Old Words for New Afflictions

or the Road to the Riot Act

It’s shameful the way negative emotion can sell anything. We reward tantrums, jealous gossiping, and self-pity. War footage, pornography, public altercations, rancid propaganda... Attention is paid to the tension that begets catharsis.

It's easy to imagine a thousand different catatrophes, but any conception of utopia is vague and fleeting. When we unwind from the stress of the day, we're not taking refuge in reveries of peace and perfected existence, we gear up for combat.

I respect displays of adrenaline-fueled pop viscerality, but the fact that serenity is so under-represented—in discourse specifically—reveals an issue. We have the yoga meditators, those who light their candlewicks, and those who take luxurious bubble baths, but they aren't immune from the fray. Their personal tranquility evaporates quickly in the social sphere.

Conversation on social media defaults to debate. Nothing is conceded, and the worst possible interpretation of people's motives are assumed. Some far-fetched grievance is invented to keep the fiery cycle spinning, and everyone hopes to inflict ego injury upon each other.

But this isn't a closed system. If we step outside these behavioral patterns, how might they be reprogrammed? Perhaps the correct approach is one of authoritative command.

When conduct becomes unthinking, it's more susceptible to influence. Principles are harder to sway, but are rarer than people would like you to believe. Most are testing the waters, baiting reactions and adapting beliefs as one would an article of clothing.

So how do you stop the cycle of antagonism from exhausting you? How do you restore faith in codrial exchanges, constructive suggestions, and humble dealings?

You go straight for the jugular, and piss on the sacred premises of the personal hell they subject you to. You froth at the mouth and spit venom in their eyes, descending from the mountain with a verbal reckoning and say:

When you condescend to me, choke. What others see as an opportunity to educate, you see as an opportunity to humiliate. You reward your vanity and disgrace the floor you walk on. Self-contempt doesn't tell the whole story of who you are. Negative personality markers like sociopathy, psychopathy, narcissism don't apply here. No, no clinical or psychoanalytic explanation pleases me at all.

Because you're evil. Your individualism has produced a perfect storm of cruel intention, forged from the fires of your cursed imagination. And what you have in you is an evilness.

My accusation doesn't abide in emotional territory, it was born out of necessity. It really wasn't for lack of effort that I arrived at this term to describe you (Evil). I studied different schools of jurisprudence, spoke to astute practitioners of law, knocked on the doors of ethicists, even digging up a few graves in the process... We all threw up our hands, and had to return to the Bronze Age to retrieve the vocabulary to discuss you with proper candor. Now let me tell you why evil is apt for you.

You release diseased rats into the windows of our homes. You slash our  tires with your little pocket knife. You sabatoge our job promotions with endless slander. You cut our ponytails off with your rusty pair of scissors. You spraypaint vulgar obscenities on our memorial park bench. You clip the wings off monarch butterflies. You smoke tobacco in our children's hospital lobby. When a baby looks at you, you refuse their gaze and caress your viles of poison.

And God said, "Let there be courts," and there were courts.

But it's more cathartic to secure justice on our own terms. So we've decided to be our own judge, jury, and executioner.

When sentences are relayed, they are prone to being hastily-conceived, short-sighted, and reductionistic. Emotional.

The theatre of catharsis is restaging the world.