"You're both wrong"

There’s a phenomenon I call “kindergarten teacher morality.”

Please hear heavy sarcasm on the word “morality.”

In real kindergarten or primary school, it looks like this:

Johnny and Billy are playing dodge boll. Johnny deliberately targets the ball at Billy harder than he throws it at anyone else. Johnny knows he can get away with this because Billy is not a popular kid. The others find him “weird” or “gross” or “gay” or whatever. Johnny means to hurt Billy, and he succeeds. Johnny then sniggers at Billy and calls him “faggot” under his breath.

Billy hauls off and punches Johnny.

Mrs. Jones comes along and breaks up the fight. Billy tries to explain that Johnny caused the fight, Johnny actively aggressed, and Johnny is now pretending that he didn’t do anything.

Mrs. Jones says, “I don’t care who started it. You’re both wrong, and you both have detention.”

This is not morality, it is an escalation of the abuse. It’s an exact inversion of morality and fairness.

Kindergarten teacher morality holds sway on social media. There’s a type of person who thinks of himself as a calm, cool, collected “outside observer.” He will enter a contentious thread that began with one party lying about the other, baiting the other party, and provoking a hostile defensive reaction.

Mr. Calm and Collected inserts himself, and says to the party who was targeted, “Your interlocutor over there wasn’t actually targeting you. I don’t see any evidence of ‘yelling’ or ‘lying.’ You’re being inaccurate. I think you are creating a problem, and you and he are both really in agreement.”

This, too, is not morality, or fairness, or good judgment. It displays no discernment. It enables abusive, bullying behavior. It’s also extraordinarily disrespectful.

As you may guess, this just happened to me on Twitter. No, it’s not the worst thing. No one actually punched me and took my lunch money.

But it did cause me to finally put Mr. Calm and Collected on mute. Mr. Calm and Collected really does believe that he is those things. He’s not a bad person, I don’t think, but he’s not exactly a person who enacts “good” online when he does this. In fact, he enables abusive social media behavior.

I’ve been around the mulberry bush with Mr. Calm and Collected before. I also know what he thinks of me in some ways. It’s the typical stuff. I’m too hot-headed. I overreact. I see enemies among people who are “just trying to have conversations with me.”

He’s wrong on this one, and he’s been wrong on several similar situations in the past. He doesn’t actually have discernment. This most recent case was so egregious—my original provocateur really did go way overboard in a way that would have gotten him bodily ejected from a party if he behaved this way in person—that I came to the conclusion that Mr. Calm and Collected is a persistent problem. He cannot ever be trusted to make good judgment.

What he can be trusted to do is side with aggressors by implying, or stating outright, that their targets are overreacting.

Put concisely: He’s on the side of bullies. Consistently. Because something about a guy like me who says “fuck you” immediately when a “fuck you” is deserved hits something deep in him. He loses the ability to make meaningful moral distinctions. Perhaps he has long experience with yellers, or very angry people, and it’s caused him to equate anger and self defense with “wrong and scary.”

Whatever the reason, Mr. Calm and Collected is untrustworthy. I don’t think he actually means badly, honest. I don’t think he “hates me” or anything that extreme. But I do believe, equally honestly, that he is the kind of person who would get a fellow soldier killed because of his poor judgment about when and where to intervene.

Have you run into “kindergarten teacher morality?” Have you met any Mr. Calm and Collecteds online? If so, feel free to tell your story in the comments, and thanks.