what you’re capable of
CN: spoilers for the movie The Drama; spoilers for an old Twilight Zone episode; general dark stuff; 18+
On my sickbed, where I have lazily done virtually no reading at all, I recently listened to an analysis of the newish movie The Drama, which I have not yet seen. I’m not sure that what follows is a spoiler, so I will just plow ahead as if it isn’t.
A woman admits to having a close call, as a child, with her own dark tetrad tendencies: sadism, punitiveness, maybe entitlement, definitely antisocial behavior. It’s like Kristi Noem’s horrifying autobiographical admission about shooting a puppy, but inverted: “Understanding the consequences, and the potential for greater tragedy, rewired my brain for empathy, made it my mission in life to alleviate suffering” (as opposed to Noem’s “I can do what needs to be done, inflicting pain, injury, death if required,” a darker, emotionally numb take on the same revelation).
The fictional character’s brave admission—an overshare, overexposure, an attempt at emotional connection—hits its dinner-party audience wrong, or maybe there is already a commitment to misunderstanding her point. Whatever the case, hers is definitely a unique, not-universal experience, and the group capitalizes upon this information in order to take her down, to annihilate her character.
I have a similar specific turning point in my childhood, after which, the thought of causing others injury induced nausea. It rendered me unable to defend myself in childhood settings, and also further down the road, I guess. The recommended process for healing harm OCD often hinges on answering every worrisome thought with “but I know I’d never do that”; a major stumbling block to internalizing that message is “I already know what I’m capable of, and I’m terrified because I don’t know what else.”
Several months ago I’d been dwelling on the way some people have contempt for others’ acts of no-strings altruism, can’t accept concern for others’ wellbeing as ‘real’ because they themselves need undying fealty from every rescue stray, need a captive audience for every minor heroic act, and I was ruminating on where the internal, developmental difference was. It came as a lightning bolt to my brain, an errant neuron firing, an electrical shock to my system, a divine interruption: That childhood moment, the source of so much shame, was what saved my life. For a while, maybe, I’d been at the crossroads of which type of reactive traumatized weirdo I’d grow up to be—how I’d be wired to respond to feelings of terror or desperation—but then the trolley had suddenly jumped tracks. Thank God, because not every child has a specific instant where they go from lost to found. Does everyone need such a lost-innocence garden-of-good-and-evil moment? I hope not, but some of us might.
Recently I anonymously answered a comment on social media asking for an explanation of a Twilight Zone episode in which a man raises himself from the dead, making everyone around him paranoid. I’d never seen the episode myself, but I’d just watched the exact same synopsis video the commenter had. So I answered, explaining it: In his old life the man was a pushover, easily exhausted. Now he is renewed, but just the fact that he’s apparently changed is what frightens the people in his community.
In its final scene, the man tells a clamoring mob that, if they persist in threatening, accusing, and othering his family unit, he can burn down their livelihoods with mind bullets. He’s fine with them thinking he’s maybe not so nice1. They will get only one no from him, without any further negotiations. The mob warily acquiesces, leaving him in peace. Now the man is benevolently reassuring his fiancee that, really, he’d never do such thing as burn down someone else’s field of crops—but then he telekinetically lights a match without striking it, like baby Drew Barrymore, to the surprise and extremely muted horror of his fiancee. Then they walk together into their warm little cottage, the viewer now fully aware of the man’s capacity for destruction, and also, his restraint.
“But is he possessed or not,” the commenter still wanted to know.
“Self-possessed,” I answered. People were afraid because he’d risen from the dead, becoming efficacious2, ungovernable. Some communities, some leaders, might want to call that a demonic influence. But really “he returned healed,” I clarified, “like Lazarus rising and emerging from his tomb.” You’re supposed to feel apprehensive about who this seeming stranger is, but the fact that he stands up to a full mob kind of hints at where your allegiances are supposed to go.
Apart from its post-McCarthyism message about Jungian self-integration and healthier ideals of masculinity, the episode hints at a great source of potential personal power: knowing exactly what you’re capable of3, and choosing over and over again to not do it, yet, if ever.
I guess that’s what this whole blog has been about: People, and life itself, conditioning you to believe you’re a danger to yourself and others, unsafe to be around, must be reined in and locked up tight, until you’ve finally disarmed and disrobed yourself completely, put yourself in jail, laid down and died, easy pickins. Your bullies try to kick you into getting back up, “drop the martyr act, I know you have it in you,” try to curb-stomp the life back into you, to get your bleeding, bedraggled ass back in the game. God, isn’t that just the toughest love.
And I go back and forth, because being unmasked and unarmed is disarming to others—or at least, it levels the playing field for other people who are unmasked and unguarded, vulnerable—but there are bad actors, or rather, people with a different set of scales and measurements inside them, who look to weaponize your authenticity or vulnerability against you. They want a fresh villain to blame and kill; “Give us the Beast,” Gaston’s mob’s DARVO4. These are playwrights and stage directors of a sort, projecting their shame, their own desperation, by needling other people into reenacting what they themselves feel, attempting to drive their own perceived failings, weaknesses, and woundings into an effigy (your body) that they can then annihilate in a sort of performance: Shakespearean tragedy; phantasmagoric shadow theater; Greek theater, that simulacrum of gladiatorial combat.
The exorcism fails, obviously. Woundings don’t hop places; rather, they spread virally, through perpetrators and victims and witnesses.
That’s when a stage play stops being enough, I guess, and your governing authority starts screaming for public ritual, for literal blood.
My best friend, her daughter, her father, and I recently visited the local airfield, waiting in the waiting area to watch a particular plane take off. After a time my friend said to me, a little over-loud, “I can’t wait until millennials aren’t being scapegoated for everything anymore.”
I followed her gaze; two men were talking to a third man at a counter. The youngest man was probably the upper end of Gen X. “Is that what they’re talking about?” I whispered. My friend nodded, wide-eyed.
“Millennials are 45 now,” I answered her over-loud, a little stage performance of our indignation.
We continued talking, normally now, while her daughter climbed around the couch. Her dad was relaxing in a distant chair, possibly already asleep. The three men were getting louder and louder; I heard one say “they need humility!” Although the men were all the way across the room, about 90 feet away, they’d become so loud that I could no longer hear my friend. I got up out of my chair, which was like four feet away from her, and sat down again right next to her on the couch.
“Sorry,” I said in a low voice, tipping my head closer to hers, “I literally could not hear you anymore.”
Other people were sitting in the same windowed lobby by then, all the newcomers women. It was only when a particular man of indeterminate age entered the room that the other three men piped down.
I hid my surprise and distress I hope, but I’d actually never seen someone open-carrying a firearm in real life before. The man’s handgun was in a nylon Nokia-type holster, the grip and the barrel both exposed. He was right-handed. He had thick gym muscles that appeared to’ve been augmented by PEDs and beer. He was wearing sunglasses, a heavy silver chain, jeans, a black graphic T-shirt that read DON’T LET YOUR TONGUE GET YOUR TEETH KNOCKED OUT. His messaging was loud and clear; he was carrying incredibly openly. His girlfriend, youthful but age-appropriate at 48ish, sat down next to him, not quite physically draping herself onto her king but it was a little bit like that.
After awhile I gestured toward a picnic area and asked if anyone wanted to stand outside in the sunshine on the lawn with me, and we left. Before we walked to our cars to leave, though, I remarked to my friend, in a low hiss, that the three men only hushed themselves when a potential gunman was around. “They were so disrespectful,” I said.
“They couldn’t tell what age we are,” my friend said hopefully.
“But they could sure tell we’re millennials,” I said, acrid. If ‘millennial’ is shorthand for ‘anyone younger than I am’, we were it. Perhaps the men simply hadn’t wanted unattended women and children complicating their airspace. More likely they’d enjoyed shit-stirring, knowing they had a captive audience. Here’s that attention you ordered.
“It was so disrespectful,” I continued, “and they only shut up when that guy walked in with a gun and a shirt that said ‘shut up’. It was so demoralizing. They were demonstrating that’s what they respect.” A literal strongman, for whom ‘attention’ is a one-way street.↩
Something I am working on right now is reclaiming and restoring what are considered traditionally ‘masculine’ traits—in the extreme, what would be termed dark tetrad traits. These are socialized or punished out of people, typically but not always AFAB people, from a profoundly young age, leaving us susceptible to predation, unarmed, ill-equipped to protect ourselves. Yet these same traits are revered and rewarded when seen in strongmen and billionaires. In small, medicinal doses, these traits—self-centeredness, ambition, visibility or voice, the capacity to tolerate ‘reasonable’ expressions or declarations of pain or discomfort in others, to sit with others’ discomfort and hold space for it without rushing to ameliorate it, a willingness to receive resources, not just give them away, a willingness to take up any amount of physical space—are basic acts of self-preservation. This isn’t about “leaning in”; this is about staying upright and breathing. These traits are important to cultivate especially if you’ve been compulsively abandoning yourself in favor of some ideal of a highest collective good, because in a real fuckass situation your perfectly fixable vulnerabilities might get you left behind, and anyway, much more vulnerable people are going to be your escort mission, so you’re needed in that way. Your tenderness is imperative, but we also need you alive.↩
A friend messaged, startled by a recent interaction in her own life. Someone had told her she was a witch. “In a good way.” That she had ‘powers’ she did not know about. Unnervingly, though, this was the second time it had happened; a mutual friend had told her the same, apparently. “What does it mean,” she concluded.
I didn’t hesitate: “It probably means you have a strong biofield and that you should use your thoughts wisely,” I answered. We should all appreciate and be wary of our own powers of influence, such as they are.
“What is a biofield,” this friend obviously asked.
“So,” I replied, “humans have mirror neurons, but there’s something else electrical going on, like radio receivers, amplification, feedback loops.” This is skirting the woo-woo fringe because outside of, like, military research on sonic weaponry or whatever, we don’t fully understand vibrations, resonance, frequencies, oscillations, unless we’re talking about actual ham radio, actual bandwidth, actual sound, the way light refracts through a prism. No worries, though, because I still had more gas: “Entrainment is when brainwaves sync up—originally studied in the context of cults, churches, and praise and worship bands. It’s how you get a literal ‘hive mind’; I just watched Sam Vaknin’s podcast about this.” Whatever your own opinion on Professor Vaknin, his explanation is good.
In it, Vaknin talks about how entrainment works: rhythmically. Beautifully. There’s a beautiful musicality to it, to language. Certain charismatic cult-leader types come by it naturally, can lead whole groups, just like the leader of a church’s worship band. It’s a lovely musical ear. And you end up with a hive mind—“literally! It’s not a metaphor,” Vaknin exclaims during his explanation.
It sounds like this is coming awfully close to the concept of neurolinguistic programming—which is, really, the process of essay-writing, or maybe of chatbotting, of walking someone through different gates in a garden, walking them straight up to an idea or realization and then gently nudging them through it, making them believe it was their idea or eventual conclusion all along and not yours, letting them take the credit for having your idea—but these are two discrete things, NLP and entrainment, that can be used in tandem. Put together, they are, to oversimplify it a bit, group hypnosis. You’ll see it in any high-control environment. And I do so love music, I do so love a sermon.
My favorite shift nurse once asked me about hypnosis. She was wondering if it were real, if it worked, and if it could benefit a relative of hers.
“I don’t know about whether it would help her,” I said, “but you’d love it.” I told her it felt great. Best rest she’d ever get. Really, it’d be her first restorative nap: the first time she’d ever felt safe, experienced a normal-feeling nervous system, probably.
“I don’t know if I can be hypnotized,” she said.
“You definitely can,” I told her. The girl is narcoleptic, suffers sleep attacks, which I know all about. She has no issue slipping into a halfway state. “It’s staying hypnotized that would be the issue,” I told her. She would find, I suspected, that the instant the speaker said something slightly off-key, something dissonant, something she disagreed with, couldn’t sign on for, a difference in values, anything that ruffled her feathers in any way, she would stir and wake up. “Which is very annoying,” I told her. You wake up mad. Just mad. Because you just want to take a nap but the sleep spell has been broken, because this fucker talking in your ear can’t keep his mouth in the right place or the rhythm sustained. And now you’re wide awake and just livid.
So that is how entrainment, together with pathological meaning-making through a designated path, operate together, for good or ill. But I kept all this to myself. My witch friend had another question.
“Isn’t this ‘community narcissism’ or whatever,” she messaged.
Yes, there is a kind of collective self-preservation of the collective ego that can distort itself into a large-scale superiority complex, status, supremacy. “Uhhh, well any community actually!” I said. Any community, any traits. “It’s useful to read about ‘entities’ and ‘egregores’ in the context of ‘community identity’ (or mobs!) and kind of parse how the collective’s identity might be different from the individual’s.”
I continued: “I tend to visualize it as ‘overlapping biofields’ i.e. the ‘flower of life’. Is every community organism or colony necessarily a cult, a mob? No.” I was trying to conclude now. “So [your friends] are acknowledging a ‘magnetism’ that would put you in a position to maybe kind of dictate the course of a collective…”
My friend had already responded. “Like….. The Force,” she’d messaged.
“…yes, the Force,” I said. “It is the Force.”
“lol,” she messaged.
Of course, I continued, the Force is just another term for qi, which is to say, life force, an animating power that blows through us all. (“Like it’s not an accident that magnetic phone chargers that work by touch are called ‘qi chargers,’” I wrote.) “What you focus your attention on is what you’ll manifest, basically,” I said. “Like, I think that’s true for everyone eventually.” So be discerning with your thoughts and attentions. You don’t even know what you’re capable of. You don’t even notice when you’re praying that you’re praying.↩
To understand Gamergate, or perhaps the U.S. government’s war on large swathes of its own population, you have to first understand the Karpman Drama Triangle. This is a type of public display—an improv game that is incredibly easy to be drawn into, cast into a role unwillingly, especially if you’ve already been bullied, have already suffered, and don’t yet understand how it keeps happening to you.
The Karpman Drama Triangle requires at least three people; at scale, it requires three groups. Those roles are Victim, Persecutor/Offender, and the Audience (who may, in turns, be the Rescuer/Hero, the Observer, the Judge, the Juror, the Journalist, the Court of Public Opinion). In order to successfully do a DARVO—that is, to garner public sympathy, assuming the Victim role for some sort of profit or to achieve some other end—the Persecutor initiates, agitating for conflict, launching a strike against his selected primary target. From that starting vector, the pathways to fresh potential targets grow. This isn’t limited to the primary target’s allies; it’s more like a game of Six Degrees of Separation, where anyone within the field-of-view who reacts, who inadvertently makes themselves less invisible, becomes another target to needle, to abuse, or to do violence against. Any reaction means any member of the persecutory group can now claim reactive abuse, and now the DARVO can be executed, “reverse victim and offender.” This serves another purpose, as well: recruitment. Members of the audience group may decide to join in, taking one side or the other, rather than letting the whole monstrous mob die. The entire horrific conflict comes down to an idea as simple as “if you can see me, I can see you,” and what that might come to mean for one of us.
As someone with a genetic predisposition to central nervous system dysfunction, I have a narrower window of distress tolerance than most, just to start out with biologically, and then acquired trauma on top of that, making eventual CNS dysregulation feel inevitable. I am also, in almost every setting, the “weakest link”: I struggle with, not only tolerating my own distress, but especially with witnessing others’. I am unable to tolerate any degree of distress or pain in another person, even or especially when I’m walking around on my own two legs already at a level 9. Again, the impulse to rescue, to fix, comes from an extremely dark place.
People intuit they can make me feel their desperation as if it were my own. So when someone is pleading their emotional case, I’m at best a compassionate audience or juror, at worst, a mark for a con. It means I’m the breach, the person most likely to respond when an agitator accuses me of “sitting in an echo chamber,” or who claims they’re “just asking questions,” “why are you shutting down good-faith debate,” etc. People can have a lot of contempt for the kind of person who keeps handing out the benefit of the doubt for free—the devil’s own advocate—but those are typically the same people who come to shake me down demanding their own allotment of grace, so, you know.
Being a bleeding heart with an overdeveloped fawn response also means I’m likely to turn around and plead my own case, to reason, to overexplain, when there is no case to be made because why am I even here right now. What I’ve failed to understand, for over half my lifespan, is just how much a sadist gets off on hearing someone plead for their life. It is so nourishing. Wasting my time aggrandizes and strengthens and fuels them, and of course it also fuels the narrative they’re actively in the process of writing, supplying new details to feed into the mill, giving their own fabrication the veneer of truth. “Give me the man, and I will give you the case against him.” You have the right to remain silent. (To be sure, the American justice system itself is a theater: devising narratives using testimonies of self-incrimination, many of them coerced; cherrypicking evidence, with grace and punishment both being determined by the literal Karpman Drama Triangle itself. It’s all editing, it’s reality TV and fantasy football all the way down.)
Because I’ve been so slow to understand the concept of “Jenny, stop talking,” many people who were rooting for me could not bear to watch or stand by as I panicked and fawned. (Others in my midst stood very close by, thrilled, I think, to look sane and regulated by comparison.) A famous game designer once implored me to put my phone away, to just log off, as I sat there watching my career being sucked into a black hole. Of course I was watching. I was at a public event with my phone out, watching to see who online would find my home address, who was breaking into my accounts. I was a captive audience to my own assassination.
Other friends and friendly acquaintances, meanwhile, simply dropped off. I would never react. I would just sit still, not panicking, not thrashing around, is what I think some would like to believe about themselves, which is easy enough to believe if you’ve never been sitting in a Chili’s staring at your phone as a campaign against your life kicks off. One former acquaintance wrote a celebrity autobiography, in which (I’ve heard) she describes how merely interacting with me online led to her being doxxed—a shame I’ve certainly internalized. I’ve internalized a lot of harms done to others, blamed myself for being present, visible, active, reckless. To be clear, I’m not upset about my isolation; all of these people were demonstrating basic self-preservation2, which we love, and I trend toward self-isolation anyway. But altogether it ensured that I’d of course deplatform myself. Externally I play good cop and internally I’m a bad one, so of course I arrested myself. I locked myself away, functionally a house arrest but fundamentally deep into hell jail, vanished from my own life, became my own ghost, my own haunting: a fate worse than death but blessedly not quite so final.↩