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Perceived Humiliation Followed by Revenge
Bob Wallace
September 2,
2010
When I was in
college, for a year-and-a-half I lived in a studio apartment attached to an old
two-story house, in which lived 11 or 12 girls. I got to know them quite well.
Some stayed
there the entire time but some left and others arrived, so altogether I got to
know maybe 15 girls. It was an eye-opening experience.
One night I
was in the room of one of them, listening to her records (this was before CDs,
obviously). She was 21 years old, very attractive, very curvaceous.
For some
unknown reason she began to tell me about when she was 12 years old. She had
been ostracized in the seventh grade, she told me. She showed me a picture.
She didn’t
look bad, just a gawky 12-year-old with glasses. A little pudgy. The word
“nerdy” occurred to me. All these things together were enough for her to be
ostracized.
That summer,
within three months, she blossomed. The baby fat melted, she got contacts, she
got taller, she filled out. It was the proverbial case of the ugly duckling
turning into a swan.
When she went
back to school in the eighth grade, all of the kids who had ostracized her now
wanted to be her friends. She ignored every one of them. She told me from that
time forward she was never attracted to “what most women consider good-looking
men” — the kind who had ostracized her.
I remembered
that story because it made such a vivid impression on me. Years later, when I
began to think about it, I realized what had happened to her. It was a case of
humiliation followed by revenge.
I never asked her, but I wouldn’t doubt that if some really good-looking guy
asked her out she turned him down. Neither would I doubt that she enjoyed it.
I tried to
put myself in her place. How would I feel? Rejected? Offended? Hurt feelings
(whatever that means)? Anger, resentment? Self-pity? Perhaps. Humiliated? The
desire for revenge? In some form, yes.
Humiliation
followed by revenge is the story of Cain and Abel, except in that case it led to
murder. In this girl’s case, being much milder than that of those two
unfortunate brothers, it took the form of rejecting or completely ignoring the
kind of guys who had humiliated her when she was 12 years old. She was doing to
them what they did to her.
What happened
to her for those several months in the seventh grade affected her for the rest
of her life. You could use the word “trauma,” although I think it’s a bit
strong. But there is an old saying, “Trauma demands repetition,” which is done
in order to relive the trauma and make it turn out right. It might be why some
people who have been (or think they have been) humiliated seek revenge over and
over.
I mentioned
this girl was nerdy at 12 but very good-looking at 13. That reminded me of the
well-known movie, The Revenge of the Nerds.
And what was it about? Humiliation followed by revenge (for that matter, the
same goes for Animal House). That
formula is an archetype that everyone, the world over, understands. You could
probably show both those movies without any sound, and people would
still understand it.
I was also
reminded of Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, about a girl who gets revenge on her high school — and the
entire town — by destroying both.
Then of
course there is the classic revenge novel, one that has influenced so many
writers — The Count of Monte Cristo,
which, in my copy, is over 1300 pages devoted to vengeance.
I don’t see
much difference, if any, between humiliation and shame — in both cases the
sufferers perceive themselves as diminished. In the story of the Garden of Eden,
Adam and Eve (who, ominously, are Cain and Abel’s parents), are ashamed when
they realize they are naked. And Cain is shamed and humiliated when God rejects
his sacrifice and accepts Abel’s.
Shame,
humiliation…pretty much the same thing, then. They are apparently our earliest
unpleasant feelings, and the cause of so much trouble in the world. In the story
of Cain and Abel, those feelings are what bring murder into the world.
The
psychiatrist
James Gilligan,
who studied murderers his entire career, one day realized what he was hearing
from them, over and over, was the story of Cain and Abel. “I killed him because
he dissed me,” he heard. It’s become a shorthand — “dissed.” And everyone knows
what that word means: he disrespected and shamed me, so I got revenge by
brutally battering or killing him.
Can there be
a case of revenge that is not based on humiliation and being shamed? If revenge
is not based on humiliation, then what else can it be based upon? I can’t think
of any other reason.
“Humiliation followed by revenge” doesn’t
have to be based on real humiliation. That is the problem. It can be based on
perceived humiliations, perceived slights,
even if they are non-existent. I suppose that’s the definition of paranoia:
seeing attacks that are not there.
Perceiving
humiliations that are not there is an excruciating problem in the United States,
one that I believe is going to get worse, and could be fatal to this country,
especially when dealing with ethnic groups.
How can an
entire ethnic group be exploited and therefore humiliated? Individuals, yes, but
entire groups? Every member, including ones who didn’t move to the United States
until they were adults? The idea is preposterous.
Yet the
prevailing multicultural paradigm today implies that people have an identity
mainly as members of their ethnic groups, and not as individuals. Ethnic group
status has become a legally recognized category. This means the
institutionalization of the non-existent: group innocence and group guilt.
When people
are legally judged as groups, I see no way around the belief in group guilt and
group innocence. Because of human nature, if one group believes it has been
humiliated, it is always going to blame that humiliation on another group. It
will see itself as innocent and the other group as guilty.
The media as
well as classes in many colleges — indeed in some high schools — have for some
years been portraying White people (and especially White men)
as a group as the cause of all the
trouble in the world, which means that people are taught that Whites have been
humiliating everyone else in the world who is not White. The result of all of
this will be attempts at revenge from the resentful and paranoid who have been brainwashed into
thinking White people are the cause of all their problems.
People’s
first defense — projection — is to blame their problems on someone else. That’s
one of the lessons of the story of the Garden of Eden: “The woman made me do
it…the serpent made me do it.” Who has not heard from every small child, “You
made me do it?” It’s your fault, not
mine.
Coupled with
the propaganda that non-White ethnic groups have been shamed and humiliated by
White people (i.e., the West) is the attempt to disarm them and make them
self-destruct by making them feel shame and guilt.
Guilt can
lead to attempts at self-destruction. It may not be physical self-destruction,
the way Arthur Dimmesdale branded himself in “The Scarlet Letter,” but it
certainly can be attempts at psychological self-destruction.
Guilt is, in
fact, self-hatred. If people are propagandized into believing they are the worst
ethnic group in the world, and responsible for nearly every problem that exists,
their guilt will make them attempt to debase and destroy themselves.
What we’ve
got today are resentful ethnic groups, who believe they have been exploited and
humiliated, and who have no guilt at all toward those they blame their problems
on. The group that is taught to be guilty, if they internalize that guilt, will
hate themselves and
participate in their own destruction
(see also
here). It is a nifty
little scheme.
White people
are supposed to feel guilty and ashamed of themselves for their supposed sins
against the world — as if every ethnic tribe hasn’t done horrible things to
other tribes.
The Aztecs
ripped the hearts out of hundreds of thousands of people who belonged to the
tribes they conquered. American Indians used to bash out the brains of babies of
other tribes on rocks. The
Bolshevists of Russia killed 20 million
Russian Christians, with a very large role played by Jews motivated by revenge
against the old order. The Communists in China may have killed up to 50 million
Chinese. How much worse can it get than those atrocities?
Once one
group believes it has been humiliated and exploited, it is going to blame it on
another group, then try to disarm that group by attacking it and trying to make
the members feel shame and guilt. It’s happening today — witness insults about
how Americans are “racists” if we don’t allow the U.S. to be inundated with
illegal immigrants, or “prejudiced” if we don’t permit a mosque to be built near
the WTC site.
What the
aforementioned means is that it is sheer insanity to believe the United States
can be a successful multicultural nation. Ethnic groups that believe they have
been humiliated and abused are going to blame their problems on the White tribe
— specifically White men — then try to disarm and then destroy them by trying to
make them feel humiliation and guilt.
Leftism, at
least extreme leftism, is predicated on the belief there is no human nature. Yet
even leftists have to admit the existence of envy, since that is the one feeling
leftism is dedicated to eradicating. So even leftists have to accept the
irreducible minimum that human nature, if nothing else, is envious.
What goes
along with the feeling of envying others? Feelings of humiliation. So we’re back
to the desire for revenge, which painfully illustrates the fact that leftists
don’t merely misunderstand human nature; they don’t understand it at all. That
is one of the reasons they support multiculturalism. They are clueless as to
where it will lead.
I believe
“perceived humiliation followed by revenge” is a law of human nature, just as
“You’re the cause of my problems” and “People who think they are guilty try to
hurt themselves” are laws. I’d like to see them taught in the schools, but
that’s not going to happen, not with public schools. I have no idea why they’re
not taught in church, unless the churches are not doing their job. Which they’re
not.
It’s up to
individuals to teach themselves (autodidacts are the best-educated) and to teach
their children, to arm them against the attacks they are going to subjected as
soon as they start public school —
if you let them attend public school. (Personally, I consider public schools to
be traumatizing children, not educating them.) And children are certainly going
to be inundated with these attacks from the media.
I now know
that when members of different ethnic groups attack White people not as
individuals but as a group, these attacks are based on envy and fantasies about
their entire ethnic group being shamed and humiliated, and are not attempts at
fairness and justice, but instead attempts at revenge and therefore attempts at
destruction.
Nietzsche
well understood the ressentiment, or “life-envy” of those who feel
themselves to be oppressed by others. He considered it to be at the root their
desires to bring down their supposed oppressors.
These
attempts to instill guilt and shame can only be done through propaganda —
schools, commercials. TV, movies, magazines, and newspapers. It’s best to start
when they’re kids. Get ‘em when they’re little and can be easily molded!
For me, and
for others I know, it’s got to the point I’m very careful where I spend my
money. Why should I fund my enemies?
As a friend
of mine wrote me, “It's getting to the point that I'm
starting to feel the ol' territorial defense mechanism kick in. It's getting
harder and harder not to notice that I (and others like me) are no longer
included in most advertisements, that our only role in most popular
entertainment is that of a buffoon or the ‘weak member that constantly needs
getting rescued or the ‘evil criminal’ and that anything we do will have the
credit taken by others or be ignored. It's hard not to notice that ads now
advertise jobs for ‘women and minorities’ only, and that loans/grants are given
to, yes, ‘women and minority based...whatever’ and nothing else.”
People
consumed with guilt don’t murder others — they murder themselves. Those who have
convinced themselves they are oppressed and humiliated — they are the dangerous
ones and the potential murderers. They attack, without guilt, and attempt to
destroy, the people who have disarmed themselves through their false beliefs in
their own shame and guilt.
What’s that old saying? “Forewarned is forearmed”? It’s true.
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