The Loss of Love and the Death of the Soul

"The fear of humiliation appears to be one of the most powerful motivators in individual and collective human behavior." ~ Donald Klein

The one thing that causes, and has caused, more problems than anything else in the world is humiliating people.

The ancient Greeks thought that humiliating people was so obscene they banned it from the theater. Their concept of "hubris" originally meant to humiliate someone. (Not so surprisingly, the root words of "obscene" and "humiliation" both mean "dirt" – to treat someone as dirt.) For that matter, "mortify" means to "make dead."

You can make the distinction - and many do - that shame is private and humiliation is in public. It is a useful distinction, along with the one that you agree with shame and disagree with humiliation.

Later, Hubris later became a goddess of excessive pride, of insolence, of wanton violence. It was considered to be insanity. Through the years they analyzed it and came up with a sequence: Koros (which has various definitions, but can mean the stability of a weak person) to Hubris (the overweening pride that comes when a weak person gets power) to Ate (seeing wrong as right) to Nemesis (which is the revenge that people visit on you when you humiliate them).

So, then, what we have is this: weak people, who might be stable under the proper social order, can't handle power when it comes their way, become semi-insane from it because they can't handle it, then start humiliating people, which they don't understand because they see right as wrong. Then they are as shocked as Hell when those they humiliate rise up and get revenge on them.

Revenge is the attempt to replace humiliation with pride. And when people are humiliated they lose their respect and their dignity, and they attempt to regain their pride (i.e. their self-love) through violence. It's the way humans are, and those who don't understand human nature are going to cause nothing but trouble for themselves and others.

In other words, when someone is horribly humiliated (especially starting when they're young) it kills their self-love, indeed sometimes their souls (Greek: psyche), and they become so sensitive to insults, oppression and humiliation they will kill people to regain what they have lost.

So, in a bizarre way, getting revenge on someone is an attempt to prevent your soul from being murdered and to gain self-love. Of course, it's so well-known it's become a cliche': you can't love others (or yourself) unless you were loved first.

That's why "being loved first," when it doesn't happen, creates those unloved kids who when they grow up often become very violent. That's why child abuse creates the problems it does. "As you sow, so you shall reap."

The worst humiliator in the history of the world have always been governments. And always for the same reason: to give you security, to protect you. That's why you always end up with something like this cartoon from 40 years ago:

I am reminded of what Ben Franklin said: "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."

The "security" that government provides you is always about humiliating you, although those in the government don't understand it and don't believe it when it's pointed out to them. It's always about humiliating you, oppressing you, taking away your pride, self-respect, dignity and self-love. It's about killing your soul under the guise of helping you.

When governments get too big, they always go bad and then always attempt to dominate, control, manipulate, and abandon. And everyone of those things is an attempt to humiliate.

Since people always rise up when oppressed, this is why every government in the history of the world has fallen.

I don't find it surprising, not anymore, that Hubris is a goddess and not a god. Everything that women touch, they destroy. I don't mean any one individual woman, but the mass of women. And it always involves humiliating boys and men.

Look at what women have done in the fields they dominate. Education, for one. They're trying to humiliate and destroy boys by trying to turn them into little girls - through Ritalin, through banning squirt-guns (and shame on stupid cops who arrest kids for these things) and other insanities.

In fact, when women gain political power they always try to destroy men. That is one of the reasons they've never been given the vote. And isn't that exactly what feminism tries to do, contrary to its stated goals? And if it doesn't attempt to humiliate and destroy men, then why has the Manosphere arisen?

The first generation of feminists attacked grown men. Now have a generation of men abused and traumatized by feminism. Again, that is why the Manosphere has arisen.

After all, appreciation and gratitude are the opposite of humiliation, and you barely see any appreciation of all that men have done for women.

Of course, when people are humiliated long enough, the rise up and put a stop to it. It always happens, and it always will, and it will happen here.

“The most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps.” ~ James Gilligan