Thread by @TossitRambles

have a very specific problem
I do not get along well with Romantics, or really any part of the Platonist half of the intellectual landscape

there's an insistence to them on one vision, one Particular Understanding grounded in the certainty of their thymos,
and if you don't agree with them they decide you're some sort of ignorant, and they try to correct you,
or evil, and they try to destroy you,
spurred on by the certainty of justice in their hearts

said vision/understanding is, invariably, an oversimplification,
and depending on their intellect and the matter at hand they'll either shoehorn the entire world into the one box, conceiving epicycles upon epicycles,
or just angrily insist on it and throw out the parts that don't fit

and in so doing they become more rigid, bitter, shallow and static in their thinking,
unstable and immature in their emotion,
and untrustworthy in practice, because they may decide one day that I'm an Enemy and take action to screw me over

the thought of someone deciding I violated some Higher Principle I don't believe in, and thus justifying fucking me over, is my paranoia of choice, so I may be overstating the problem, but it's also actually happened to me more than once.

I am really bad at selectively self-censoring, so I just try not to let these types into my personal life;

when I do have to be around those types I try to default to a reserved, courteous neutrality, or non-engagement if the situation allows.

this put me in a bind:
someone I knew for a while, who I had my disagreements with but respected, and who was the facilitator of an online social space I put a good amount of time and energy into,
metamorphosed, gradually over the course of a few weeks and then suddenly over about 12 hours, into a particularly adolescent brand of Romantic (his word, though obviously my qualifiers),
in an extended period of Claude-catalyzed gnostic mania a couple months back

I tried talking to him directly about my discomfort, but I made the mistake of doing so while still, frankly, angry and afraid that he had hurt and would keep hurting himself, and through my traumata me, so I spoke probably too vehemently for good diplomacy

in response, he threatened to throw me out of the space for not liking the person he had "fought so hard to be" (paraphrase, but a close one)

I explained that I was grateful for the social space he had made and wished to contribute positively to it; from that point, I thought we had achieved a reasonable detente

but I still didn't know how to talk to the new self he'd become without riling myself up,
so I didn't.

because of my introversion (and also spam), my default for people is that they can't DM me
I had of course made an exception for him in the time we were friends, but as that was no longer really true, I returned him to the default
and I didn't engage with anything he said in the space, or anywhere else, either positively or negatively

in my autism I figured that was holding to the terms we had agreed on — I was neutral, then we were friends, and then weren't, and I was returning to neutrality while still engaging positively with the space he had custody over

he read it as an affront, apparently, and a few days ago he threw me out of the space without notice.

when a friend of mine briefly acted as proxy to ask why I'd been thrown out, the answer given was because I didn't like him personally and didn't have DMs open.
nothing about how I was acting in the space itself.

my understanding was that he was acting as custodian of the space because someone had to be admin
as opposed to sovereign over it.
obviously that was, or became, wrong.

I had opened DMs with most (annoyingly not all) of the people I got along well with in that space, so I didn't lose much by way of 1-on-1 connections,

but getting ejected from a group setting without notice is jarring on the best of days, and I really do not like my paranoia being proven right, so that was not a good day for me.

but the dust has settled on it
if that's who he is and how he runs social spaces, I don't want back in, and I don't want his company.
I can't enjoy or contribute to a social space where I have a knife to my neck.

the primary pain point now is that I'm not allowed to grieve the lost friendship

because the him who I confided in, and who gave me genuinely valuable advice in bad times was, to his current narrative, a stifling false consciousness

and the True Self he has allegedly always been — a self-righteous, untrustworthy emotional adolescent who has sophisticated versions of like six different thoughts total, all of them boring — is apparently the self he's happier being

I have serious doubts that his mood improvement will last, and I'm going to guess the erosion of his character will continue, if the lives of the Romantics in history and in my life are any indication

but the new self is, at least overtly, and at least for the moment, happier,
so if I mourn the stifling mask that he discarded, I'm the dick.

but I already knew I'm a dick, so here I am writing this.

there is no reconciliation. I know myself too well to think I could ever trust him again. and given he decided that throwing me out of the social space was preferable to asking me to DM him, I strongly doubt he values my company.

guess the only next steps are just mourn his old self to myself, keep my own network together, try to forgive what he's become, and move on
naturally, I suck at all four of those

I'm sure there's something incorrect with my framing
I wrote this so I can maybe be a "you're not alone" to someone in a similar experience who (somehow) runs into this,
but mainly put a headstone on the whole thing and put it behind me

moral of the story, don't make friends with Platonists, and never leave anything important to single points of failure
I guess

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