The line went something like,
“Why is it that a weaker person has to attach themselves to someone stronger?” And the question (while rude) for just a moment, crystalized for me. okay, well, to be honest, it’s actually been on my mind for a while, let’s not hedge our bets, i mean, come on, this is me. I’m not talking about the deference that comes from a Dom/ sup relationship, I’m talking about the … fuck-stupid and godawful parasites you see schmoozing up to anything that seems remotely stronger than them.
You know what? I’m going to post portions of a debate I had with someone.
Mr Insensitive (we’ll call him Nestor, for the sake of argument) likes things to go His Way. To any other person, his motivations might be completely incomprehensible, but for the most part, it really boils down to he likes things to go His Way. To that end, he pursues education, employment, and sociological interactions that all ultimately benefit no one else but him. When he meets someone else, his initial priority is to determine whether this person is a friend, an ally, someone who can ultimately assist him on his walk through life; or instead someone to (at best) ignore or (at worst) actively pursue complete and utter subjugation or physical/ psychological destruction. He’s not necessarily an evil or bad person, but his priority is to himself and his successes and adventures in life. Along the way he has friends, enemies, and whatever. Hi-jinks ensue.
Along the way he meets Mr Nice. (we’ll call him Spineless Bob for the sake of argument) Spineless Bob has gone through his life, effectively at the mercy of other people. for some reason, he feels that he needs to be completely selfless, to the point of ego-abdication. Because he has no central core of independent thought, no spine that can hold and support him, he has to mold himself to suit other people’s needs. Molding himself to suit other people carries a burden, though. He has to cling to them to get a shape, to become a complementary piece. So he’ll wander through his life, clinging to people he feels can give him a shape, a definition of self. All the while he tells himself he’s helping them, while in fact he’s simply leeching off them for a sense of identity. A shapeless, sycophantic leech of a man. He’s a “good Guy” because he gives and gives and gives, but at the same time, there’s a growing resentment within him. Can’t anyone see the amount of effort it’s taken him to give to everyone else? Can’t anyone see/ acknowledge his suffering? The sacrifices he’s made to be what he things people expect of him? “Goddammit, people need to wake the fuck up and see how fucking awesome I really am! I’m like… Yes. I can authoritatively say, I am the New Messiah for the Twenty First Century. I care for these worthless shits, even if they don’t deserve it.” Now, rather than actually benefit himself or his fellow man, what he’s done at this point is he’s latched onto The Stick of Self-Righteousness and jammed it up his ass.
So now if anyone wants help from Stick-ass Bob, they’ve got to run a gauntlet of bitterness, resentment, self-loathing, and unresolved teenage angst. that Stick up his ass hurts, but at least people don’t fucking walk on him now, do they? Now he can afford to help them… but only if they can survive the gauntlet.
Suddenly, the two of them meet. Nestor, meet Stick-ass. Stick-ass, meet Nestor.
Nestor’s first priority: Ally or enemy? The guy’s emotionally unstable, socially retarded, and incapable of interacting with the opposite sex with any degree of success. This guy is a problem. Self-righteous and sycophantic at the same time, desperately hoping, not only for attention, but acceptance and adulation.
This person is a danger. Instead of being capable of assisting Nestor on his walk through life (that’s what friends do, they watch your back, make your days pleasant, and help you when you’re struggling) this person would instead hinder him. So he tells Stick-ass to fuck off in no uncertain terms. He wants to keep a buffer of distance between himself and this odoriferous human waste that’s seeped in.
Stickass hates and loves Nestor, because he sees Nestor’s independence, self-assuredness, self-confidence, competence, and individual clarity of thought, and feels that sinking feeling in his gut. He is simultaneously the best and worst thing he’s wanted in his own life. He loves those things in Nestor’s character, but hates them as well because, after all, he’s sacrificed so much for ther people, right? He’s far more deserving of Nestor’s success, girlfriends, money, and popularity than Nestor is, right? Wrong.
So, there they are, face to face, a button between them.
“This button will remove the selfish and ultimately useless people in this room. When I hit this button, the person that has caused the most unhappiness in the world will disappear without a trace. In fact, it’d be like he never existed in the first place.
So now I ask you. Who disappears?
To which he replied,
Molding himself to suit other people carries a burden, though. He has to cling to them to get a shape, to become a complementary piece. So he’ll wander through his life, clinging to people he feels can give him a shape, a definition of self. All the while he tells himself he’s helping them, while in fact he’s simply leeching off them for a sense of identity.
Okay, that’s selfish. But if someone’s form of selfishness is helping people, then that’s not a shabby display of selfishness, I’d say. I think Bob’d help far more people than Nestor ever would. Nestor basically uses people as tools, and doesn’t care about them very much. Bob does care about people, and unconsciously uses them as tools by helping as many people as he can. Nestor’s obviously showing a far larger display of selfishness here.
(This went on for a while)
My response:
You assume that selfish = bad. You assume wrong. When you go to school, you go so that you can get a diploma. No ‘ifs’, or ‘buts’ about it. After High School, there’s College. You don’t go for little 12 year old Billy, you go to get a degree. Not for Sisterfucking Jimbo down the hall from you, but you. You want the degree, you put in the time and effort, you buy the books, you sacrifice time, effort, money, friends, and Life Experiences so that you can get the degree and hang it up on your wall.
You get a job so that you can take care of your bills. So that you can buy food. So that you can pay your phone, your cable, your MMO, your fucking video game systems, and pay off the family down the street to keep from going to the police after you accidentally sleep with their 12 year old daughter.
None of these things is selfish. You’re putting forth effort to (at least) break even. The better career you get, the more you can afford to get ahead.
Lessee… Work, School, friends… Ah. Friends. You pick the people you hang out with, because you don’t want some cockshit fucktube stealing your shit, fucking your girlfriend, breaking into your house, your parents’ house, or anyone’s house, for that matter. You say, “This person and I get along. I’m going to make an investment into interacting with this person above others because we have like-minded interests and I don’t with say, Jimbo Sisterfucker down the hall from me.”
Still not being selfish.
Sycophantic behavior is incredibly selfish, because it does not reward anyone but the person exhibiting said behavior. Clinging to people to form a shape, to define ones’ self, is only beneficial to the one being molded, not the one he is molding to. in addition, it burdens everyone around the person that has been adhered to, as they no longer have any capability for independent action, seeing as there’s a very large, yet shapeless mass entangling them, restricting their ability to move.
So we can derive the following values from said example: Heavy, incapacitating things drag down the individual. This incapacitation can inconvenience other people who also have a certain reliance upon that person. So the one being adhered to cannot function in society (work, home, out with friends, etc) as well as they should be capable of, simply because they’ve got something preventing them. I.E. Spineless Bob. Therefore, in conclusion, a self-sufficient and determined individual will never equate the same level of societal damage that a sycophantic, needy, and spineless dependent like Bob causes.
It went on and on, until this guy popped out with,
If someone is doing a mean thing, but they THINK they’re doing a nice thing, does that make them a mean person? No, just misguided.
To which I responded with this quote from Chris Blake:
I’m holding in my hand a 1976 press kit containing newspaper clippings, photos, and testimonials from a remarkable church, one of the largest Protestant churches in the United States. This Interracial urban church carried on an extensive ministry of impressive humanitarian aid. It had already rehabilitated more than two hundred people from drug habits, and financed the education of more than a hundred students in medicine, law, teaching, and other human service fields, and many students lived in dormitories provided by the church. Moreover, the church provided care in its own facilities for senior citizens, medical convalescents, orphans, and disabled children. Several clippings included testimonials from the president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, Congressional Record, San Fransisco Chronicle, Washington Post and a former CBS-TV affiliate News Bureau Chief, who after working on a Documentary on the church had been so touched by the “magnificent example” of the pastor in working to “stand courageously against all forms of injustice, to relieve human suffering of every kind, and to establish brotherhood among peoples of wide-ranging backgrounds” that the bureau chief had quit his job at CBS to work full time for the church. Never have I seen such a more impressive church press kit. (To be fair, not many churches have a press kit.)
The pastor was a member of a 1.4 million member Christian denomination, and by 1976 had been pastoring twenty five years. He had also served as a public school teacher and for two full years as a foreign missionary, establishing programs for orphans. More recently he had begun a foreign agricultural mission on thousands of acres to produce food for distribution to critical hunger regions. He had recieved numerous awards, including one from the Los Angeles Herald for “Humanitarian of the Year”. In 1976 he was appointed chair of the San Fransisco Housing Authority. With his wife, he had adopted at least nine impoverished children of different racial backgrounds. They lived next to one of the churches large animal refuge centers, where they took in and cared for sick and abandoned animals.
You’ve probably head of the People’s Temple Christian Church. Rev Jim Jones, Pastor.
As an addendum, I added,
Don’t give me shallow, dogmatic crap about how those people who do evil with the best of intentions aren’t ‘mean’. Even the most sinister of people have the ‘best intentions’ at heart, and that’s what makes it so sad- there IS no true good or evil, only snotnosed peckerwoods like yourself who believe something is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ based on some cobbled together dogma stemming from badly interpreted scripture and Disney. I’ve read published journals of oven operators in Auschwitz who actually felt that they were benefiting the whole world with the ritual and systematic extermination of the jews in Germany. Seriously dude. You’ve (still) got no relevant high ground to stand on.
You’d think that in the face of my debate he’d cave like a house of cards, but this debate spanned months, leading to it’s dramatic conclusion:
And the cream of the crop is that Nestor idiot. Check this out. He’s stated that nothing gives him more pleasure than hurting other people. HE’S A SICK SADISTIC PSYCHOPATH. This guy is screwed in the head. He is evil – literally evil. You hear that word said a lot for funny or dramatic reasons, but I am dead fucking serious here. Nestor is evil and does not dreserve to draw breath. Just start asking him questions about morality and whatnot, you’ll see how deep the rabbit hole goes. He’s not just a poster whose funny gimmick is to act like he’s an asshole, this guy truly is one mentally fucked-up psycho.
In conclusion, I like to debate, I’m a A SICK SADISTIC PSYCHOPATH, and being spineless rules.
Nestor Dissertation, Imported piece, Quick Post, Rant, Sociology