Illness, trauma, and cruelty

Before you engage with this essay, dear reader, please heed my warning.

I have made my best attempt to show how cruelty breaks people, and how it’s embedded in the deepest of our cultural structure. If you engage further, you will read about illness, child abuse, sexual assault, people being blown to bits, and how you possibly (probably) participate in further harming survivors of such experiences. Most offensively perhaps, you will be made to sympathize with them.

So read this piece at your own discretion. I take full responsibility for what I’ve written here, and none whatsoever for your reaction to it.

The Hell we build

The experience of chronic illness is a cruel one.

Of course, there is your body failing on you. Your legs going unresponsive at the worst possible time, your lungs filling with liquid, the pain coming back, white and hot and throbbing. This, you’ll get used to. You’ll have to. You’ll live through it once again. Or you won’t, and this all will be done with.

But then, there is the cruelty.

People you believed you could trust will see you collapse to the ground, try (and fail) to catch your breath with increasing panic, they will see you try (and fail) to follow a basic conversation as your pain is demanding an increasing portion of your attention. They will smirk, throw a dismissive comment and firmly ignore your struggle. These will be your family, your friends, your teachers.

Your workplace will vibrate with rumors of how rude you were that one time where you kept wheezing and lent against a wall while Gina from accounting was ever so kindly trying to make small talk; that one time where you insisted to wear sunglasses under the neon lights of the conference room; that one time where you collapsed in the corridor for no good reason and refused to reassure your ever so kindly worried colleagues that you were doing fine.

You’ll be told people are there to help, your needs can be accommodated, you just have to ask. You’ll be pulled from office to office to explain your situation over and over again, on top of the workload that was already crushing your body and soul. You’ll be told over and over again - sometimes with a nice regretful smile, sometimes with a disgusted smirk - that they understand and care about your needs. They really do. They’ll ever so kindly propose to accommodate your needs by granting you indefinite leave. If you’re suffering so much from it, why would they inflict you the job that’s paying for your food, for your rent, that your visa is conditioned on?

Failing that, there is nothing they can do. Do what you’re supposed to do, and stop asking for unreasonable things - like getting the notes they’ve taken from that one meeting you’ve missed because you were too busy trying to breathe.

At this point your options are threefold. You’ll give up entirely on the idea of interfacing with others and collapse into non-existence. You’ll put on a black cape and mask, buy a crossbow on Ebay, and make them feel your pain, make them relate to you by force (whichever force you have left after getting out of your bed, that is). Or you’ll put up a smile and pretend everything is fine.

Chances are, you’ll choose the latter. Everyone does.

You’ll put on a weak, forced smile, saying over and over again that everything is fine, that you’re sorry for that one time you missed a meeting and dared ask for the notes, it was so very unprofessional of you.

They’ll see right through your lie, of course.

They’ll see the seething anger, the burning despair, the bitterness behind whatever facial expression you manage to pull. They’ll see your uncertain gait, your avoidant gaze, the trembling in your hands and your smile.

So rude of you. They’re only trying to make small talk.

You’ll cling to your poor impression of a smile and keep going, feeling your body crumbling under you.

Things will get worse.

Why so cruel?

Dear reader, it is likely you’ve never experienced the specific situations I’ve described above. ME/CFS was estimated to affect “only” about 1% of the population prior to the COVID-19 pandemic [1], and only the 25% of that sample with milder forms of the illness can work full time [2]. Of course, I could cite many somatic conditions that would lead to similar experiences. But for quite obvious reasons, and I won’t bother to pull statistics on that one, the work participation of people with severe chronic illness is not that high.

Chances are, dear reader, you can nonetheless relate quite immediately to this kind of low intensity warfare on your sanity. You have lived the experience of people victimizing you in small but ever accumulating ways and expecting you to apologize for it, all in an apparently pointless show of denying you the basic level of empathy that a well-adjusted 4-year-old can routinely pull off.

After all, half of all people are women. Maybe 2% are intersex in some way, about 5-10% of whom deviate enough from expected male/female phenotype to receive “corrective” surgery [3]. Extrapolating from US statistics, maybe 1% of all people are transgender, 10% explicitly identify as LGBTQ, many more are queer or gender non-conforming in some small (or perhaps big) way without claiming to belong to this community [4]. An uncountable plurality do not belong to what is construed in their social context as the normative, dominant identity, be it for race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, geography, class, or more commonly a messy combination of several of these factors, or maybe something else I didn’t think of.

The more implicit hierarchies embedded in our way of life and cultural representations we consider, the more these numbers stack up. And a not insignificant portion of these people will see very well what I’m talking about.

Many, likely most have seen firsthand how their “inferior” social situation is first used as permission for abuse, and then the abuse used as evidence of their inferiority, feeding a self-reinforcing of performative cruelty. Some have decided to treat it with stoic resignation, some have internalized their situation and normalized the abuse, some have decided to themselves abuse this dynamic to get ahead, some have taken to denounce it with their every breath. All will resonate with this experience in some capacity.

For a good Christian, a committed humanist, or someone capable of basic empathy, this phenomenon can be very confusing. Maybe not everyone cares for others unconditionally, but why would one actively go out of their way and stake their reputation on performative displays of their lack of empathy?

Some hold that it is intrinsic to dominant social groups to oppress dominated groups in whatever ways are available. I’ll ask you, dear reader, to imagine a person in a wheelchair struggling to climb a steep slope, and ponder whether you are more inclined to offer help, ignore them, or bite them in the neck as hard as you can then run away while laughing manically. I think you see my point here - people tend to be the hero in their own story. Very few will feel motivated to do what they themselves perceive as “cruelty”, and those that do tend to find their way to prison or cemetery quite quickly.

Some hold that it is simply impossible to relate to the experience of people in a different social situation than you are. I don’t buy it either. While I didn’t personally migrate through the Mediterranean sea in a makeshift boat with all of my material possessions under one arm and my toddler under the other, deeply aware of my vulnerability to the whims of the seas, the border patrols, and the overtly shady people leading the trip, I don’t find hard to imagine this situation must be quite stressful. Either I’m an empath, or it’s actually quite easy to imagine the negative experience of others and agree that they’re indeed negative.

Some hold, more persuasively, that the cruelty is the point. While it may not be materially beneficial, performative cruelty constitutes a “psychological wage” [5] to the perpetrator. The very act of cruelty reassures them of their status within the group while displaying it to others - hopefully protecting them from getting on the receiving end of the same treatment. I think there is meat to this story, that such negative equilibria of social interaction are indeed possible and frequent. But it doesn’t explain why people without any status anxiety would partake in this dynamic, nor how participants persuade themselves that their actions are not in fact cruelty.

The core of this dynamic, or so I believe, ironically lies in the protection of one’s self-identity as a good, deserving, and caring person.

Good Persons in a Just World

For reasons tied to the very basic physics of our cognition, humans seek cognitive security.

I will not get into the specifics here, but the reasoning is simple. Human brains, being materially limited to a finite number of dimensions and bound to limited sensory and active capacities, cannot deal with every complexity of the world everywhere all at once [6, 7]. They must focus on a few relevant dimensions of sensation and action that actually help them understand what the world is like, and what they should do in it. Hence, they must act within a specific model of the world and their role within it, and constrain deviations from that model [8]. After all, you can’t focus on tax exemptions while your house is on fire.

In this approach, it’s not enough to be objectively blessed by fate or circumstances, one has to deserve it.

Everyone can plainly observe that the highest peaks of fame, wealth, and excellence doesn’t protect anyone from illness, accidents, or peculiarly aggressive rabbits [9]. But at the same time, you can’t spend your days agonizing about every single thing that could go wrong with your life. This kind of anxiety would fundamentally undermine your ability for long-term planning, which I’m told is quite critical to life in agricultural societies. You must come up with some reason why you specifically are immune to the whims of fate and circumstances.

In all societies that I know of, these reasons boil down to some version of the Just World belief. Good Things happen to Good People - be they good by virtue of birth, merit, or an act of God. So you just have to prove to yourself you are indeed a Good Person, and you don’t have to be overwhelmed by the crippling anxiety of every threat you’re objectively exposed to.

And in all societies that I know of, the intrinsic quality of being a Good Person is tied at some level to the performance of a duty of care towards your community, the less fortunate, and virtually everyone you are actively engaging with [10].

In a rationally designed universe, these two representations would lead to a virtuous circle where everyone would reassure themselves by helping others. And to some extent, it does.

But we do not live in rationally designed universe. Accidents happen, illnesses develop, people crumble under the weight of their responsibilities or under the ever present gaze of fate and circumstances. You can feel anxiety creeping, cold and crippling as ever, and you can feel your mind start to slip.

You must take corrective action, do something to reassure yourself and prove to yourself that the world is indeed fair, that you’re indeed a Good Person, and that everything will be all right.

The indirect experience of unfair suffering, be it born from illness or oppression, threatens that fragile state of cognitive security in two complimentary ways.

First, it constitutes by definition direct evidence against the Just World belief. Second, it should compel you to help and care for those people, if you are indeed a Good Person. But doing so may be beyond your capacity. And most importantly, it would not only require you to admit that the Just World belief is wrong, but also to acknowledge this in your own acts.

You’re stuck in a dilemma: either help and abandon your core protective Just World belief, or don’t help and lose your sense of being a Good Person who is protected by it. In either case, the intrusive thoughts win. What other corrective action could be taken?

I’m sure, dear reader, that you have picked up where I was going at.

The suffering must have had it coming. They must have done something to deserve their illness, or their history of abuse. They must be undeserving of help by virtue of their evil nature.

The cycle of cruelty

Of course, the belief that the suffering must have had it coming cannot be rationally held.

You can’t possibly sit down, examine the facts with a cool head, and come to the conclusion that people must develop cancer because of their evil nature, fall from ladders because they are bad fathers, that all those children starving in Sudan [11] must have offended God somehow. You must know at least one good person to whom something bad happened.

So you must take corrective action.

Due to the same physical constraints of cognition I have discussed above, there is no clear distinction between perception and action in the human mind. Your model of the world can very well be supported by the fact you’re taking actions coherent with that model, and vice-versa.

And when you feel the core belief that supports your entire sense of cognitive security crumble, your sense of being protected by being a Good Person within a Just World fade away, you must reaffirm in acts the reality of those beliefs. You must do something to prove to yourself that those people are undeserving of your care, that their plight is self-inflicted.

One way you can do that, and often the most salient one, is through performative cruelty.

If you, a Good Person operating within a Just World, are currently biting this one guy in a wheelchair in the neck, this is ample evidence that he was not a Good Person himself. It is in fact further evidence that you are indeed a Good Person acting within a Just World, as you yourself are inflicting rightful vengeance on the wretched.

The problem with that approach is that it’s somehow even more blatantly stupid than the Just World belief in itself. You biting this one guy in a wheelchair is anything but evidence that you are a Good Person within a Just World. If you let yourself consider your own actions for three consecutive seconds, the intrusive thoughts will win.

Corrective action must be taken.

Of course, no one (that I know of) spends their day running around and sinking their teeth into the neck of every defenseless wheelchair user they can find. Those acts are meant to protect one’s sense of self-identity, they need to look and feel defensible (and even justified) in isolation. Performative cruelty must deviate minimally from your model of yourself as a Good Person, while also performing the core function of denying its target empathy and care.

The form this usually takes is symbolic violence.

Little jabs are made towards the target’s competency or good character, blaming them (implicitly or not) for the very oppression they’re subjected to. They may initially respond with outrage, deescalation, or ignore the attacks. But any response short of self-deprecation and apology, actively validating the cruel action as reasonable and legitimate, will confront the perpetrator to the reality of their behavior. It will threaten their self-identity as a Good Person, and their belief that the World is Just.

Corrective action must be taken.

From there, the cruelty can (and most likely will) escalate. Any mundane act of cruelty creates a more dire threat against the perpetrator’s self-identity as a Good Person, more blatant evidence that the Just World belief is in fact false. More accusations must be made, more attacks must be committed to protect oneself against the creeping anxiety. Perhaps one ends up biting people in wheelchairs, writing blog posts about race and IQ, accusing the Jews of controlling the media, assaulting queer or racialized people in the streets.

While those acts may be condemned by most bystanders, they can’t either extend adequate support and care to their victims. They can’t acknowledge the reality of their experience. After all, it would be admitting in acts that the Just World belief is in fact false, that one would demonstrate more support and more care if they were in fact a Good Person. It would be letting the intrusive thoughts win.

Corrective action must be taken.

They will condemn in principle any act of violence (symbolic or otherwise) against the oppressed. After all, they are a Good Person. But they’re also in a Just World, and being a Good Person should prompt them to act.

So maybe this one instance doesn’t really count for some reason. Maybe the victim wasn’t deserving enough, not oppressed enough, maybe they did something to set this off, maybe the perpetrator was a Good Person like oneself and their acts should not be named or responded to in any coherent manner. The victim should let it go, not ask for more support and care than they already got (which is, most likely, none whatsoever).

Else, corrective action will be taken.

After all, one can’t be made to apologize for being white, being a man, being valid.

Thus, the cycle of performative cruelty is born.

Double binds, small and big

I am walking a fine line by laying out these arguments, and I am very aware of it.

Self-victimization is a core driver of performative cruelty, as it frames the perpetrator as innocent while blaming the victim for undergoing the abuse. And there is no way I can prevent my text to be recruited by the performatively cruel to legitimate their abuse, by accusing their victims to be the one doing the performative cruelty.

No theory is fundamentally immune to being abused - especially not one that is or that feels true.

However, it is important to acknowledge the deep effects that this dynamic can have on our social, psychological, and even somatic health - and the way it blurs the very boundaries between these categories.

This is where I must leave the personal tone of this essay and delve into systems neuroscience.

The husband to cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, co-founder of systems theory, and psychiatrist Gregory Bateson has (along with his colleagues) proposed in 1956 what is likely the most influential theory of schizophrenia to this day [12]. According to them, schizophrenia develops as a result of double bind situations where actors are subjected to mutually contradictory constraints they cannot possibly satisfy at the same time.

Most of us have experienced this in some mundane ways at some point of their lives. Maybe they have briefly dated a partner who invested no effort whatsoever in emotional connection but expected to be lauded as a supportive bedrock; maybe they have worked under a boss who gives them incoherent instructions and blames them when those predictably fail; maybe they’ve submitted their writing to academic journals who demand every article to make bold new claims while also saying nothing controversial whatsoever. These situations will have left them anxious and confused, unsure of what they are supposed to do and think, until they could extract themselves from the situation.

I could not possibly overstate how damaging such a situation is to someone’s psyche, when they are unable to extract themselves from it.

As I have laid out earlier, our ability to function cognitively relies critically on maintaining a coherent world- and self-model. We must have a sense that we understand what is going on, and that we know pretty well what it is that we are doing, if we are to understand and do anything at all. And double bind situations fundamentally undermine that sense.

When we are exposed to such situations intermittently, as full-grown adults with fairly stable concepts of the world and themselves, this will feel like the cold, creeping touch of anxiety. We will feel that we are somehow failing at the situation, that there is no clear way ahead, and disengage entirely or engage in corrective actions to reaffirm our world- and self-model.

But when we are exposed early enough, intensely enough, repeatedly enough, this can and will utterly break our ability to conceive of ourselves as competent agents in a legible world. This can and will utterly break our ability to function.

And I don’t think I need to tell you why performative cruelty, where one is not only attacked but also made to carry the blame for being attacked, constitutes a double-bind situation.

Disorders of cruelty

Once our sense of the world and our role within it breaks, our mind starts to slip.

The most direct way in which this will manifest is depression and anxiety disorders. We will maintain a fairly coherent model of the world and ourselves, but the world will become a dangerous, unrewarding place; in which our role will reduce to avoid danger or react to it. We will become unable to form coherent plans for the future, failing to conceive of any acceptable future or of any role we have in shaping it.

But from the perspective of cognitive security, this is an absolute failure state. To give in entirely would mean to cease working, to sever relations with friends and family, to stop getting out of bed, stop eating, and eventually stop breathing.

So when the stress is great enough, when no other option is available, our mind may go to great length to avoid this state, to reaffirm some sense of control, in any form, even one that cuts it from perceptible reality.

Schizophrenia is the poster child of this. Maybe this world where you have no power to decide for yourself, no power to perceive with any clarity, is not the real world. Maybe greater things are going on. Maybe the birds are talking to you, the cats are parts of the gay cabale, or this girl you’re dating is a witch paid by the CIA to keep tabs on you, or maybe they chartered a satellite to do that - now that you’re thinking of it, you can plainly see its blinking red light among the stars. But when you show it to others, they don’t seem to understand. Perhaps they’re in on it.

If your reality was strange enough, if your ability to trust your senses was undermined enough, maybe stranger beliefs would sound quite reasonable to you.

Think of it from the perspective of a child born from abusive or neglectful parents.

You wake up every day and you feel fear. Fear that today your mask will slip. That you will let anger take over fear for one instant, for one instant only, and let one word too many cross your lips, or say the right words with a tone that could be read as defiant. Or maybe that you will let your fear be seen, cracking the front that you are a happy child, ever grateful to your parents for their care and support and insults and blows.

Then Dad may glare at you one more time with eyes dulled from alcohol and start undoing his belt. Then Mom may tell you one more time how the only reason you were born is that the condom broke, and she was afraid what her own Mom would say if she got an abortion. Or they may otherwise remind you one more time that your existence is worthless, that nothing you feel or think or say matters, that your only value is to cheerfully support them in believing they are great parents and everything you ever felt was happiness and love and gratitude.

Chances are, there is nothing you can do to change that. They can plainly see your pain, as does everyone who meets you. They can see just as plainly their responsibility in that pain. They can see the guilt they carry every time they look at you. Hence, corrective action must be taken.

So maybe, just maybe, the birds are talking to you.

But perhaps, dear reader, you will ask yourself: the child is bound to grow at some point. The stressors are bound to disappear. Why don’t those people get better? Why don’t they get help?

Oh, you sweet summer child. Have you heard of some reason why people would refrain from offering basic empathy to those they can see are suffering?

Diseases of trust

I think anyone who considers the concrete implications of daily, repeated abuse in good faith for three consecutive seconds can understand how this could lead to long term damage in a human psyche. Three seconds would be quite a long time to reach that conclusion, in fact.

In contrast, we could consider the case of single instances of trauma as a comparatively easy thing to recover from. The fact that many people instead develop long-term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder should tip us off that something else is going on.

Maybe you suffered a random accident. Maybe you gave your trust to someone you shouldn’t have. Maybe you’ve seen your buddy be obliterated by an IED, and you’ve seen his body rain all around you in a mix of shredded body parts, gore, and red mist.

Sure, this is a bad moment to go through. But you learn. The world is dangerous.

Your metabolism redirects its activity, keeping you ready to fight unforeseen threats and neglecting basic maintenance. You stop investing into relationships that much. You start losing weight, or gaining it. You stop getting out of your house unless it’s really necessary. Your life expectancy and comfort shoots down as your stress level shoots up. Your ability to think of and commit to long term plans collapses.

But nothing about this is maladaptive.

As you personally witnessed, the world is indeed dangerous. Redirecting energy to immediate survival is an adaptive response to that - if not one you and I would wish to go through. Sooner or later, if the stressor is not a typical expression of the context in which you live, you will learn some more and progressively return to normal.

And then there is the existential aspect.

Feeling your legs hang uselessly from your hips after they were crushed by a drunk driver, watching powerlessly as your partner intentionally abuses your inebriated state to rape you, seeing the man you trusted most turned into flying bits of meat at a moment’s notice, maybe all of that wasn’t part of your life plans. Maybe you have no idea whatsoever how you adjust your role in the world after living through that.

The way we could address that and rebuild a new model of ourselves, cognitively speaking, is essentially by talking it over.

Our sense of agency is deeply tied to our social identity, for reasons beyond the scope of this piece [13]. We can go to a friend, have them hug us, have them welcome our pain, have them say something like “everything will be OK” or “your old self died and you are being born anew” or whatever else they seem to believe will help you go through this.

But if you recall, that’s not what most people tend to do in these circumstances.

Psychologist Jeremy Cooper talks of “jaded realism” to describe this phenomenon [14]. People diagnosed with PTSD do not only experience the hypervigilance and “dangerous world” belief which seems like a fairly adaptive response to traumatic events. They also experience a sense of loneliness, an antagonism between their experience of world and everyone else’s.

I wonder why that is.

Perhaps you intentionally suppress everything that you see and feel, and disconnect entirely from your bodily experience. Perhaps you attempt to engage with other people, relate to them from your new found sense of ever present danger.

Either way, they can feel you’re suffering. They can feel you don’t trust them.

Corrective action must be taken.

Your sense of agency erodes. You start doubting your own experience of the world. Your mind starts to slip.

Allostatic load and illness

Perhaps, dear reader, you think I have opened this essay on the experience of chronic illness as a simple illustration of how suffering can lead to performative cruelty, taken at random from all forms of structural oppression I could think of.

Oh, you sweet summer child.

You see, our body and mind are not that far apart.

Our metabolism, for all its faults and inefficiencies, is quite well-tuned. Threatening situations cause our energy to go in the brain and in the muscles, as they ought to. This is of course at the expense of all the basic maintenance tasks that keep us alive and well.

This predictably leads to heightened rates of illness, chronic and otherwise [15].

When we’re exposed to chronic stress, our mind starts to slip, and so does our body. Our lungs shut down, our glucose regulation goes off track, our stomach is eaten by the very acid it produces, our heart becomes prone to infection. Our immune system goes into overdrive, leaving us more vulnerable to viral infections and cancer development while it randomly attacks healthy tissues.

It sure sounds like keeping a living organism living is a hard task, and the less energy is available for this, the worse it gets at staying alive.

I have alluded earlier to ME/CFS, the illness whose experience I have recounted in the first section of this essay.

The onset of ME/CFS appears to be most often triggered by viral illnesses, although doubt remains [16]. But it is also associated with (somatically or psychologically) traumatic experiences [17].

I wonder why that is.

Once the illness develops, there is no known cure. Which is only on par for an illness with no known mechanism.

You have palliative treatment, of course. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t seem to do much, besides the corticosteroids. The corticosteroids allow me to keep breathing somewhat regularly. That’s something I quite enjoy. But the fatigue, the insomnia, the extreme somatic reactions to even mild effort, those will not recede.

The seizures do seem to get weaker and further apart, if I religiously spend most of my days resting, at the exclusion of any activities that could bring me joy, intimacy, or improve my overall condition in the medium-to-long term.

This is what “allostatic load” entails, for me and for the many other people who developed a similar condition due to illness or abuse or oppression.

The thing is, I need to do things to stay alive.

I need to cook, I need to clean, I need to keep more money coming into my bank account than getting out of it. Or I need to live from the land, weak and alone and seizure-prone. I need relationships to make this entire thing worthwhile, or at least relatively less painful than slicing my wrists [18]. And I don’t have the energy to do all of that.

Right now, I am doing fine. My job is writing on my computer from the comfort of my home, something I don’t exactly enjoy but I’m confident I can keep doing for a while. But I don’t know what happens next.

I could feel safe about my future with adequate social support. I don’t think I need to explain you why I don’t.

You may call it “jaded realism”.

Conclusive remarks

At this point of the argument, dear reader, you may feel that what I produced is an unnecessary exercise in bleakness and cynicism. Perhaps you think that I am unfairly attacking you by reminding you of all the big and small ways in which you personally participate in the dynamics I have described.

If so, I implore you, lash out!

Write seething reviews about how the woke left is demanding the working white man to apologize for existing; how I am appropriating the struggle of those who are really oppressed by some more important thing than what I’ve described here; how I am actually harming the mentally ill by making it out to be a structural issue rather than something they can fix of their own volition.

Accuse me of being a deranged mind spouting dangerous ideas about how structural oppression is actually grounded in individual behavior, about how the behavior of oppressors is grounded in specific socio-cognitive processes, thus excusing at the same time the ever invisible ghost of Oppression and its evil minions.

Explain to me in great detail how performative cruelty may perhaps exist in some land far far away that you couldn’t possibly know of and have certainly no part in, but also how you’re somehow certain I must have personally deserved every instance of performative cruelty thrown my way for how I reacted to them, and so does everyone who ever lived through it, and that no one is deserving enough to be suffering from it anyway.

It would be so kind of you to freely spend your time producing direct evidence for the model I have articulated here! To help me demonstrate what I want to demonstrate, beyond what I could do with my own words. To show me that I can not only predict you, but also control you. That the cruelty I’m expecting you to perform anyway is something I can intentionally trigger, not something I must anxiously anticipate and react to. You would do much to ground my sense of being a competent agent in a predictable world, to provide me with an ever needed sense cognitive security.

But if you read this far, chances are that you’re at least curious about what I’m getting to.

My point is in fact quite simple, and I hope unobjectionable.

The structural is an expression of the personal, and vice-versa.

For all the way in which performative cruelty is structurally embedded into our way of life, it still relies on the individual choice to perform it. And the viability of that choice itself relies on the collective choice to give a blind eye to it, when it’s aligned with the collective’s own sense of being Good Persons within a Fair World.

We can just as well make the other choice. When presented the opportunity to perform cruelty, we’re also presented with the opportunity not to do it.

Of course, to even recognize the existence of that alternative opens the gaping, bottomless abyss of anxiety.

Perhaps someone somewhere is suffering for reasons you’ve not personally acknowledged, perhaps you’ve personally participated in that suffering. Perhaps you’re not a Good Person, and you deserve whatever this Just World will throw at you.

If this is news to you, dear reader, I hate to break it to you [19]. But you’re not a Good Person, and this is not a Just World.

You’re a bumbling bag of flesh with a very partial grasp on reality, who spends an unhealthy amount of time obsessing about sex or work or gambling or whatever it is that your thing is. You shouldn’t have said that one girl she’s not pretty enough to date you when you were 9, nor should you have stayed home and ate 3 (three!) family-sized bag of chips in front of NCIS while you knew very well that your friend was in desperate need of support after their breakup. And you certainly know better than drinking coffee after 17:00.

None of this has anything to do with whether you will be eaten by frenzied dogs, lose your home to war, or witness your partner die a gruesome death from pancreatic cancer. None of this has anything to do with whether you’ll be dragged to the town square and publicly demeaned, then summarily judged and executed [20]. Whatever suffering fate and circumstances will throw at you are mostly beyond your control, and essentially unrelated to your moral character.

Everything you have will come to pass, one way or another. New things will come about.

None of this has anything to do with whether you can atone for your past faults, here and now. None has anything to do with whether you have the power to help those you have a duty of care towards. Sometimes you do, and then you should. Sometimes you don’t.

You owe the world, you owe yourself this little bit of clarity.

Everyone you’ve ever cared for was also a bumbling bag of flesh with a very partial grasp on reality, who committed faults countless times and will commit countless more in the future. And yet you cared for them. If you could do that, if you could care for others and accept them despite their faults, then you can extend the same grace to yourself.

You can accept to look at what it is that you are, what it is that that you do, what world it is that you live in. And this will bring you cognitive security.

Not the passive, comfortable one born from believing you are a Good Person in a Just World. The active, harsh one born from clarity about what you are and what you’re going to do. You will nourish what you want to keep and root out the rest. You will act towards becoming a good person and making your world a just one.

This security, you will need it. I promise you.

You will need it when you turn your new born clarity outwards, look around you and see the suffering. The pain. The violence.

You will need it when you see the cruelty of others, some whom you love, some whom you hate, and help them see it themselves. Sometimes with care and empathy, sometimes with harsh words mouthed from clinched teeth, sometimes (rarely) with fire and brimstone.

Because this is something you’re responsible to do now. You can’t say you didn’t know.

You’ll need to balance it, of course. Most of what happens in the world is beyond your control. So is what happens in the mind of others, and even in your own. And you need to survive, to manage your own allostatic load to bearable amount if you want to help others, to be present without prejudice.

But if you’ve read this text this far, I trust you’ll survive more suffering.

Do with it as you will.

[1]: Lim, Eun-Jin, Yo-Chan Ahn, Eun-Su Jang, Si-Woo Lee, Su-Hwa Lee, and Chang-Gue Son. “Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Prevalence of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME).” Journal of Translational Medicine 18, no. 1 (2020): 100. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12967-020-02269-0.

[2]: Grach, Stephanie L., Jaime Seltzer, Tony Y. Chon, and Ravindra Ganesh. “Diagnosis and Management of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 98, no. 10 (2023): 1544–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2023.07.032.

[3]: Blackless, Melanie, Anthony Charuvastra, Amanda Derryck, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Karl Lauzanne, and Ellen Lee. “How Sexually Dimorphic Are We? Review and Synthesis.” American Journal of Human Biology 12, no. 2 (2000): 151–66. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1520-6300(200003/04)12:2%253C151::AID-AJHB1%253E3.0.CO;2-F.

[4]: Extrapolation may be the death of numeracy, but these numbers are to be treated as rough ballparks anyway. There are many ways in which one may define and measure “being trans”, “being LGBTQ”, “being gender non-conforming”, none of which will capture all of the relevant population.

[5]: Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt Du. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1935.

[6]: Hipólito, Inês, Manuel Baltieri, Karl Friston, and Maxwell James Ramstead. “Embodied Skillful Performance: Where the Action Is.” Synthese 199 (January 2021): 4457–81. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02986-5.

[7]: Hipólito, Inês. “Cognition Without Neural Representation: Dynamics of a Complex System.” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2022): 5472. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.643276.

[8]: Or formally speaking, minimize Variational Free Energy: Parr, Thomas, Giovanni Pezzulo, and Karl Friston. Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. MIT Press, 2022.

[9]: Gilliam, Terry, and Terry Jones, dirs. Monty Python And The Holy Grail - Killer Bunny Rabbit. 1975. 0:07. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNClI4KBKy4.

[10]: In some form or another, that is. Please don’t look too closely into Rome.

[11]: Due to a very much active, very much preventable civil war that no one seems to care much about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80%93present)

[12]: Bateson, Gregory, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland. “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia.” Behavioral Science 1, no. 4 (1956): 251–64. https://doi.org/10.1002/bs.3830010402.

[13]: Guénin–Carlut, Avel. “From the Existential Stance to Social Constraints - How the Human Mind Becomes Embedded in Our Social, Cultural and Material Context.” Preprint, OSF, July 9, 2024. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/3kyzt.

[14]: Cooper, Jeremy. “Phenomenological Belief Formation in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder - ProQuest.” 2023. https://www.proquest.com/openview/9584b02ccbdbd7471482d14d53d1fd63/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y.

[15]: McEwen, Bruce S., and Eliot Stellar. “Stress and the Individual: Mechanisms Leading to Disease.” Archives of Internal Medicine 153, no. 18 (1993): 2093–101. https://doi.org/10.1001/archinte.1993.00410180039004.

[16]: Bateman, Lucinda, Alison C. Bested, Hector F. Bonilla, et al. “Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Essentials of Diagnosis and Management.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 96, no. 11 (2021): 2861–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2021.07.004.

[17]: Institut für Qualität und Wirtschaftlichkeit im Gesundheitswesen. Myalgische Enzephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS): Aktueller Kenntnisstand. 2023.

[18]: Just kidding. I’d go for the throat.

[19]: I’m actually having a great time writing this piece.

[20]: Of course, this is unless you’ve fully given in to the way of abuse, rape, and murder. To which I would only comment that maybe some performative cruelty is sometimes acceptable.