One man’s meat, etc.
When I was re-reading C. S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters’ recently, there was a chapter that made me think a lot of these fora.
The hero (a nameless ‘patient’ who is to be tempted by a young devil and his superior, Screwtape) has a mother (with her own ‘tempter’). Screwtape tells the young devil to ‘let your patient think in talking with his mother that all the little ‘irritants’ she has, her finger tapping, the way she only wants a ‘teeny piece of toast and tea’ when he has taken trouble to fix a nice meal, etc. are not only known by her to irritate the son, but that she irritates him DELIBERATELY. Every word she utters the son is to ‘hear’ with the most aggravating and offensive undertone. Whereas every word that HE utters (even though of course he has habits that irritate his mother as well) is to be taken as being the most charitable, reasonable, and sweetly uttered.
So while they might engage in seeming kind conversations, they are each practicing oneupmanship.
The one is hearing every word the other says as being harsh and hateful, but thinking every word of theirs is sweetness and light.
So of course, the more they speak and interact, the angrier they get.
It reminds me of here because most of us who like something —say it is the OF and the EF in question—probably think that everything WE say is ‘sweet reason’ while—the longer the conversation goes on and people are saying, or arguing, the contrary-the madder we are getting at each other, because we simply cannot ‘grant’ to the other person the same virtue we are parading ourselves as possessing.
We’re leaping for the moral high ground and in order to do so, we have to stand on top of the other person.
And of course it helps to use loaded words too and then do a ‘who innocent little me” when called on it, too (and NONE of us can say we aren’t guilty of that at some point).
That’s one reason that as much as I’ve enjoyed participating in the times CA has been on, I am starting to get too uncomfortable. I just see too many people on here who are just going to get on the bully pulpit and pat themselves on the back for showing those ‘others’ (those who are ‘not-like-me’) how utterly vile they are for their hatefulness (we don’t even have differences of opinion any more). It gets harder and harder to pick oneself up and say, “They aren’t really attacking me as a person” and it gets hard not to snark in return.
I am tired of it all.
I think I’ll spend the next couple of weeks knitting and just forgetting about ‘talk’ for a while. It gets, sadly, soul killing here.