The Imposition of Unwanted Selves

When people try to impose an unwanted self on someone else, that person often responds with shame. When Matt Taylor, he of the Ph.D. in Physics and the Gunner Girls bowling shirt, was viciously attacked over that shirt, he responded by tearing up on TV. That's feelings of shame and humiliation.

People also respond with depression, guilt, anxiety and anger. I generally respond with anger and attack. It works for me, because the attackers are never rational and cannot be reasoned with.

Everyone is subject to these attempts. Many people are herd animals - sheep. And when someone tries to wander outside the herd, that person becomes a scapegoat and can be brutally attacked.

It's because the hater is imposing his problems on the hated. Which is why I often wonder: ask yourself who is hated, who the hater is, and why they hate?

It's also why I point out the scapegoat is a predictor of the future. At the age of six I was once hit several times in the stomach by an pudgy, unattractive spinster of a teacher. Why did that say about her? That's pretty obvious. She hated boys who didn't do exactly what she wanted. I doubt she would have attacked a girl like that.

What did it say about me? I was ignoring her - not doing what she wanted - and she responded by projecting her own hate and anger on me and attacking me. I was the scapegoat on whom she projected her problems.

I, for example, have been told a have a tiny little dick, that I live in my parents' basement (I do, but I own my late parents' home), that I'm no gentleman and not married, that I'm terrified of "strong, independent women"....blah, blah, blah.

This hate, directed towards me and many others, is an attempt to shame me - and them.

I wasn't shamed by what the teacher did. I was stunned, and later when my first-grade teacher asked what happened, then I started crying.

This has happened to me my entire life. I have always been off the reservation all my life, and have subject to these attacks as long as I can remember.

One thing I have concluded is that the smarter you are, the more of these attacks you will get. Intelligence is envied, so the smart must be brought down. Not surprisingly, Helmut Schoeck wrote a rather thick book, Envy, about the subject.

When I was 16 years old I was walking to a party two neighborhoods over and passed a girl I went to school with. She was walking her dog. I thought, I'm going to a party and she's walking a dog? On a Saturday night?

She was chunky and unattractive, and as I was walking toward her she gave me a look of close to pure terror. Intuitively I knew why: she was afraid I was going to say something mean to her. Years later I realized she thought I was going to impose an unwanted self on her, one that probably been imposed for years by being ignored by guys and never asked to parties.

There is a concept know as "mirroring." It's when you see yourself in how others treat you. Now imagine someone raised their entire lives in schools that mock and denigrate them, treat them with contempt, in families that do the same, with a media that does it...how will those people grow up?

Shamed, humiliated, guilty, depressed, anxious, angry. That's how.

When people are humiliated they often to the extreme opposite extreme and develop a grandiose self. It's a very fragile self they use to cover up their feelings of humiliation.

I see it all the time, which is why I believe, and have believed for years, there are a lot of shamed, guilty, anxious, angry people out there, trying to cover it up with bluff and braggadocio.