a lot of people are DMming me their horror stories of ringleader-led fake-social-justice harassment and i just feel like my third eye is opening. not only is this tactic stupefyingly common, all the people doing it have the exact same personality.
unsurprisingly a lot of the profiles i'm being sent are of extremely insecure people who feel a sense of helpless powerlessness which can only partly be blamed on whatever marginalisation axes they're on
these are people who are failing at their ambitions, petty about it, and have no emotional self-regulation. failed actors targeting other failed actors. a local left org member jealously torpedoing new recruits to protect their role as... the person who takes the minutes
a lot of the selected victims are autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. is this because ND people are more likely to take the harassment in good faith or because they're more traumatised by a lifetime of rejection already? no way of knowing
going to armchair Freud a bit, but a lot of the people in my DMs were really stunned by the 'acting weary' part. When I wrote the thread, I'd assumed the weariness was fake, but I think it may be a real exhaustion of quieting the voice in their head telling them this isn't good
there's only a tiny number of people who don't have an internal barrier that tries to prevent them from hurting other people. most of the bullies doing this aren't any different, and are, on some level, aware that what they are doing is sadistic and useless.
inside, there's both the thrill of the chase and the enjoyment of the drama... but also nagging feelings of doubt that pull them back down. it makes an emotion of incomplete satisfaction, confused motivation and frustration, which is experienced as weariness.
if this theory is true, harassers should get less weary over time, not more (as you'd expect from a drawn-out real conflict) - as the victim defends themselves, the harasser gains new justifications for the harassment, which makes the victim easier and easier to condemn.
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