Darker Motivations

Hello, good evening, everybody! I gotta warn you, today’s post is gonna be a lil dark. Not piss-about “ugh I feel like the states of the self are temporary” dark, either; actually dark, like, break-out-your-torches, Joseph Conrad, stygian fuckin’ darkness.

There will also be swearing, probably. I can’t help it; I’m discussing one of the darkest (yet most effective!) thought patterns I possess. It does relate to suicide, so if you're not set up to interact with that topic at the moment (which I understand entirely; it's a tough one), do feel free to step over to some other content, and I'll see you on the next one. :)

You are advised; now, on to trigger me timbers!

Super brief backstory, which many will know but I’m authorially obliged to repeat: I’m crazy as hell. I think that’s always been the case, although it took most other people a little while to catch on. I couldn’t figure out arithmetic for the longest time (it probably wasn’t insane and arbitrary enough), despite the use of a bunch of different teaching methods, including touch math (which was too insane and arbitrary by half). Young Peter spent about four times as much time wandering the school grounds and talking to himself as he did running around things, climbing atop things, and falling off things as larval humans are generally supposed to do.

This isn’t a pity party, so I don't say that as a “woe is me” diatribe. I’m just pointing out that I was a weird-ass kid from day one, and it came as no real surprise when I started collecting labels. I paid attention some small but non-zero percentage of the time, so I was “possibly” attention-deficit. I took some satisfaction in pulling out my hair and peeling off loose bits of skin (ew, sorry), so I had OCD. Your typical eight-year-old doesn’t lie awake all night, consumed with thoughts of distant impending existential annihilation, so I had depression.

Again, not a pity party. I’ve had a very nice life, really, looking at it objectively. There’s just this little thing in my head that pops up every so often, telling me I really ought to end same. Bloody nuisance, that.

I wanna take a sidebar out here and point out that it’s an irrational impulse. Clearly. I live a life of inordinate privilege by the global standard, and even by more local metrics I’m not too hard up at all. A common question I get on this topic is: given this life, why would I throw it away?

I wouldn’t. When that evil voice bubbles up, it’s not me talking. That’s why we call it a mental illness; I wouldn’t ask you to reason away your sinus infection. That question up there is an easy, common mistake to make, but I would encourage those who have never had suicidal ideation to consider exactly how few of their other thoughts are “rational” or “deliberate.” We’re all big chaotic thought-blobs; mine’s just got a weird recurring wavelength in it.

Anyway, enough of that. The point is, 70% of suicides in 2015 were white men (like me!), and I have a ton of other little factors increasing the odds I’d be one of those 13.26 individuals in 100,000.

So, knowing all that, an awful question arises: why am I not? Despite what Effie Trinket might have told you, the odds are not, in fact, in my favor.

There are a lot of reasons, and I’ll start with the simplest one: I was told not to. Western culture takes a rather dim view of killing oneself, and I was told fairly early that it was a wrong thing to do. The Bible’s view of suicide is less than explicit, but most of the figures who do end their own lives are singularly wicked people (like, y’know, Judas). That works to a degree; I am nothing if not an obedient eggplant.

Another, simpler reason: death (being dead) doesn’t scare me too much, but dying is a fuckin’ awful process. No matter how you go about it, I’m told. I research things neurotically before I take action, and it turns out dying has very poor reviews indeed. So, to paraphrase great old Sartre, there’s a degree to which I preserve myself out of weakness.

Those two alone don’t cover it, I don’t think. Between how horrid the world actually is (can be) and the wicked creature in my brain, my dogmatism and (giving myself some credit here) weakness aren’t of sufficient magnitude to hold the horror at bay, as it were. I’d love to slather you with a vague motivational speech about my growing optimism, but let’s be honest, optimism is a pale and fragile flower in the face of the world’s hurricanes. So what else is goin’ here?

I do have several things backing my corner, as it were. I came from a fairly stable family as they go (and thank God for that; that’s a whole other blog post in itself). My friends are all humans (which I mean as a high compliment), and in my view their strengths greatly outweigh their little foibles. Still, others have been here, and the attrition of this awful disease still got them.

The answer might surprise you, and I’m afraid it’s not as light-hearted and springy as I’d like.

The answer is spite.

As I mentioned, there are lots and lots of factors predisposing me to suicide; indeed, given the fairly safe life I live, it turns out the most likely thing to kill me… is me. That’s a bleak sort of thing to be aware of, and that knowledge used to give me all sorts of trouble when I was younger. The dread of enacting the self-fulfilling prophecy, and all that.

Nowadays, that knowledge doesn’t generally make me sad. It makes me angry. I have goals and objectives, things I’m aiming at and people I care about, and this callous little brain-thing dares suggest I jump willingly off this mortal coil? Nah, brain-thing, piss up a rope. I’m busy.

Better still, and this is the real kicker, my premature death by suicide is not just expected in the abiotic, statistical sense.

There are people waiting on me to kill myself. Not that they “want” me to, or at least they’d never admit such a heinous thing. But if it came to that, there are a few people I know whose responses would go something like this.

They’d be shocked and horrified as necessary, and pretend they didn’t know it was coming.

They’d be unhappy and aggrieved, for however long was expected of them.

And then, after a while, some crooked circuit at the back of their mind would log me as another tragic statistic, but one that validated their world-view. A wicked little part of them would be smirking and nodding. They called it, they knew, and that would be proof of their narcissistic grandeur. Their model worked on this one thing, which would mean I was wrong and they were right, about everything.

I consider myself a fairly articulate person, but I have no words for exactly how much that idea pisses me off. Oh, y’wanna be right, do ya? NOT ON MY WATCH, FUCKER.

As established, I have my many, many flaws, but I don’t think a lack of willpower is among them. In my really bad moments, when all the other things keeping me afloat fail, I just recall the image of a select group of people, then have them all give a smug, knowing little nod and woo lads. Nope, not killin’ ourselves today, because fuck you that’s why!

So I guess, in short, one major thing that keeps me going is an insane, bloody-minded determination to piss certain people off. That fits with my character, I think.

I wanna end on something approaching a positive note, so here’s two. Firstly: I’m fine! I realize this reads kind of like somebody losing their marbles completely, but I’m actually quite all right; I always sound like that, so don’t worry.

Secondly: you, dear reader, are yet another reason Peter endures! Many of you are good friends of mine, points of light in the sky, vital strands and junctions in the web supporting the cracked, damaged egg that is me. So thank you! For reading, and for being. I do appreciate it.

I’d love to know what y’all are thinking about this post. Positive, negative, brownie recipes: whatever you’re thinking, let me know in a comment, an email, or via carrier pigeon, whatever y’got. And as always, you and I make a dialog, but you, a friend and I are an alliance, so push the appropriate buttons to show a friend. Everybody have a nice evening, now. C:

Would You Rather Not Hurt?

Hi there! Long time no see, again. I find myself apologizing for that every time I make a post, so I’ve decided I’ll stop it (apologizing, not posting). Always assume, dear reader, that I’m sorry to someone about something, and I’ll stick to my usual state of scatterbrained contrition, and we’ll average out all right.

The question up there occurred to me as I was waking up; I don’t generally mind getting up, but I’m sure you can relate to this experience:

The Self: “Wake up.”

The Body: “NEIN.”

The Self: “It is time for us to all wake up and work together in harmony, that we might accomplish tasks and utilize our capabilities to the mutual good.”

The Body: “DIE WELT IST KALT UND BRUTAL, UND ICH BEGEHRE NUR DEN TOD.”

Yes, today was one of those days, and it got me thinking: when you get to feeling awful, wouldn’t it be better to just… not? Wouldn’t it be nicer if my back/neck/legs/existence was less uncomfortable? Wouldn’t I feel better if I couldn’t remember the suffering in the world (the tiny fragment of it that I’m momentarily aware of, anyway; I don’t think a human exists who can feel the whole world’s pain and survive)?

I thought about it for a while, and I came to a surprising realization: no, no I would not.

Aside: this post will not degenerate into either of the tropes “the pain makes y’feel ALIVE” or “Oh my Gwaaaad, I am so LUCKY!” Both of these things are in the unique position of being both completely true and completely useless to talk about.

Anyway, if pain both physical and spiritual ceased, I don’t think I would feel better, and here is why.

Physical pain is essential; evolution is a highly conservative process, and as odd as it may sound, there is nothing whatsoever in your body that doesn’t serve some specific purpose. Yes, that includes your appendix; ours seems to have functions in immunity and the maintenance of gut flora, and marsupials evolved theirs independently, so it’s important.

I’m not saying physical pain is a good thing. Pain sucks. It’s not like I had an epiphany or saw the face of God when I was chopping salad and decided to chop my hand too (I did say something involving God, though; sorry, God). It would indicate a very severe problem indeed with my mental state if I banged my head on a doorway and announced “Ah! A gift of understanding, from the Universe!”

But I need it. Physical pain’s an investment, to put it simply. My body maintains this preposterously expensive network of neurons so I can feel it (without instruction from my conscious self), and the pain of an injury persists long after it’s “needed;” we get the message, and then our ankle keeps hurting anyway.

I said this was an investment, and here’s the payoff: I’m 99%  percent less likely to cut myself chopping a salad, at least in that same way. After about the third session, I don’t think about keeping my fingers clear, but some reptilian part of my brain is aware that a failure to do so will hurt us. I duck reflexively when I go through a low doorway, my ankle was really just trying to tell me: “squat better (dumbass).”

To cut a long story short, it’s a good thing that knives hurt, because I don’t fancy finger salad.

“Aha, Peter!” I hear you cry. “Physical pain is a cautionary investment, but we knew that, and you didn’t explain emotional pain, you absolute cuck!”

You’re half right, so let’s think about that. A friend of yours is suffering under some emotional burden, and assuming you’re not too preoccupied with your own desperate existential struggle, you’ll automatically ask why.

Okay, stop, back up. Your friend was suffering, and you knew. You didn’t ask them if they were suffering, and you skipped right to what the cause was. That sense for the pain of others might be automatic, or even unconscious, but I don’t think it’s trivial that you can infer someone’s emotional state from tiny details that are otherwise irrelevant. With people you know very well, the signs become obvious: Person A only bites her nails at times of heightened anxiety, Person B always plays a certain song on good days.

But try this sometime, dear reader. Go to a public place, a coffee shop or a supermarket or what have you, and try to assess people at a glance, listen to overheard conversations, and so on. I think it will surprise you how appallingly easy it is to “feel” other people, even total strangers.

So, at least part of the utility of emotional pain is the establishment and maintenance of relationships with other people, people who also suffer. It sounds rather like the lyrics to an emo song to say we’re all bound together by pain, but I think it’s also true. We’re social animals, and we notice when other members of the pack are in distress; even reduced to the cold level of self-interest and threat identification, that’s still a pretty heartening message.

Picture somebody who doesn’t hurt, and doesn’t hurt along with others either. I don’t know about you, but most of the people who come to mind are either fictional supervillains or real supervillains of the very worst sort. Such people are at best nihilists, simply indifferent to the pain around them because they don’t feel it matters, and at worst they’re Carl Panzram; my advice is to stay away from them.

So, this sense is useful with regard to other people, but why do we need to feel our own problems so acutely? Physical pain is one thing, but emotional pain can be so, so much worse, and where’s the utility in all this awful torment people go through?

I think it works out like this: when someone else suffers, you ask what the cause is. This might be fairly silly if you’re the one doing the suffering; you probably know what happened.

What you can then ask yourself is why. There are two main things that can happen here: one of them is wicked bad, and the other one can be wicked good.

Bad news first: when you ask yourself why you’re suffering, you might come up with a couple of terrible answers. Bad Answer One is that everyone suffers, all the time, and any joy you experience is illusory. Bad Answer Two is that you, in particular, are suffering while others revel in the good life.

Bad Answer Three is both the best and worst of the bad lot: that you’re suffering, and it’s your fault.

Depending on your mindset, Bad Answer Three means different things. If you run high in the negative end of things like I do, you might just conclude that you’re trapped in an endless cycle of self-inflicted damage. You might infer you should just go ahead and step off this here mortal coil, because it sucks, and people cause themselves constant pain.

You might even think, because people are so blinkered and cause themselves such pain, that the best plan is to take as many people with you as possible.

But here’s the upside of Bad Answer Three, the answer a more positive person might encounter: if it’s your fault, it means you can fix it. That’s a bitter pill for sure, but it reveals a dim little glimmer of light in the bleak little tunnel of nihilism we’ve dug here.

Speaking of that tunnel, here’s that other good result of suffering I mentioned: we now have something that we distinctly want to move straight away from. This isn’t some magic cure-all realization, mind you; we’re still in the tunnel, and we’re still suffering, but we’ve at least become aware that this is, indeed, a tunnel.

Tunnels are structures, and they have endpoints. There was some part of this tunnel where we entered. We’re sitting in the darkest part, the part that smells like cigarettes and human waste and always seems to be squishy somehow. But because it hurts, we know we’re in a structure, and we’ve arrived at a split in the tunnel; one fork has a poorly-resolved, nebulous light of hope flickering at the end, and the other goes all the way down.

Not as easy a choice as you might be led to believe, but there’s an answer when it comes to that. A good answer, even, a morally right answer.

So, cutting a very long story short, I think that’s why we feel emotional pain so acutely. Physical pain tells you things about the physical world: “knives are sharp, stoves are hot, cactuses give us the needles in our nose.” Pain and injury provide simple, direct guidance for your navigation of the mundane world. Step here, not here; eat this, not that.

Emotional anguish, I think, works the same way but on a higher, much more consequential level. Burning myself on the stove is a pretty bad result, but if I let nihilism and resentment consume me the results can be horrific. Cactus spines hurt, and we steer away from the cactus; when we discover someone’s been lying to us, automatic systems kick in and get us variously disappointed, critical, and right pissed off. None of these are comfortable sensations (very few people really like to be angry), and if we’re healthy and capable we leave the situations that cause them, seeking something better.

That has a downside, obviously; pain avoidance can turn into a pathology all on its own. Anybody who’s a little too into alcohol or opioids can tell you that. Similarly, the bereavement you feel at a funeral might make you want to avoid forming any relationships at all, for fear of loss, and that’s clearly no good. But that’s a topic for another time. The point here is that the pain you feel, physical and emotional both, has a purpose: it wakes you up, tells you something’s wrong, and then shows you, maybe, in about 240-pixel resolution, what might be better.

To put it in a vignette, the process goes (or generally ought to go) like this:

“Ow! Shit! What’s happened? I have identified what happened. That’s no good, doesn’t work for me, bub. We’re goin’ over here to try somethin’ else.”

I think I’m off topic and starting to sound a little schizophrenic, so I’m gonna cut it there for today. I hope you can see what I’m getting at, though; it’s not for nothing that we suffer, and pain’s not just a trivial, fleeting trick of brain chemistry like some of the more nihilist parts of society might tell you. It exists, really, and it’s for something.

This may sound strange, but I don’t hope you encounter zero suffering; I hope you find suffering that’s minor, and that ends up pointing you in the right direction.

These are all my thoughts, dear reader, and I’d love to hear any and all of your thoughts about them. Comments are always welcome, private messages are always encouraged and both are always appreciated. Enjoy the rest of your day, night, wherever you find yourself in the flow of time. C:

TL;DR Pain can (should) lead to progress. Maybe not directly, one-to-one, right away, but ultimately it should be a catalyst for change.

In the Name of Cake (The Great Christian Baker Debacle)

Hey, everybody! Even-longer-than-usual time no see. I blame… I dunno, the NRA; that seems like a safe bet in recent times.

As the title suggests, I want to talk a little bit about this Supreme Court decision on 4 June of this year, because I think it deals (and intentionally does not deal) with some crucially important issues, and I’ve seen an amount of misunderstanding about it that is equal parts appalling and impressive. I should follow that inordinately pretentious statement with a disclaimer that I’m a) not a lawyer b) not a Constitutional lawyer and c) kind of an idiot in general, so fair warning, this post, as all my posts, are opinionated and unobjective hot garbage of the highest order.

With that said, I want to hear your more salient opinions on the subject, dear reader; leave me a comment with what you think, or message me privately, whatever. The idea here is a dialogue. C:

Now, for those with absolutely no clue what I’m talking about, on 4 June the Supreme Court finally ruled on a case argued back in December of 2017, known to me and no one else as the Colossal Cake Kerfuffle of 2017. The scene: in 2012, a gay couple from Colorado, married in Massachusetts (same-sex marriage had yet to be legalized in Colorado until two years later), returns home to celebrate their union and goes to Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood in search of a tasty baked confection.

What a lovely story! Sweet, like cake.

Jack Phillips, the shop’s owner, refuses to bake the couple a custom cake on two grounds.

Huh. Not so sweet. But remember that, because it’s important: he refuses to bake them a cake.

Now, the grounds Phillips cited: Masterpiece doesn’t bake cakes for same-sex weddings because he’s a Christian (more on that in a second), and Colorado doesn’t (didn’t, at the time) recognize same-sex unions.

There’s a refined point here that I don’t think gets covered enough: Phillips refused to bake them a custom cake, while representing that they were free to purchase any other baked goods from the store. This may seem like a weird technicality, but I can see a sort of logic to it; if I had a client (ha!) who wanted me to write a post extolling the virtues of communism (or fascism, or whatever) I would refuse categorically, on the classic and well-articulated grounds of “shit’s one-sided, yo.” I’m not going to ban the person from my blog outright, but I wouldn’t take creative action on behalf of an ideology with which I disagree.

I want to take a sidebar out here and declare that I think Phillips is wrong. Theologically, Scripturally, Biblically speaking, he just isn’t correct on this particular point. I also think I have the right to tell him so, but furthermore that he has, in a weird turn of grammar, a basic and unalienable right to be wrong.

The couple in question seemed to think he was wrong too, so much so that they lodged a complaint with their local civil rights commission. This case is moving into the heady and the surreal, so here’s a grounding thought: cake is a protected human right by this point, isn’t it? And if it isn’t, why not? Cake for all, God dammit.

The rights commission, armed with these allegations and a thorough knowledge of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law, goes “daaaaaaaamn” and orders Phillips to "change its company policies, provide 'comprehensive staff training' regarding public accommodations discrimination, and provide quarterly reports for the next two years regarding steps it has taken to come into compliance and whether it has turned away any prospective customers." (Quoted from the ACLU site).

Because I’m still blathering on about the backstory, you may safely conclude that Phillips did not comply with the state’s orders. He removed his business from the wedding cake market altogether and kept appealing the case, with the gathering crap-storm of media attention these things usually gather, until it wound up dropped at the doorstep of the United States Supreme Court.

Thank God, Peter’s arrived at the point!

The Supreme Court ruling demanded that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission reverse the decision it had made. Now, depending on where you sit on the spasming bronco of American politics, you may be thinking anything from “Yeehaw, the Supreme Court doesn’t like the gays!” to “I thought we’d already had the Supreme Court rule the opposite way” to just simple, unadulterated “WAT.” I can’t say as I blame you, in any case; most of the news articles I’ve read on the subject have been… misleading, let’s say for the sake of diplomacy.

So what did the Supreme Court actually say, or more importantly what did it not say?

What it didn’t say is quite a laundry list, but here are some claims I’ve seen made and I want to refute.

I’ve seen it said that they were ruling in favor of Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop, which is not… exactly correct. The Supreme Court examines the Constitutionality of the laws and rulings passed by lower courts; when a case comes before the Supreme Court it’s no longer a simple civil matter of “person A has placed their fence too far into person B’s property and person B is Quite Put Out.” Supreme Court decisions run more on the scale of “person A’s fence represented a manifest threat to person B’s rights under the Constitution, and so all fences, forever and in perpetuity, must not be placed thusly, or the entire towering legal edifice of the United States of America will be Quite Put Out.”

And that may be why the Supreme Court’s ruling was so mercifully, irritatingly narrow. I’ve seen it said that this ruling was an attack on gay marriage, which I think constitutes either a horrendous misunderstanding or an intentional representation of the case. Indeed, the ruling specifically, deliberately doesn’t address that topic at all; I encourage you to read the Court’s full opinions, because they’re all interesting, but they’re very careful to avoid discussing the intersection of free speech, free exercise and anti-discrimination law entirely.

This is kind of the crux of the issue for me, and the case title says it all: Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

Wait, I thought this was a case about a baker refusing service to a gay couple.

Well, it was, and I think that’s why there’s been so much confusion on this topic of late. Phillips’ decision was the catalyst, let’s say, that set off some tremendous, bubbling and appallingly smelly reactions in the journalistic and legal spheres, but it wasn’t the final issue on which the Supreme Court ruled.

The final contest was between Phillips, in his guise as the business Masterpiece Cakeshop, against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The Civil Rights Commission was rather harshly smacked down, but the Court’s decision wasn’t an attack on civil rights, or an endorsement of any particular religious denomination, or any of the myriad things I’ve heard people claim.

The Court’s decision was that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, when presented with the opportunity to rule on the issue between Mr. Phillips and the couple, absolutely bungled it.

From that sentence you might infer that I mean “bungled” as in the Civil Rights Commission lost the paperwork, their dog ate the paperwork, or they themselves ate the paperwork. I do not. I mean “bungled” in the sense that the Supreme Court found the Commission’s handling of the case evinced overt hostility to Phillips’ religious beliefs, namely by comparing them to defenses of American slavery and the Holocaust.

Putting it less diplomatically, the commissioner in question went so far as to claim that Phillips, bowing out of a making a cake on religious grounds (admittedly questionable grounds at that, but certainly within his right to free exercise), was on an equal moral footing with the Fire-Eaters of the Antebellum South and the degenerates who frequent places like The Daily Stormer.

So that, in short, is the much-under-reported reason the Supreme Court ruled the way they did. It wasn’t an espousal of anti-gay hatred (although God knows there’s enough of that going around from other sources), and it wasn’t a tacit or explicit endorsement of Phillips’ religious views; rather, it was a declaration of Phillips’ right to a fair trial, which the Commission signally failed to provide, unburdened by institutional hostility to his beliefs. On a subtler level, I think the ruling was an acknowledgment of Phillips’ right to even have such beliefs in the first place.

Put another way, the Supreme Court in this case wasn’t agreeing or disagreeing with either Phillips the Commission at all; they ruled instead that the Commission, by virtue of its hostility toward religion in general and most especially Phillips’ religion, had (as they say in the French) fucked it all up.

But maybe I’m wrong; it certainly wouldn’t be the first time, and I’m equally as certain it won’t be the last. This is a complicated, sticky topic, and I’d love to know your thoughts, dear reader, on any aspect of it. Some things to consider: is it relevant in your view that the baker in question was Christian, specifically? If so, why or why not, and would the picture be different if it were, say, a Muslim or Jewish baker? On that note, do you see this as strictly an issue of religious freedom vs. the law, or is there more at play here?

I see this as an issue of a) people resorting to the big blunt hammer of the state as a solution in a situation that might merit a more sociable scalpel and b) the people who compose said institution failing to carry out their role as neutral adjudicators, in a spectacular and corrupt fashion. I may be wrong about that; I have a natural distrust of institutions in general, and perhaps that’s skewing my thinking.

In any case, let me know what you think about this topic in a comment or a message at your leisure; it’s an absolute mess, this case, and I’d love to hear your opinion about any angle or aspect of it. Furthermore, if there are topics you’d like to see me write about (God forbid), let me know that as well; I’m quite thoroughly mad, but my hope is that my madness might be edifying, educational or even merely interesting to someone.

Thank you for your time and attention, and have a lovely rest of your Sunday (or whatever day it is, when you read this). Anything you’re thinking, let me think about it too. C:

Betrayal

TL;DR Don't betray people who put their trust in you, because that's really, really, really bad.

Well HELLO there, everybody! It's been quite a long time again, and yet again I must apologize. There are a lot of reasons I've been away, one of which is that I'm lazy and disorganized, another of which is that I was doing other things, and yet another of which is that I moved to Oregon in the time between this post and the last one. For those curious about my opinion of this place, I can tell you definitively that the average temperature here is lower than in the parts of California in which I lived, and I think that's a pretty good thing.

Now, the title of the post probably concerns you a little, and I want to clarify that it shouldn't, necessarily. The events I'm discussing have happened varying numbers of years ago, and clearly I'm still here and as intact as I've ever been, so the events aren't necessarily the biggest deal. What they are, however, is interesting, and the way I've thought and felt about them is more so, in my estimation. This is going to be pretty heavily psychological, so fair warning for those who don't care for insights into someone else's psyche (which I don't mean to sound so negative; it's pretty scary to get to know someone, really).

One interesting aside I thought I'd mention is the internal response I have when I hear or read the post's title. When someone says "grief," I know what they mean, "suffering" I understand in a general empathic way, and more positive things like "joy" and "drive" I have the same sort of conceptual understanding of. I know what these things are, clearly, and I've felt them all at various points in life. If you asked me, I could take a minute and make a list of experiences associated with them.

Not so betrayal. With betrayal I don't even have to take the time; immediately I have a perfectly clear mental image of situations involving betrayal, and not just one, but all of them. When I say "perfectly clear" I'm not being figurative, either; my full set of circumstances at the time is engraved in my memory. In the case of a truly monstrous betrayal within my family, I can tell you what the weather outside was like when I found out, what was on the sandwich I went and got afterwards, and what shirt I was wearing (for God's sake).

In my presumptuous moments, I think to myself that everyone has such an experience of clarity when betrayal is brought up, but that's clearly overly general, so I wanted to ask you, dear reader. When I say "betrayal," what goes through your mind? Are you put in mind of a specific person/event/situation in the way I am, or do you have a more general understanding of it?

Well, okay, now the obvious question: why? These aren't pleasant memories, in the case of the betrayals themselves, and in the case of the peripheral details I mentioned they're simply totally useless to me. There's no utility to the knowledge that the sandwich had the wrong God damn sort of lettuce on it; indeed, I think that memory space might be better used for the current location of one's keys, or something like that, and yet here I am with the full set of useless details.

Putting it simply, I think it's because betrayal is the single greatest existential threat your mind can experience. I specify "your mind" deliberately; clearly someone throwing an ICBM at your home has more dire immediate consequences. Consider, though, mentally: is it worse for a soldier to shoot and kill an enemy combatant or a member of his/her own regiment? Both are acts of equal violence, but in my mind at least the latter carries with it a more grievous moral element. Again, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that little scenario, because it's more complicated than I make it out to sound, so let me know in a message or a comment if you'd like.

So, in the purely mental realm, given situations of equal scale, I think betrayal is the single worst thing. If I'm out for a walk somebody hits me with a bat, that's clearly going to ruin my morning and maybe my day, but if they're a teammate of mine and have explicitly promised not to do so it might ruin my year. The death of a family friend of ours wrecked me totally for several months, but a betrayal within my family corrupted every element of my perception and hung the proverbial black cloud over me for a much greater period of time. It's still not gone, even; in my weaker moments I'm near-Stalin levels of paranoid.

So, returning to the question, why? It's not an intentional decision on my part to dwell on these unpleasant situations (given the option, I don't think most people would actively increase the misery in their lives, or at least they wouldn't admit it), yet here I am.

I'd like to hear what you think on this, but my opinion is that it has to do with frames of reference. In the case of a bereavement, the present is pretty miserable, and that makes the future seem bleak as well; as I've observed it, most people's grieving process involves a period where they can't find the motivation to do much of anything. The way we deal with it, generally, is by focusing on things we've already experienced; in the situation I mentioned earlier, my family friend's death was premature, awful and senseless, but it didn't change the extant fact of all the fun trips I'd taken to their house, the hours I'd spent playing with their dog (a GOOD DOG), or how the sunset on the lake near their house looked.

To put it in a platitude, I didn't know where I was, and the situation skewed my mindset to make it unclear where I would go from there. I did, however, know where I'd been, and I dealt with the situation by concluding that where I'd previously been was pretty good.

Betrayal's not like that in my view, and I think that's where it gets its greater psychological impact from, the reason we remember it so clearly. Losing a limb is traumatic enough, but I imagine it would be worse if one of your own limbs tore itself off, tried to kill you, then informed you the entire process was your own fault for being weak and complacent enough to trust it.

I think that's because betrayal doesn't just ruin the present and future the same way other horrible events do. It does, of course; after a betrayal like the one in my family, the present is clearly shot to shit, and moving into the future has a great deal of nerve-wracking uncertainty (well, if they lied, why wouldn't everyone else be lying?). But betrayal, in my experience, is worse because it fucks with your past.

When you've known someone a long time and integrated them into your life, they're built into the frame of reference with which you understand just about everything. This frame tells you where you are in the world, in time, and so on; the culture in which you live does that at some high and abstract level, and really the people with whom you interact do so at a more personal, instrumental scale. When you make a decision, most people don't just blindly fumble into it; you review your memory for relevant information and experience, and when you ask a trusted friend for advice, you're implicitly asking for their present thoughts conditioned on past experience. That's wordy, so here's this: becoming lost in a new place is predicated on having known where you were at some point.

Not so betrayal. When someone betrays the trust you've put in them, it's only an attack on you in the most superficial sense; yes, clearly, they doubled back on their word, they've lied to you for years, they're working actively against your best interest, and they're disgracing you to mutual friends, and that's bad enough. But what that represents, more deeply, is an attack on your entire existence and the frame of reference you use to understand the world. Under attack, you might ordinarily fall back on the positive memories, focus on the good stuff and survive the present hardship that way.

When someone betrays you, you can't. The black stain of treachery taints everything you know and understand about the world by association. A family especially is a foundational frame of reference, and the positive memories of my childhood that might be useful in coping with adversity are, in a sense, predicated on a potentially endless series of lies. I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that at the moment of revelation, I had reason to retroactively question everything that happened in the previous twenty-one years of my life.

I'm a cold, hard bastard, but there's not a person alive who that wouldn't mess with. Say what you like about the rest of Christian doctrine, but I don't think it's accidental or insignificant that Satan, prince of darkness, lord of hell, archenemy of humankind, and general director of all the bad shit in the universe, is in his position by virtue of a betrayal driven by narcissism. The Bible clarifies that murder, theft, and all that are repugnant and not to be done, but the fundamental struggle story in the Bible is order and loyalty against the agents of chaos and betrayal. Cain is the first murderer, and he's a pretty bad guy in the Bible's narrative view, but he as a mortal pales in comparison to Judas Iscariot, to say nothing of Judas's inspiration, the Big Bad himself.

Also, notice that Satan took a third of the angels with him when he fell; one person's betrayal is bad enough, but then that person starts turning your friends against you. And that, I think, is why betrayal is the ultimate social poison; like any other tragedy it wrecks the present and renders the future bleak and uncertain, and it retroactively corrupts your past as well. As concerns the betrayer, not only have you lost that one element of the frame of reference that lets you interact with the world, but that one part actively conspires to strip other elements off the frame and turn them against you in a spreading cascade. To betray someone is to reveal the very worst part of any person, the hungry and amoral monster that sits in everyone's head but most of us choose to repress and ignore. When someone turns on you and stabs you in the back, it gives you a direct insight into what Jung called the shadow, and I think that's why it's so profoundly hurtful and also so memorable.

Not good, I think is the appropriate label for it.

Anyway, this was just something I've been thinking about lately, so I wanted to write it out and think about it some more, clearly. I'm gonna cut the post off there before I get any more excessively wordy and off-topic than I already am, and I'll end with a question to all of you, dear readers mine. Do you agree with this interpretation of betrayal, or am I totally off-base here? Do you remember betrayal rearing its ugly head in your life, and if so, how did you deal with it? On those or any related topics, really, I'd be thrilled to hear your thoughts, in a public comment if you'd care to jump into the dialogue, or in a private message/email if you'd rather talk to just me.

Okay, as always, thank you for reading! And have a lovely rest of your day, night, and life as applicable C: