean, we have eight reasons why people just can't seem to be nice to each other. We can conflate numbers three and four into 'need for attention'. Numbers two, six, and seven also combine, into 'sharing the misery'. One and nine are sort of two sides of the same coin, while numbers five and ten are really their own issues. So our simplified list is thus:
1. Laziness/boredom.
2. Loneliness/need for attention.
3. Sharing the misery.
4. Schadenfreude/it's fun.
5. Self-defense/retaliation.
These are the reasons that people are mean. Unsurprisingly, they don't look very nice. I think, however, that we can boil all these down even further, taking the first four articles on our list down to one. Yes, just one. Want to know what it is?
Being mean makes you feel good.
Seriously, whether it's the guilty goodness of 'I have just kicked a puppy to make myself feel better' or the malicious goodness of 'I have just thrown mud on something beautiful', being mean frequently makes people feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, it's not the sort of goodness that lasts; most of the time, it devolves quickly into self-loathing and disgust. How can you make those bad feelings go away? Be mean to someone else! Like any sort of an addiction, it becomes self-perpetuating, and the cycle is very hard to break. Our list is now:
1. Being mean feels good.
2. Self-defense/retaliation.
Fact #2: People will always do what feels good, no matter how bad it may be for the people around them.
So what drives the second item on our list? Why are people mean in self-defense? Well, sometimes, the self-defense is genuine. If you get in my face and start being mean to me, I, being only human, will probably be mean right back at you. The issue is more the meanness that doesn't seem to have a starting point -- the man who thinks it's okay to shove you out of his way because he had a bad cup of coffee, or the woman who got a bad performance review and is thus verbally abusing the clerks down at the grocery store. The free-range mean. The 'the world will be mean to me no matter what I do, so I'll be mean first' stripe of nastiness. That's the kind of mean that can taint the moods of dozens of people, because it hasn't got a target; it's just there, like the water hazard at the golf course, and it makes me sad. There's no cure for that sort of mean. It can only be endured.
Actually, that's not true, because there is a sort of cure: don't play along. If someone wants to be mean to you for their own gratification, and there's plainly nothing personal about it, don't give them the satisfaction. Some people just feel ill-used by life. Some of it's the need to defend from an attack that hasn't come yet, and some of it is simple jealousy over perceived unfairnesses in the way things work, but the fact is, some people will never be happy if they haven't got an enemy. You don't have to be a saint, but sometimes the only way out is refusing to play the game.
Fact #3: Most things require your participation. That includes your own belittlement.
Let's take some time to examine our statement that being mean feels good. Well, if we take that as a truth, then yes, we've found the instinctive root of most cruelty; it makes us feel better about ourselves and the world, and heck, it may even drive the competition away from the watering hole. Score! But why does being mean feel good? We don't like it when people are mean to us, and for the most part, people learn from experience what not to do; we learn that if we don't enjoy having our heads held under water, for example, maybe we shouldn't hold anyone else's head under water. Not a hard connection to make, yet 'being mean' -- the act of insulting, belittling, or outright attacking another human being -- seems to miss that process in a lot of individuals. Why? Because it feels good. But why?
Part of it is the jealousy/loneliness construct from above. Say Betty has cake, and Bobby doesn't. Bobby wants that cake. It looks really good. But he knows Betty isn't going to give him any (and the Bobbys of the world often know this about the Bettys of the world without ever asking, which makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy), and that makes him mad. So he waits until he's sure Betty can hear him, and then he calls her an ugly booger-eater. Betty is crushed. She still has the cake, but it just doesn't taste as good. Bobby is elated -- see how he got that greedy Betty! -- and yet, quite probably, a little bit ashamed. Now, he can either blame himself for his own actions, or he can blame...Betty. After all, Betty started it. Betty had the cake. If Betty hadn't had the cake, he wouldn't have had to be mean. In order to keep feeling good, Bobby needs to be mean again.
Substitute 'talent', 'friends', 'attention' or 'good hair' for cake, and that's jealousy. What about loneliness?
Loneliness and jealousy often twine together, because the person who is truly alone isn't going to have anybody to be mean to. They're lonely, but they can't be mean; the meanness would have no target. The cruelty begins when you add a third person to the equation: enter Jenny. Jenny and Betty are best friends. Bobby has no one. Bobby is lonely. Bobby watches Jenny and Betty having fun and sharing cake and all that good stuff, and it makes him feel bad about himself. Why isn't he worth having fun with? What's wrong with him? To stop those feelings, he needs to lash out.
What the Bobbys of the world miss -- and we've all been Bobbys, at some point or another -- is that nothing has to be 'wrong' with anyone at all. Just because Jenny and Betty like each other, that doesn't make Bobby a bad person, or flawed, or wrong. It just means that he's not the kind of guy that they want to hang out with. Not liking someone is not an attack. Attacking them is an attack. There's a difference.
All this sort of begs the question: if we're mean because it feels good, what else can we do to feel good? And the answer is...everything. When I'm having a rotten day, when I'm jealous of the kid who seems to be cooler, or smarter, or closer to all my friends, I read. I write a Martin's Passage story (now with extra demon mice!). I do a round of Iron Poet. I write an essay. I buy doughnuts and hand them out to people. I call my friends on the phone. Doing things that make me feel good without lashing out, and knowing what those things are, helps to keep me from being mean to people who really don't deserve it. I get jealous and I get lonely, just like everyone else, and cruelty is a cheap, easy high...but it doesn't last. It never does.
Fact #4: When someone doesn't love you back, it isn't a crime, or a sin, or a reason to hurt them. It's just a shame.
As much cruelty seems to be born out of laziness as almost anything else. Not only is being mean often easier than being nice, but we've been socialized to believe that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, whether it deserves it or not. How many times have you seen one jerk yell at customer service, in whatever form, until he got his discount/rebate/free stuff? It's a way for the powerless to feel empowered, and it's also a way to justify behaviour that frankly shouldn't be justified. 'I didn't get exactly what I wanted due to corporate policy, and so I'm going to scream at this retail clerk for the next three hours' is not the sort of thing that should be rewarded, and yet it often is, with the mounting consequence being that people learn, hey, wow! If I'm a total dick, I get stuff! So much easier than following proper channels and behaving like a human being.
So why do we reward this? I'm serious, here. Half the time -- more than half the time -- the person who waits patiently and follows all the rules gets nothing, while the screaming man who broke every rule in the book gets whatever he wants, and more. There seems to be a culture of slightly ashamed 'we must have done something wrong' which leads to that squeaky wheel getting well and truly greased, whether it deserves it or not. Half the time, they don't, and yet more and more, meanness wins where rationality fails. This upsets the heck out of me; it's wrong, and yet it's the way things seem to work, and it's going to take a cultural shift to stop it. The customer is not always right, because I am not always right, you are not always right, and Betty is not always right, and we're the customer. The clerk isn't always right, either. Maybe if no one was screaming, we'd be able to figure out who the right one actually was.
Fact #5: Being loud doesn't make you right. It just makes you loud.
Of course, there's another truism to be considered here, one that's gotten just as twisted around as 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease'. 'Where there's smoke, there's fire'. Which is to say, if I go around telling people that Betty is a greedy bitch because she doesn't share her cake with me, well, there must be an element of truth in it, otherwise I wouldn't be saying it. Right? Before you know it, six more people will be happy to say that they didn't get cake from Betty either, and another three who got cake but didn't like it, which proves that it was evil ambush cake, only meant to hurt them. Before you know it, Betty is an evil enchantress who hands out poison cake to bend people to her whims...and all because I felt like telling people she was greedy. (I wish I were exaggerating as much as some of you probably think I am.) There's a very strong attitude that, basically, I wouldn't be saying these things about Betty if she wasn't doing something wrong -- and once I start in on her, it is literally impossible for her to win. Seriously. If she defends herself, she admits that she did the bad thing in the first place. If she doesn't defend herself, I can just say that she knows she'll be condemned by her own words. And if she manages, through some astonishing stroke of good luck, to convince people that she never passed out evil cake, well, she must be hiding something, or I wouldn't hate her. Right?
Um. Sorry, no. The Internet -- and fandom, and worst of all, Internet fandom -- creates a constant sort of illusionary celebrity, just like high school did (and does, and always will). Maybe the coins of the realm are a quick wit and a modicum of talent, rather than large breasts and good hair (although large breasts and good hair quite frankly fail to hurt), but it still happens, often without the awareness of the people involved. Betty goes to bed, innocently unaware that her essay, 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation As Jason Dohring's Pool Girl', has just been linked from five thousand fansites. The next day, she has seven hundred new people reading her LJ, she can't possibly keep up with all their comments, and yes, people almost immediately begin calling her an elitest snob who thinks she's better than everyone else. Backlash is a wonderful thing. Meanwhile, Bobby gets mad because people seem to like Betty better, and the cycle starts again.
Much like high school celebrity, most of this doesn't really matter in the long run. But also much like high school celebrity, this is, in fact, real life. It's not fake. It's not a game. It's not some sort of Tron-esque virtual reality based on 'Mean Girls', where you get to be a catty bitch and no one really gets hurt and there's a moral in the end. Nope, sorry; this is the genuine article, and when you call Betty a snob, there's a genuine person who gets hurt by your words, even if -- maybe especially if -- all the mean things are said anonymously. There's a certain dehumanization that happens over the Internet, one which makes it substantially easier to say things that we probably wouldn't say to people's faces. After all, since we've never met Betty, we're judging her from a distance, and from a distance, she can't possibly have earned all that cake. We don't have to take anything into account beyond the natural human impulses towards jealousy (I want cake!), loneliness (all those people only want her cake!), and the need to be cool by putting down what's popular (her cake sucks because it's in cake; my cake is fringe). There's also, I think, a certain measure of self-belittlement that goes into that sort of meanness -- Betty is, after all, so much infinitely cooler and more together than I am, she won't even notice when I slap her, much less be hurt, so that makes it okay to do it, right? And then, when she is hurt, I know that I have slapped the mountain, and the mountain has reacted! I rule!
Except for the part where my behaviour kinda sucks.
Fact #6: Cheerleaders have feelings, too.
A lot of the mean that I see these days, especially online, comes from this weird school of thought which states that, basically, I have a right to Betty's cake, and if Betty doesn't share her cake, she's just being mean. It doesn't matter a) whether I ask her to share, or b) whether I did anything to help her get that cake; maybe she spent the last three days slaving to make every aspect of that cake from scratch, while I sat back and did my nails. It doesn't matter. Betty has cake, ergo, I am entitled to have cake, too, and if Betty doesn't put out toot-sweet, there's nothing wrong with me trumpteting her selfishness and heartlessness for the world to hear. Betty sucks!
...you'll forgive me while I continue to look a little bit baffled over here, won't you? Because I don't get this at all, despite the fact that it's prevalent in all sorts of forums. People feel that logging on gives them all sorts of rights and privilages, and set their expectations accordingly. They have a right to regular updates of free stuff, like fanfic and webcomics. They have a right to pretty icons, even if they don't credit. They have a right to be invited into every clubhouse, welcomed in every circle, and included in every conversation, because they're here, dammit, and that means they're entitled to be just as cool and loved and involved and shiny as Betty over there.
I'm sorry. I really am. But no. No one is any more entitled to coolness, inclusion, or cake than anybody else. We are entitled to get out of a thing what we put into it; no more, no less. If we get more, that's a cool bonus, but it's not something we should get by right. If Betty bakes a cake, she is entitled to cake. If Betty then proceeds to give me cake, I am lucky. Not getting my due -- lucky.
I was told, fairly recently, that I was an arrogant bitch because I don't answer every single LJ comment the second that I get it, to which I must say, again, no. I am not entitled to comments; those are a reward I get for being interesting, or controversial, or cute, or annoying, or any one of a hundred other things. Commenting in my journal does not entitle you to a reply. Is it polite of me to reply? Sure, just like it's polite to comment on every LJ entry I read. That doesn't mean that I always have the time, nor does it mean that I'm 'ignoring the little people' when I buzz through, answering the questions and neglecting the 'hee!'s or the 'me too!'s. Yet because of the attitude of Internet entitlement, I can't honestly say that the critique was a surprise.
'Exclusion' is also a big buzzword in justification of cruelty to people online. 'Betty gave you cake and she didn't give me any, so you're excluding me, you suck.' Sometimes, yes, this is true. But at the same time...how much cake was there? Did Betty and I split a slice, or did we eat a whole cake by ourselves? Did I help Betty bake the cake? Did I buy the cake for Betty? Was it my birthday, so she gave me cake? Has Betty been my friend since second grade? That's something I see happening fairly frequently: people turn friendship into 'they are excluding me'. And that just doesn't work. I am not excluding you because Betty is the subject of this essay. I am not excluding you because Mars is my best friend. I am not excluding you when I call Phil to talk me to sleep. I am interacting with my close personal friends. To get friends, you have to be a friend, and friends don't accuse friends of exclusionary behaviour just for the sake of being mean; they do it nicely, as friends, and by saying 'wow, you gave everyone else at the party cake and not me, are we okay?'. If the first thing someone does is accuse me of exclusion because I lean on the folks that I know better, I can promise you that I probably won't be getting close to them in a hurry.
Fact #7: You get what you pay for, and you earn what you build. So pay your dues, and build things, like friendships, if you want them to be available to you.
Of course, this all sort of begs the question of what, exactly, we owe one another. After all, I'm saying that none of us have a right to cake unless we baked it ourselves, and that just because I sometimes want to hang out with Cat in a one-on-one capacity, that doesn't mean anyone is actually being excluded. So what do we, as a society, owe each other?
Civility. Tolerance. Most of us here on De Interweb have been on the outside, looking in, at some point in our lives; we've all been on the receiving end of the senseless cruelties, the jibes, the mean-spirited comments and the hurtful jokes. They didn't feel good when they were directed at us, and they don't feel good when we direct them at other people; just because you've never seen me in the flesh, that doesn't mean that I'm immune to feeling bad when you insult me. And just because Betty is a concept, instead of a companion, that doesn't mean that it's all right to attack her.
There's a book by John Wyndham, called 'Re-Birth', where the main religious command is 'Watch Thou For the Mutant'. Anything that doesn't conform, exactly, to the standards of 'what is human' is considered inhuman, and that makes it acceptable to treat it however you like. Socially, we're always watching for the mutant, whether that mutation be foolishness or brilliance, and waiting to stomp it down. And we need to stop, because we are the mutants, we are the green monkeys, and we do no one any good by continuing to treat each other the way that we do.
Fact #8: 'Do unto' others is the golden rule for a reason.
In conclusion -- not that I've said half of what I could, but a girl has to stop sometime...I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, I went to a lot of Disney movies. (Yes, this is important. Stop looking at me like that.) One of them was this movie called 'Bambi', about a deer who hung out with a rabbit and a skunk -- sort of the pre-carnivore 'Lion King'. Anyway, the rabbit's mother makes him repeat what I was told was The Big Secret of getting along with people to her, and here it is, gratis, from me to all those people who apparently didn't see this movie:
"If you can't say nothin' nice, don't say nothin' at all."
Please. Think before you attack. Anonymous or not, obscured by distance and a computer screen or not, the world is as nice a place as we allow it to be, and this?
This is no way to treat our friends.
(*Girls, you understand. Guys, you may not, because you've never been girls. You know how we're generally regarded as pink and frilly and sweet and all that happy crappy, and it's not okay for us to take out our aggressions by beating the snot out of each other? Yeah, well, they start socializing us that way in kindergarten, while you guys are still viewing the good ol' shin-kick as a valid form of communication. Since we're not allowed to hit with fists, we learn how to do it with words, and the meanest of the mean girls quite possibly can kill with an insult. Which is not to say that all girls are good at it -- there will always be the people with no natural defenses -- or that some boys don't learn the art of Catty-as-Fuck Fu, but for the most part, Girls Are Meaner Than You Think They Are. Black eyes and bloody noses might just be kinder.)
People, unsurprisingly, got mean. People do that. And no matter how much you say 'I will not take this personally' when you sign up for a meme like that, you will. I would, you will, heck, Mother Teresa probably would, if she weren't, y'know, dead, and had lots of time to spend hanging out on LJ. And all of this, of course, made me think, because that's basically what this sort of thing tends to do. My brain is sometimes frustrating like that.
Part of it is the question of, 'well, are these people obligated, in any way, to like my friend? To like me? To like anything?' The answer to that is, of course and undeniably, no. No one is under any obligation to like anything, no matter how close to perfect it's supposed to be. Unless you're a hundred dollar bill, not everybody's going to like you, and even if you are a hundred dollar bill, there are going to be people demanding to know why you're not a thousand dollar bill. This latter trait is part of what makes the Internet such a hostile place, in some ways: because there will always be people who figure, and all too often rightly, that if they keep complaining, they'll keep getting what they want. Bitch about that hundred bucks for long enough, and it will become a thousand, if only because people are praying that you'll be quiet.
Fact #1: You can't please everyone. Partially because there are some people who will refuse to be pleased, no matter what you do.
So fine. The folks who don't like my friend -- we'll call her Betty, just because 'my friend' is really tiresome to keep writing -- aren't under any obligation to like her. No matter how fine, wonderful, upstanding and generous of a person Betty may happen to be, the whole world can hate her, if that's what makes them happy. I won't contest that. If hating me makes you a happier person, go right ahead! It's no skin off my nose. By the same token, no matter how rotten, horrible, evil, awful and perverse a person Betty is, you're not obligated to hate her. Loathe the holy and embrace the profane; that's your right as a human being, and no one's going to stop you. They may try, but they'll probably fail. What we're talking about here isn't whether you have to like Betty; this isn't a screed in her defense, or 'Why My Friends Rock And You Suck, By Seanan, Age 9'. This is an examination of why, precisely, liking -- or disliking -- Betty makes it okay to be mean to her.
Why are people mean? Like any behaviour, they must get something out of it, simply because most human behaviours, learned or unlearned, are selfish at the core. We have to be taught to share; we don't have to be taught to take. Taking is instinctive, and starts with babies screaming to be fed, to be given attention, and to generally be the center of the world as they perceive it. Since cruelty seems to be more instinctive for most people than kindness is, it must come with some sort of reward to justify it. Otherwise, we'd all just stop.
After polling a variety of people silly enough to hold still while I asked them questions, I have come up with a short list of Reasons Why People Are Mean:
1. It's harder to be nice.
2. Because they're jealous and don't want to admit it.
3. Because they're lonely.
4. Being mean gets you attention.
5. They desire to create schadenfreude.*
6. Being mean makes other people feel as bad as they do.
7. It lets them punish people for being happy.
8. Because they suck.
9. Boredom.
10. Because they feel attacked.
(*A German word meaning 'taking pleasure in the misfortune of others'. Ironically, it was not the German respondent to my informal poll who came up with this one.)
Even tossing out number eight as being a little, well, mean, we have eight reasons why people just can't seem to be nice to each other. We can conflate numbers three and four into 'need for attention'. Numbers two, six, and seven also combine, into 'sharing the misery'. One and nine are sort of two sides of the same coin, while numbers five and ten are really their own issues. So our simplified list is thus:
1. Laziness/boredom.
2. Loneliness/need for attention.
3. Sharing the misery.
4. Schadenfreude/it's fun.
5. Self-defense/retaliation.
These are the reasons that people are mean. Unsurprisingly, they don't look very nice. I think, however, that we can boil all these down even further, taking the first four articles on our list down to one. Yes, just one. Want to know what it is?
Being mean makes you feel good.
Seriously, whether it's the guilty goodness of 'I have just kicked a puppy to make myself feel better' or the malicious goodness of 'I have just thrown mud on something beautiful', being mean frequently makes people feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, it's not the sort of goodness that lasts; most of the time, it devolves quickly into self-loathing and disgust. How can you make those bad feelings go away? Be mean to someone else! Like any sort of an addiction, it becomes self-perpetuating, and the cycle is very hard to break. Our list is now:
1. Being mean feels good.
2. Self-defense/retaliation.
Fact #2: People will always do what feels good, no matter how bad it may be for the people around them.
So what drives the second item on our list? Why are people mean in self-defense? Well, sometimes, the self-defense is genuine. If you get in my face and start being mean to me, I, being only human, will probably be mean right back at you. The issue is more the meanness that doesn't seem to have a starting point -- the man who thinks it's okay to shove you out of his way because he had a bad cup of coffee, or the woman who got a bad performance review and is thus verbally abusing the clerks down at the grocery store. The free-range mean. The 'the world will be mean to me no matter what I do, so I'll be mean first' stripe of nastiness. That's the kind of mean that can taint the moods of dozens of people, because it hasn't got a target; it's just there, like the water hazard at the golf course, and it makes me sad. There's no cure for that sort of mean. It can only be endured.
Actually, that's not true, because there is a sort of cure: don't play along. If someone wants to be mean to you for their own gratification, and there's plainly nothing personal about it, don't give them the satisfaction. Some people just feel ill-used by life. Some of it's the need to defend from an attack that hasn't come yet, and some of it is simple jealousy over perceived unfairnesses in the way things work, but the fact is, some people will never be happy if they haven't got an enemy. You don't have to be a saint, but sometimes the only way out is refusing to play the game.
Fact #3: Most things require your participation. That includes your own belittlement.
Let's take some time to examine our statement that being mean feels good. Well, if we take that as a truth, then yes, we've found the instinctive root of most cruelty; it makes us feel better about ourselves and the world, and heck, it may even drive the competition away from the watering hole. Score! But why does being mean feel good? We don't like it when people are mean to us, and for the most part, people learn from experience what not to do; we learn that if we don't enjoy having our heads held under water, for example, maybe we shouldn't hold anyone else's head under water. Not a hard connection to make, yet 'being mean' -- the act of insulting, belittling, or outright attacking another human being -- seems to miss that process in a lot of individuals. Why? Because it feels good. But why?
Part of it is the jealousy/loneliness construct from above. Say Betty has cake, and Bobby doesn't. Bobby wants that cake. It looks really good. But he knows Betty isn't going to give him any (and the Bobbys of the world often know this about the Bettys of the world without ever asking, which makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy), and that makes him mad. So he waits until he's sure Betty can hear him, and then he calls her an ugly booger-eater. Betty is crushed. She still has the cake, but it just doesn't taste as good. Bobby is elated -- see how he got that greedy Betty! -- and yet, quite probably, a little bit ashamed. Now, he can either blame himself for his own actions, or he can blame...Betty. After all, Betty started it. Betty had the cake. If Betty hadn't had the cake, he wouldn't have had to be mean. In order to keep feeling good, Bobby needs to be mean again.
Substitute 'talent', 'friends', 'attention' or 'good hair' for cake, and that's jealousy. What about loneliness?
Loneliness and jealousy often twine together, because the person who is truly alone isn't going to have anybody to be mean to. They're lonely, but they can't be mean; the meanness would have no target. The cruelty begins when you add a third person to the equation: enter Jenny. Jenny and Betty are best friends. Bobby has no one. Bobby is lonely. Bobby watches Jenny and Betty having fun and sharing cake and all that good stuff, and it makes him feel bad about himself. Why isn't he worth having fun with? What's wrong with him? To stop those feelings, he needs to lash out.
What the Bobbys of the world miss -- and we've all been Bobbys, at some point or another -- is that nothing has to be 'wrong' with anyone at all. Just because Jenny and Betty like each other, that doesn't make Bobby a bad person, or flawed, or wrong. It just means that he's not the kind of guy that they want to hang out with. Not liking someone is not an attack. Attacking them is an attack. There's a difference.
All this sort of begs the question: if we're mean because it feels good, what else can we do to feel good? And the answer is...everything. When I'm having a rotten day, when I'm jealous of the kid who seems to be cooler, or smarter, or closer to all my friends, I read. I write a Martin's Passage story (now with extra demon mice!). I do a round of Iron Poet. I write an essay. I buy doughnuts and hand them out to people. I call my friends on the phone. Doing things that make me feel good without lashing out, and knowing what those things are, helps to keep me from being mean to people who really don't deserve it. I get jealous and I get lonely, just like everyone else, and cruelty is a cheap, easy high...but it doesn't last. It never does.
Fact #4: When someone doesn't love you back, it isn't a crime, or a sin, or a reason to hurt them. It's just a shame.
As much cruelty seems to be born out of laziness as almost anything else. Not only is being mean often easier than being nice, but we've been socialized to believe that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, whether it deserves it or not. How many times have you seen one jerk yell at customer service, in whatever form, until he got his discount/rebate/free stuff? It's a way for the powerless to feel empowered, and it's also a way to justify behaviour that frankly shouldn't be justified. 'I didn't get exactly what I wanted due to corporate policy, and so I'm going to scream at this retail clerk for the next three hours' is not the sort of thing that should be rewarded, and yet it often is, with the mounting consequence being that people learn, hey, wow! If I'm a total dick, I get stuff! So much easier than following proper channels and behaving like a human being.
So why do we reward this? I'm serious, here. Half the time -- more than half the time -- the person who waits patiently and follows all the rules gets nothing, while the screaming man who broke every rule in the book gets whatever he wants, and more. There seems to be a culture of slightly ashamed 'we must have done something wrong' which leads to that squeaky wheel getting well and truly greased, whether it deserves it or not. Half the time, they don't, and yet more and more, meanness wins where rationality fails. This upsets the heck out of me; it's wrong, and yet it's the way things seem to work, and it's going to take a cultural shift to stop it. The customer is not always right, because I am not always right, you are not always right, and Betty is not always right, and we're the customer. The clerk isn't always right, either. Maybe if no one was screaming, we'd be able to figure out who the right one actually was.
Fact #5: Being loud doesn't make you right. It just makes you loud.
Of course, there's another truism to be considered here, one that's gotten just as twisted around as 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease'. 'Where there's smoke, there's fire'. Which is to say, if I go around telling people that Betty is a greedy bitch because she doesn't share her cake with me, well, there must be an element of truth in it, otherwise I wouldn't be saying it. Right? Before you know it, six more people will be happy to say that they didn't get cake from Betty either, and another three who got cake but didn't like it, which proves that it was evil ambush cake, only meant to hurt them. Before you know it, Betty is an evil enchantress who hands out poison cake to bend people to her whims...and all because I felt like telling people she was greedy. (I wish I were exaggerating as much as some of you probably think I am.) There's a very strong attitude that, basically, I wouldn't be saying these things about Betty if she wasn't doing something wrong -- and once I start in on her, it is literally impossible for her to win. Seriously. If she defends herself, she admits that she did the bad thing in the first place. If she doesn't defend herself, I can just say that she knows she'll be condemned by her own words. And if she manages, through some astonishing stroke of good luck, to convince people that she never passed out evil cake, well, she must be hiding something, or I wouldn't hate her. Right?
Um. Sorry, no. The Internet -- and fandom, and worst of all, Internet fandom -- creates a constant sort of illusionary celebrity, just like high school did (and does, and always will). Maybe the coins of the realm are a quick wit and a modicum of talent, rather than large breasts and good hair (although large breasts and good hair quite frankly fail to hurt), but it still happens, often without the awareness of the people involved. Betty goes to bed, innocently unaware that her essay, 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation As Jason Dohring's Pool Girl', has just been linked from five thousand fansites. The next day, she has seven hundred new people reading her LJ, she can't possibly keep up with all their comments, and yes, people almost immediately begin calling her an elitest snob who thinks she's better than everyone else. Backlash is a wonderful thing. Meanwhile, Bobby gets mad because people seem to like Betty better, and the cycle starts again.
Much like high school celebrity, most of this doesn't really matter in the long run. But also much like high school celebrity, this is, in fact, real life. It's not fake. It's not a game. It's not some sort of Tron-esque virtual reality based on 'Mean Girls', where you get to be a catty bitch and no one really gets hurt and there's a moral in the end. Nope, sorry; this is the genuine article, and when you call Betty a snob, there's a genuine person who gets hurt by your words, even if -- maybe especially if -- all the mean things are said anonymously. There's a certain dehumanization that happens over the Internet, one which makes it substantially easier to say things that we probably wouldn't say to people's faces. After all, since we've never met Betty, we're judging her from a distance, and from a distance, she can't possibly have earned all that cake. We don't have to take anything into account beyond the natural human impulses towards jealousy (I want cake!), loneliness (all those people only want her cake!), and the need to be cool by putting down what's popular (her cake sucks because it's in cake; my cake is fringe). There's also, I think, a certain measure of self-belittlement that goes into that sort of meanness -- Betty is, after all, so much infinitely cooler and more together than I am, she won't even notice when I slap her, much less be hurt, so that makes it okay to do it, right? And then, when she is hurt, I know that I have slapped the mountain, and the mountain has reacted! I rule!
Except for the part where my behaviour kinda sucks.
Fact #6: Cheerleaders have feelings, too.
A lot of the mean that I see these days, especially online, comes from this weird school of thought which states that, basically, I have a right to Betty's cake, and if Betty doesn't share her cake, she's just being mean. It doesn't matter a) whether I ask her to share, or b) whether I did anything to help her get that cake; maybe she spent the last three days slaving to make every aspect of that cake from scratch, while I sat back and did my nails. It doesn't matter. Betty has cake, ergo, I am entitled to have cake, too, and if Betty doesn't put out toot-sweet, there's nothing wrong with me trumpteting her selfishness and heartlessness for the world to hear. Betty sucks!
...you'll forgive me while I continue to look a little bit baffled over here, won't you? Because I don't get this at all, despite the fact that it's prevalent in all sorts of forums. People feel that logging on gives them all sorts of rights and privilages, and set their expectations accordingly. They have a right to regular updates of free stuff, like fanfic and webcomics. They have a right to pretty icons, even if they don't credit. They have a right to be invited into every clubhouse, welcomed in every circle, and included in every conversation, because they're here, dammit, and that means they're entitled to be just as cool and loved and involved and shiny as Betty over there.
I'm sorry. I really am. But no. No one is any more entitled to coolness, inclusion, or cake than anybody else. We are entitled to get out of a thing what we put into it; no more, no less. If we get more, that's a cool bonus, but it's not something we should get by right. If Betty bakes a cake, she is entitled to cake. If Betty then proceeds to give me cake, I am lucky. Not getting my due -- lucky.
I was told, fairly recently, that I was an arrogant bitch because I don't answer every single LJ comment the second that I get it, to which I must say, again, no. I am not entitled to comments; those are a reward I get for being interesting, or controversial, or cute, or annoying, or any one of a hundred other things. Commenting in my journal does not entitle you to a reply. Is it polite of me to reply? Sure, just like it's polite to comment on every LJ entry I read. That doesn't mean that I always have the time, nor does it mean that I'm 'ignoring the little people' when I buzz through, answering the questions and neglecting the 'hee!'s or the 'me too!'s. Yet because of the attitude of Internet entitlement, I can't honestly say that the critique was a surprise.
'Exclusion' is also a big buzzword in justification of cruelty to people online. 'Betty gave you cake and she didn't give me any, so you're excluding me, you suck.' Sometimes, yes, this is true. But at the same time...how much cake was there? Did Betty and I split a slice, or did we eat a whole cake by ourselves? Did I help Betty bake the cake? Did I buy the cake for Betty? Was it my birthday, so she gave me cake? Has Betty been my friend since second grade? That's something I see happening fairly frequently: people turn friendship into 'they are excluding me'. And that just doesn't work. I am not excluding you because Betty is the subject of this essay. I am not excluding you because Mars is my best friend. I am not excluding you when I call Phil to talk me to sleep. I am interacting with my close personal friends. To get friends, you have to be a friend, and friends don't accuse friends of exclusionary behaviour just for the sake of being mean; they do it nicely, as friends, and by saying 'wow, you gave everyone else at the party cake and not me, are we okay?'. If the first thing someone does is accuse me of exclusion because I lean on the folks that I know better, I can promise you that I probably won't be getting close to them in a hurry.
Fact #7: You get what you pay for, and you earn what you build. So pay your dues, and build things, like friendships, if you want them to be available to you.
Of course, this all sort of begs the question of what, exactly, we owe one another. After all, I'm saying that none of us have a right to cake unless we baked it ourselves, and that just because I sometimes want to hang out with Cat in a one-on-one capacity, that doesn't mean anyone is actually being excluded. So what do we, as a society, owe each other?
Civility. Tolerance. Most of us here on De Interweb have been on the outside, looking in, at some point in our lives; we've all been on the receiving end of the senseless cruelties, the jibes, the mean-spirited comments and the hurtful jokes. They didn't feel good when they were directed at us, and they don't feel good when we direct them at other people; just because you've never seen me in the flesh, that doesn't mean that I'm immune to feeling bad when you insult me. And just because Betty is a concept, instead of a companion, that doesn't mean that it's all right to attack her.
There's a book by John Wyndham, called 'Re-Birth', where the main religious command is 'Watch Thou For the Mutant'. Anything that doesn't conform, exactly, to the standards of 'what is human' is considered inhuman, and that makes it acceptable to treat it however you like. Socially, we're always watching for the mutant, whether that mutation be foolishness or brilliance, and waiting to stomp it down. And we need to stop, because we are the mutants, we are the green monkeys, and we do no one any good by continuing to treat each other the way that we do.
Fact #8: 'Do unto' others is the golden rule for a reason.
In conclusion -- not that I've said half of what I could, but a girl has to stop sometime...I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, I went to a lot of Disney movies. (Yes, this is important. Stop looking at me like that.) One of them was this movie called 'Bambi', about a deer who hung out with a rabbit and a skunk -- sort of the pre-carnivore 'Lion King'. Anyway, the rabbit's mother makes him repeat what I was told was The Big Secret of getting along with people to her, and here it is, gratis, from me to all those people who apparently didn't see this movie:
"If you can't say nothin' nice, don't say nothin' at all."
Please. Think before you attack. Anonymous or not, obscured by distance and a computer screen or not, the world is as nice a place as we allow it to be, and this?
This is no way to treat our friends.