When adjectives attack

My experience with violence, and why the activists are suffering from paranoia

Two weeks ago I wrote about Ryan Carson, a New Yorker who called cops “sub-human” but in the moment of his murder revealed himself to have all the street smarts of the Star Trek’s fan club president. Ryan was the very type of person that cops exist to protect!

Progressing with our theme of people tragically detached from reality, I’d like to explore the machinations of the “words are violence” crowd. A coterie of craven characters who lose their collective shit when someone uses a naughty word on Twitter. Is it just theatrics; unsheathe thine glittering sword of Wokemocles! Or do these sensitive souls really believe that sticks and stones may break thy bones but words are what destroy thee? Let’s consider the evidence…

The Psycho started slow. A few harsh words, a raised hand, vague threats about eradicating my lineage. By the third week the raised hand was a descending fist and I was a punching bag for this demon, a former solider who thought he was still in Fallujah. Sometimes I could stay on my feet after a blow, mostly I went to the ground.

In the gaps between physical assault there was humiliation, like the time he trimmed off my eyebrows and eyelashes because I “wasn’t wearing them responsibly.” Here’s what that looks like, if you’re curious.

On the worst night of horror the four of us went to a gay bar. My pledge brother and I, the Psycho and Anthony; another brother from the fraternity. Anthony had a pierced ear and the Psycho thought I’d look dashing with my own bedazzlement. He borrowed the earring and tried to pierce my ear with it. Earrings are dull, the blunt tip refused to go through my lobe, but god bless the Psycho he didn’t give up that easily.

Once it was clear that this plan was flawed, the Psycho summoned forth from god knows where a medical needle, the type they use for stitches. He “pierced” my belly button several times, leaving the needle in so he could show off his handiwork to bystanders. “You look divine,” he assured me. “Nobody takes better care of you than I do,” he would coo proudly.

Once that thrill wore off the Psycho withdrew the needle and put his short-lived piercing career behind him. From the gay bar we drove 70 mph through the empty city streets, blasting red lights while Anthony screamed at the Psycho to slow down. I hated Anthony and took great solace in his discomfort.

We ended up at a hot dog joint in record time. The Psycho laid down the law, we were to snort a packet of pepper in penance for having the audacity to pledge his fraternity. My pledge brother, who had the desperate eyes of a hunted animal, turned white and clambered out of the restaurant like he had a lion on his tail. He ran down the street headed god knows where, his shaky silhouette shuttering from streetlight to streetlight. Then he turned a corner and was gone from our night, gone from the fraternity, gone from the college he transferred somewhere else the next semester. I think the Psycho was awfully proud of his work that night.

Although it sounds barbaric, getting a hack-job piercing through my belly button wasn’t that painful. Those medical needles are really quite sharp. The Psycho’s worst pain was mental. Every moment spent with him was psychological terror. His unpredictability and gargantuan disregard for risk made him into the guy who would chop up your murdered remains with a hatchet, throw the goo in a swamp and sleep like a princess that same night.

Fake heroes in Hollywood dramas claim they don’t care if they die, and these declarations are supposed to convey stoicism and strength. In my experience with the Psycho, when you don’t care if you live or die your behavior trends more towards unhinged than unfazed.

What is violence? I guess it depends on who you talk to. If you go to Cornell, violence means that Ann Coulter is giving a talk at your university.

If you go to the University of Colorado Boulder, violence means using the wrong pronoun. That’s according to the Center for Inclusion and Social Change.

The same holds true at George Washington University.

If you think getting called the wrong thing is violence, I’m damn sure you’ve never spent an evening with the Psycho…

For further erudition let’s summon a New York Times editorial helpfully entitled “When is Speech Violence?” What wisdom is Lisa Barrett going to grant us, I’m on the edge of my seat to find out!

Imagine that a bully threatens to punch you in the face. A week later, he walks up to you and breaks your nose with his fist. Which is more harmful: the punch or the threat?

The answer might seem obvious: Physical violence is physically damaging; verbal statements aren’t. “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

But scientifically speaking, it’s not that simple. Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons — and shorten your life.

In theory Lisa has a point. Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. When the Psycho said that he was going to “destroy me,” I felt like hell. However, his threats were accompanied by actual violence. The Psycho would say, “I’m gonna fuck you up,” and then he would fuck me up.

We must draw a distinction between threats backed with action, and ephemeral fears. If, like Lisa, you’re arguing that words are dangerous because of what they imply, then there must be actual harm substantiating the implication. If there is little chance of harm then all this talk about “words are as dangerous as the sword” is nothing more than paranoia; a deep-seated persecution complex. Let’s run some math to see what’s actually happening.

According to the FBI, in 2022 there were 1,944 hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation.

America has population of about 331,000,000 people, 7.1% of which now count themselves as homosexual. That’s 23.5 million gay Americans. Now look at the number of hate crimes. I’m going to assume that every incidence happened to a different person, although this is almost certainly inaccurate.

1,944 hate crimes out of a population 23.5 million is approximately 1 person in 12,000 effected. If we run the math for all 11,288 hate crimes, against the entire American population, we’re looking at about 1 American in 30,000 who are victims of a hate crime every year.

As a general rule, if a thing has a 1 in 10,000 chance of happening I don’t think you should spend your life obsessed with it. You could channel your angst far more effectively into worrying about that Frappuccino and diabetes, or getting into a car crash. There were 42,795 car crash fatalities in 2022, but I don’t hear the activists losing their collective shit over this statistic.

The article continues…

Your body’s immune system includes little proteins called proinflammatory cytokines that cause inflammation when you’re physically injured. Under certain conditions, however, these cytokines themselves can cause physical illness. What are those conditions? One of them is chronic stress.

Your body also contains little packets of genetic material that sit on the ends of your chromosomes. They’re called telomeres. Each time your cells divide, their telomeres get a little shorter, and when they become too short, you die. This is normal aging. But guess what else shrinks your telomeres? Chronic stress.

If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?

Spoiler alert: the wrong kind! Lisa meanders on until finally reaching the conclusion…

That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.

By all means, we should have open conversations and vigorous debate about controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence.

Again with this “literally a form of violence.” Well, fuck. I don’t think that word means what you think it means 🤔 If it’s the perception of violence, without there being a physical threat behind it, then it’s just good old-fashioned paranoia!

Maybe these activists are incapable of telling the difference between a persecution complex and an actual threat. I shared my experience with the Psycho because it illustrates my encounter with brutality, a history that might set me apart from many other people my age.

In one sense it’s good that my situation is somewhat unique; I don’t wish for anyone else to relive my shitty festivities. But it also means that we have millions of citizens with delusions about destructive adjectives because they have no framework to help them see the bigger picture. If online bullying is the worst aggression you’ve ever known, then that becomes your yardstick by which you measure the world. In his book “Everything is Fucked” Mark Manson wrote,

The better things get, the more we perceive threats where there are none, and the more upset we become. And it is at the heart of the paradox of progress.

Or, as Lars Svendsen put it,

A paradoxical trait of the culture of fear is that it emerges at a time when by all accounts, we are living more securely than ever before in human history.

Many have argued that we’re living in one of the safest periods of human history, if not the safest. These conditions are amazing, but they certainly seem to encourage a weakening of the human psyche. The activists capitalize on this fear and use it, under the guise of compassion, to determine the acceptable norms of speech. But this must be put to a stop! We cannot allow millions of children with paranoid delusions of prosecution to dictate the speech norms of our society, even if they do so under the guise of compassion.

Martin Luther King Jr. insisted on the freedom of speech. The civil rights movement could only exist because of the protections promised by the first amendment. In 1978 the ACLU demanded that Nazis - real Nazis! - be allowed to express themselves. In both instances there existed a recognition that once freedom of speech is limited, censorship will be applied to prevent people from protesting injustice.

To shut down free speech is to shut down dissent, and without dissent we’re trapped in whatever reality the mainstream powers want to enforce. This is no way to live, for a speech-restricted culture most assuredly does not lead us down the path of human flourishing.

I didn’t get into that fraternity. I was crushed but it was for the best. None of my pledge brothers who got in graduated from college. A couple of them even snagged an opiate addiction before dropping out. Yowza, I really dodged a bullet on that one.

Me and the Psycho? I’m neutral on the experience. Our hangouts were unmitigated physical and psychic torture, and yet… That psychotic soldier-criminal with a war hangover gave me a chance to be brave, which isn’t an opportunity you encounter every day. I also got down and dirty with some actual violence, and in all the years since I’ve never once had to seek counseling because I encountered a string of hostile adjectives. So hey, at least there’s that.

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If you’d like to stick it to the Psycho, please consider upgrading your subscription. He’ll never know, but maybe karma will find him anyways.