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: