Well, it’s easy to see now, after several days of increasing isolation, increasing anxiety, that it’s quite understandable for a general mood of grouchiness, a kind of irritability to spread throughout the people generally, and more time spent with crowded conditions, or cramped conditions, routine broken, lots of uncertainty about the future: everybody, even without even thinking about it, it seems like we’re more ready to find a target, find an outlet for our frustration.
That even if consciously we don’t want to find some kind of a scapegoat or find some kind of a target, but it’s just all this frustrated energy and this feeling of of tightness and just general unpleasant discomfort: it’s just so ready to just fire off at anybody who takes a wrong step.
And now with the restrictions becoming stronger and the level of intensity of freaking out, you might say, intensifying, there’s this new level of targeting, of shaming, against anybody who is considered to be not playing by the rules, not taking the appropriate measures of self-isolating.
And of course, understandable to see why.
If you are completely changing your life and giving up so many things in order to fulfill a social duty to try to protect other people from illness, and then you see other people who just appear to be just having fun as if nothing’s happening, completely unconcerned about this social duty, that’s really irritating.
It’s really easy to understand why they would become a target.
But what I find a little bit disturbing is how much this is intensifying where the feeling of hate, the shaming, and the level of intensity of targeting anybody who’s considered to be going against the rules has now reached a new level.
And I can see now the governments here are talking more strongly and really encouraging it, to say, like, “If you see people that aren’t following the rules, you know, you should really let them know that they’re off.
Let them know what they’re doing wrong.
You should actually shame them.” And in fact, it’s really become something like a license to hate.
Anybody who does this, anybody who behaves in a way that’s not consistent with the standard that is agreed upon, the standard level of isolation that is decided to be correct, anybody that shows more social contact than the prescribed level is really open to be a target for shaming openly.
And really, it’s ugly to see the level to which the hate is released against anybody.
And even though it’s totally understandable, it still appears to me to be a disturbing trend that may only get worse, that we’re looking for an outlet, we’re looking for a target, for feelings of anger and hate, and it’s such an easy target.
In the early days it was the toilet paper people.
How many people were talking about “Oh, the toilet paper hoarders”, and just unleashing against the hoarders.
Perfectly understandable why they were targets, since their actions are antisocial, helping themselves at the expense of others.
And the same here people who are considered to be “too social”, too socially in contact, are also being antisocial.
They are pleasing themselves at the expense of the common good.
And so of course they will be targets.
But it’s frightening to see the level of almost a joy and pleasure that comes out of attacking something that, when you find somebody to be an enemy, it really releases a lot of pent-up frustration to just, like, direct some, you know, “Aren’t those people just terrible? Those are just- they’re just horrible.
These people are disgusting.” And really just like throwing it, throwing all the frustration into a convenient target.
As much as we can judge correctly that their behaviour should change, it seems like something to watch out for and observe how much is our reaction an emotional reaction, that we are simply looking for a target? Seems to me this is something to keep an eye on.
#someonetohate #scapegoat #lovetohate