Provoked by truth

The list below is something I put out on Substack notes, the social media Twitter clone around these parts. No other “note” I’ve published got as much “engagement.” The number of likes and restacks (both positive and negative restacks) was higher than for any other “note” I can remember.

The large majority of the responses were positive/in-agreement. That’s nice for my ego, but not necessary. I don’t actually demand agreement as many of my critics often claim. What irritates me with what critics call “disagreement” is that it’s not “disagreement.” It’s readers personalizing something when I didn’t speak to or about them personally. It’s readers responding with aggressive, accusatory tones, when I didn’t do anything to “victimize” them. It’s readers responding with lectures, scolding, or aggrieved personal feelings simply because they did not like the general statements I made.

It’s true that I often throw rhetorical “bombs”, as some of my friends and even my therapist have said. Or is it? Is it really true that direct statements of fact, couched in generalized terms without lots of “feelings care,” are “bombs”? Is it really true that not buffering every statement with “Of course, I’m not saying ALL PEOPLE are like this, and of course, I understand that YOU and YOUR family are not like this, and I wouldn’t want you to think . . .” means that I threw a bomb?

No, it’s not. I didn’t actually throw a bomb. And within living memory, adults were not expected to wrap rhetorical cotton wool around statements to anticipate the tender feelings of other adults with the emotional regulation of an eight-year-old. The problem is introduced by people who choose to personalize, who choose to pretend that they don’t understand the difference between general patterns and individual exceptions, and who choose to take something personally for the purpose of maneuvering me into the Persecutor role in their Karpman Drama Triangle. That’s a link to Substacker Barbara Wegner’s site; she’s an expert on that dynamic and you’ll get a lot out of reading her work.

The bomb is inside them, and they lit the fuse.

After the paywall, I give some examples of the accusations and grievances. They are the minority of responses, but they’re worth looking at because they exemplify the modern emotional problems too many adults have:

1. Inappropriate personalization

2. Childish pretend “misunderstandings” in order to be able to accuse the other of “doing harm”

3. Making one’s self a Victim, so that a Savior can come along and tell that bad man off

These are all behaviors of children. When adults do them, they start to look like Cluster B behavior. That’s what Cluster B (narcissism, the emotional instability of borderline-style dysregulated and explosive feelings) is literally: arrested emotional development.

I make no claim that any of the respondents are personality disordered. I can’t know that, and I’m not motivated to “accuse” them of this or to “diagnose” them. But I can know that their behaviors are in the Cluster B style. Social media and modern mores push otherwise normal-range adults into these behaviors all the time.

The List

Millennials and younger need to hear these things.

1. 35 is the beginning of middle age. Yes. No matter how much you don’t like that. It is not “youth.”
   

2. Your adolescence has been artificially extended. You are not “a kid” at 25 or 30. You may act like one and “feel like” one, but you’re not. No generation before you believed this because it’s not true.
   

3. 35 is a geriatric pregnancy by definition. This is biology. The body does not care that you “feel like” “35 is the new 25.” It’s not.
   

4. The vast majority of you are not going to find your dream wife/husband/best life at 40. You’ve missed a lot, and for some the window has closed to marry and have a family.
   

5. No, it does not matter than number 4 made you mad. It doesn’t matter that you “know a couple who fell in love at 40.” We’re talking about averages and patterns. Don’t pretend you don’t understand it.
   

6. Women in their 30s will never be perceived universally as sexually desirable/desirable as women in their 20s, by most men, no matter how many times you demand it. Reality is real.
   

7. It is reality that men and women are perceived differently based on age. It’s not “fair” because life isn’t fair. Again, biology is real.
   

8. Being gentle and soft-spoken and male feminist and, for all intents and purposes, taking on the affect of a gay man will not make you attractive to women, gentlemen. Your feminist girlfriend is lying to you (and to herself, and she doesn’t know it), and she is getting very close to being completely turned off by you. Biology is real.
   

9. Gays are not generally interested in domesticity and traditional family life, and they almost never carry that out despite claiming publicly that that is what they want. Their behavior reveals their preferences. Not one in 100 “gay marriages” is monogamous.
   

10. Surrogacy is selling and buying children. It’s a deliberate, wicked choice to abuse a child from birth, consciously, to get yourself a baby like a commodity. It’s morally obscene.

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I’m putting most of the examples and the ability to comment on this behind the paywall as I trust my subscribers to be able to respond, including with disagreement, without personalizing, calling me silly names, or claiming that I’m responsible for their upcoming suicide attempt. Paid subscribers (thank you) often bring up relevant, interesting perspectives that can change my mind—I don’t have to fend off bad-faith manipulation which leaves room to engage in good faith.

Let’s take a look:

Personalizing, false creation of the self as a victim, unprovoked aggression

Here are the rest: