Do you feel more sympathy or antagonism towards people that are assholes?

[Brian63]

Recently I was visiting another message board that I used to post on awhile back, and it was mostly populated by religiously and politically conservative members. Since I hold generally opposite views, we mostly did not get along well. Even when not responding to me specifically, those folks still had a strong inclination to heavily insult atheists, liberals, and other such groups that make up fora like this one.

When it comes to those kinds of people who are extremely harsh and antagonistic, I have long held a variety of views. Part of me actually feels very sorry and sympathetic for them, for having lived a life that encouraged and maybe even forced those sorts of attitudes. I realize they are not at fault for those views, anymore than anybody else is at fault for all the different views they happen to hold (self-included) because of their surrounding environment. So I want to help them. Often when I read testimonies of various theists-turned-atheists, that even seems to be a common trait. The people were raised and indoctrinated in an environment that pushed it onto them, but they broke free of it (and their testimony describes the “how”). Sometimes they can be helped out of it, if we show compassion for them.

At other times, when someone is just acting as an asshole, there is a large part of me that just wants to give them the same treatment that they are giving to those others. Partly to help them for the same reasons as stated above, but admittedly partly I just want to hurt them too. If someone is being a jerk to others, they deserve to get what they deliver, and should be treated as a jerk as well. That is sometimes an efficient way to “teach” them to not lay out the insults, but sometimes it can moreso hurt them too. It might still feel good to me though. It may even benefit others who are observing the discussion, to see one of their “higher-ups” on their message board or community be likewise insulted.

So I very much have conflicting feelings and attitudes about how to behave whenever I come across someone who is behaving as an asshole. Not so much in real life (where I will usually just ignore it and walk away), but the internet is a different medium and it allows us to fight back in some way, and sometimes I feel we should take advantage of the opportunity. I do not know what the most effective sort of attitude for me to take is though. Sometimes being very kind to someone who is an asshole is the most effective way to assist them in the long run, sometimes fighting back (verbally) is a more efficient method. Is there any way to know which one it will be? Also, if there are other people also watching or participating in your conversation with the asshole, you have to try to guess and analyze their reactions as well, and factor that in to your own behavior.

There is even a part of me that feels like it would be inappropriate of me to be kind to someone who is being a jerk themselves. It can seem unfair to other people who work to be genuinely kind and compassionate to all others, if people who are mean and assholes are also treated just as kindly as well. A part of me wants to treat those 2 different groups of people differently because they deserve it, and I should show more compassion for those who are compassionate themselves.

So whenever I have engaged in some kind of religious debate with someone who not only holds a different view, but is also personally a bit of an asshole themselves, I have gone back and forth with how I should respond. I would not go as far as they would go, but should I still fight back to some extent, or just entirely show mercy and kindness for them? Should I show mercy and kindness because that is a more effective means of changing them and their attitude, or should I show mercy and kindness because that is actually what I should be feeling myself for them? Or some measure of both?

What are your own views on this issue? When you come across some stranger (either on the internet or in real life) who is being a personal asshole on top of espousing political, ethical, and religious views that you oppose, do you have one predominant reaction of either sympathy or antagonism for them, or do you have more of a mixture of those 2 sentiments? Do you try to have one reaction and not the other? How do you decide what behavior to take towards them? Does it matter what the audience is like as well (if there is one)?

All thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks,

Brian

 

[James Brown]

I vote for mercy and compassion, although I admit it can take lots of patience. I'm reminded of a Zen principle that the teeth are one of the hardest part of a person's body and the tongue one of the softest. But elderly people never experience their tongues falling out like they do their teeth. Punch a wave, and the water will just recede away from your fist, yet patient waves can tear down stone castles.

 

[Rhea]

My experience is that those who are assholes do not learn a single thing when they look in a mirror - i.e when you treat them as they treat others. So being an asshole back to them will not accomplish any of your stated goals. Unless you couch it in Socratic terms where you ask them, "if I were to answer like this, what would it make you think, feel?" then sometimes they can be made aware of something. But generally, I hew to the pity/compassion/sharing model as the only one with a chance (sometimes small) of success.

And at times, I lose my patience and go all unproductive on their asses. And it can be funny, but in the end, it harms my own cause so I regret it.

 

[James Brown]

Good point. If nothing else, the Socractic Dialogue can be educational for lurkers. But in my experience, the other side never follows the script that I've carefully prepared ahead of time.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Depends on how big of an asshole. My wife's family has a couple.

There is her dad who is a reformed asshole. When I first got to know him, he was a complete narcissist, and the empathy for him came from knowing that his world was unraveling around him and he had absolutely no clue he was the reason. He has improved quite a bit since meeting him. He still lives close to the I of life, but seems to now understand at least one other person matters. And he is a great grandparent.

My wife's aunt, she is a special sort of asshole. No empathy there. She wants to destroy anything that stops her from having what she wants and will not stop. The world would be better off without her and we were close to seeing it.

Then you have the cancers like Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity... people that make a living by sowing hatred and fear. I'm all for entropy taking their asses down.

For online experiences, who knows. You'll probably touch someone. Over at TWeb, there was one person that was a full on jackass, but they actually made a turn towards being nice and expressed as much privately. But then you have places like Freeconservatives (or at least back when it existed) where there was so much hate. It made me think of the movie Conspiracy where the "hero" is the man who merely wants to sterilize the Jewish instead of kill them, ie... the nicest guy at FC would be someone you could have a drink with and talk about sports, but that'd be it.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

So whenever I have engaged in some kind of religious debate with someone who not only holds a different view, but is also personally a bit of an asshole themselves, I have gone back and forth with how I should respond. I would not go as far as they would go, but should I still fight back to some extent, or just entirely show mercy and kindness for them? Should I show mercy and kindness because that is a more effective means of changing them and their attitude, or should I show mercy and kindness because that is actually what I should be feeling myself for them? Or some measure of both?

Lately I'm seeing emotions as intellectual short circuits, substitutes for real knowledge.

The best way to deal with your posting at those type boards is to ignore the insults and be impersonal and matter of fact in your statements. Don't use words and phrases that might be inflammatory but definitely get your point across. Instead of referring to Jesus as a 2000 year old zombie you might just say the stories about this Jesus aren't convincing because you know people don't really fly around in the sky, walk through walls and come back to life.

But most importantly you just have to ignore the stupidity and the insults, and not expect anything to change.

 

[zorq]

See Too Long : Didn't Read at the end.
_____________________

I agree with Rhea that fighting insults with insults is obviously pointless. Especially when one of your side goals is to help teach an asshole how to not be an asshole. But at the same time, offering no resistance to abusive behavior seems to teach a lesson that abusive communication is an acceptable and even effective strategy for prevailing in a linguistic squabble.

So some sort of middle ground strategy seems to be called for. Using the Socratic method to try to force a little bit of introspection is a great idea, but I also agree with James Brown that trying to predict the responses of online debates is quite a gamble.

If you manage to guess their first response correctly most competent assholes will trick themselves into thinking that they never would have really responded that way anyways and move on to their next reaction. If you didn't even guess their first response then you have committed the sin of presuming to know more about a person than you do, and you have earned yourself the disrespect of a pigeonholing jerk who isn't nearly as clever as they think they are. You only lose more respect from your opponent that way. The way to help manage this problem is to trace out as many branching opposing arguments you think your opponent might argue all at once and show the failure of all of them all at once.

Show

(E.G. If you agree with this statement S then you're wrong for reasons a,b,and c. A has two interpretations, each is wrong for reasons x and y respectively...If you disagree with the first statement S then you're wrong for reasons d,e,and f. etc. ...)

This can be a tremendous amount of work and my time is usually worth a little more than that. And this is still not immune from the problems of the more basic socratic argument where you only trace one potential dialogue.

SO... I don't do that anymore.

One easier strategy that I enjoy is ridiculing your opponents argument without directly insulting the argument's owner. I think people can recover from discovering that their ideas are ridiculous. Well, as long as those ideas aren't core personality defining ideas. For example, ridiculing Jesus himself activates the "fight" response in Christians and they will just stop hearing your message or anything else you say, but you can ridicule the small ideas like inerrant translation and inspiration or the qualifications of biblical council of Nicaea. If your derision is persuasive enough you can sometimes activate the "flight" response and your opponent may retreat to the realms of discussion they are more comfortable and confident with.

Ridicule doesn't help assholes overcome abusive communication techniques because laughing at your opponents anger will only make them angrier but it is at least a blade that can cut through a blind rage, where insults would just bounce off.

Another strategy you may consider is constantly reminding them of their human emotions and tying them to the subject you are discussing. Try to manipulate the sensitive emotions, if possible, but the anger related emotions can be tinkered with too if you can't get your opponent to identify any empathy within themselves. This all requires some good story telling skills to re frame the issue into one with different emotional reactions for your opponent.

Regarding the OP's association of conservatives with assholes, I definitely have noticed the same correlation. My hypothesis on the mental makeup of a conservative mind is the following:

1.Conservatives distrust the things they (a) don't understand and (b) can't control. Also, 2. because untrustworthy things are dangerous, they seek to destroy the things that they can't trust or control. But 2. applies to everyone, not just conservatives.

Homosexuals, Other ethnicities, Muslims, hippies, democracy (small d), socialism, unions, and global warming, are the enemies of the conservative mind because they are foreign to the friendly and safe world their parents taught them about and molded them in when they were children. Where everyone is straight, ethnically homogeneous, Christian, and reserved. The family hierarchy was stable and unmaleable. Plus disagreement with the family leader could result in punishment. The family providers seemingly provided everything without outside help People lower in the hierarchy could not object or bargain. And changes to the happiness/stability of the family always came from outside the family.

I'm not saying that all of these factors apply to all conservatives, or that factors like this can preclude the rearing of a liberal, I haven't done any studies and I'm aware that this may look like I'm trying to construct an elaborate framework of stereotypes. Like I said it's just a hypothesis.

Anyway, I think conservatives tend toward asshole communication techniques because they see so much of the world around them as the enemy and enemies are for destroying because they are untrustworthy.

TLDR
Don't fight fire with fire, fight insults with laughter or re-frame the emotional content of the argument.
Also, conservatives are afraid of the stuff they don't understand and can't control. And because a huge chunk of the world falls into the category of stuff they are afraid of, they don't feel any need to offer any compassion to those things.

 

[Brian63]

The response here that it is *not* an effective approach to be insulting and combative to those who are being assholes to us in the first place, if we want to change them, is definitely one that I can sympathize with. I will just add that it is a mentality that I used to hold as well, actually until I read some first-hand accounts of people who acknowledged that they were not mind-changed by such people expressing such caring. It was actually the people who were more aggressive and used harsh language that interested them more and got them to see their own beliefs in a new and interesting way.

Please note that I am definitely NOT advocating we always be aggressive and hostile…I am just saying that sometimes that actually is the more effective tone to use. It depends largely on the character of the variety of members of the audience, so it is not a one-size-fits-all strategy in any way. Different approaches will have different effects on different people. Just as a generalization though, it probably would be more practical from our end to be compassionate and polite even to those who are being jerkish to us and others we support. At times though, the more combative tone should be undertaken. Some bullies would respond more kindly to those who show them compassion, other bullies sometimes first have to be taken down a couple notches themselves.

Brian

 

[James Brown]

Wars are won by soldiers and diplomats.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

The internet is good for people who honestly seek to learn and who are willing to have their minds changed should convincing evidence be presented to them. It's impossible to say what fraction of people that is, but it is assuredly very small.

People on the internet are not really who they are IRL, even though they don't mean to be. The best place to observe this, in my experience anyway, is Facebook. I have really been friends with so many of these people since 4th grade (like 35 years) and I know they're not the horrible, mean spirited assholes they come across as when they post stupid shit. And I don't think they fully realize that there are real people on the other end of the screen. Or maybe it's that they feel artificially insulated because they don't have to engage in direct conflict.

I've had to unfollow people because I didn't want to grow to despise them over what they post. I know that what they post is likely a nearly insignificant part of who they really are. The worst thing they'd ever do is vote the way they see fit. But if you didn't already know them, you wouldn't know better.

Can you change someone's mind? Only if they're predisposed to it. Only if that's already a core part of their person. And as people get older, the more intractable they become.

How do I respond to assholes though? With wicked, biting sarcasm. I have done the thing where I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to explain something like a feature the federal Constitution in order to enlighten someone as to why X is the way it is, and have never gotten anything in return except derision, if anything at all. So fuck 'em.

 

[braces_for_impact]

Winston Churchill said:

“Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”

I really like this method. Admittedly I switch between the various ways I engage in discussion. I think, for me, it largely depends on my audience and my overall goal as to which which method I use.

If my goal is to really educate and my audience is one I feel is on the fence about an issue or issues, and I think I may provoke some thought, I'll be gentle. If my interlocutor is one that is engaging in emotional ad hominem type attacks, I may use a clever zinger here and there. People relying on those kinds of techniques to argue a point I find can rarely actually defend it rationally in words.

I haven't actually engaged in an all-out burn fest in a long, long time. People often don't like this tactic, but I can tell you, it worked on me. My deconversion started in a YouTube chat room with a foul-mouthed, obnoxious, arrogant atheist taking on multiple Christians in arguments. He used large font, he called people names, he was a total ass, but he threw links around and made me so angry with his being such an asshole that I clicked on them, and then started to do real research in an effort to shut him up. While some of his arguments were indeed poor, many were not. Most of all, he threw multiple links around about critical thinking. One was THIS ONE. So, here I am, about 16 years later with you fine people.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

It is important to know the audience.

Way long ago I used to post at a catholic board. Were I to return there I'd know that the Vatican is changed in the interim. I'd know that many of the posters and mods there are actually pissed and resentful because their pope has friends that are gay, atheist, visits muslims and calls them brothers, is trying to clean up the Vatican's dirty money, etc. I'd know that virtually none of these same folks have had or entertain similar relationships. It's just so obvious when you read the comments that they're ready to nuke the world.

I even commented that were their Jesus to return in the manner he supposedly did 2000 years ago they'd string him up the same way. AND THEY AGREED WITH ME! Remind them that according to their beliefs Hitler may be sitting with Jesus today and the millions he slaughtered are all in hell AND THEY AGREE WITH ME! Where do you really go from there? Where's the door to walk through?

Probably the best track to take if posting in such places is to get people to state that they could be wrong. And of course that would go for self. But good luck getting such an affirmation.

 

[braces_for_impact]

This makes me wonder if two atheists went into some Christian boards playing good cop/bad cop, how would that go and how would the board respond to the two different tactics? What an interesting experiment...

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

This makes me wonder if two atheists went into some Christian boards playing good cop/bad cop, how would that go and how would the board respond to the two different tactics? What an interesting experiment...

Depend on the Christian Board. Typically, the more conservative, the less the difference would probably be.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

I tend to think that most assholes are only assholes because they're "missing something", and never had the chance to develop a strong sense of empathy, perhaps for oppressive reasons, so often I feel sympathy for them in that sense.