How familiar are you with emotional blackmail?
Maybe it’s unfair to call it emotional blackmail – most of it accrued through one’s own volition, after all – nevertheless whenever I dream about disappearing so I realize emotional blackmail is the razor-thread wrapped around a neck.
Long time ago a friend of a friend would threaten to kill himself if his girlfriend ever left him. This is a more extreme example, but is the gestalt: the governance structures and underhanded expectations leave you at anxiety gunpoint when people realize they can take advantage, and they will if they’re desperate enough.
A core American principle is Negative Liberty – that is, a freedom to be left alone. A freedom to be left alone means you don’t have to deal with anyone, you don’t have to pay anyone, you don’t have to be wedded to anything. You can refuse business whenever, and you can ignore whatever everyone else is doing. You can walk away. You don’t have to listen. You don’t need to be here.
It’s a negative-tint on the Golden Rule, yet it seems to be a shining star if you ever do want to navigate the world, when the world reveals itself to you. It will, it does – this is the curse of empathy I’m getting at: coddled and coddled until someone implants a hammer into your skull because the accommodations stop. Getting your way is a euphemism for pushing someone else to submission, more often than not.
And so both parties lose in such submission. Because Empathy and Avoiding Conflict is smothering someone with a pillow to death. And I smother people every day, and I don’t know why. Well, I know why. Because of emotional blackmail.
It’s easier to stay silent and minimize any demands – neutralize any demands, really – because it’s the convenient and cowardly way out. That’s the trouble though, and that’s why many delight at the blubber rich kid getting his skull smashed in. Because these are the type of lies which destroy a nation.
There’s such a big ego hidden in empathy. Whether it is to wear another as the skin suit in order to feel something, “living voraciously” – or an assumption that whoever has the skin to wear can’t handle anything on their own, so you wire yourself in to pilot them. How they can’t handle it, whether it’s an emotion, situation – til one cannot handle the outbursts anymore.
Would you rather render everyone as the damned and the wretched, sentencing them to lifelong bondage of inadequacy and inability to stomach anything? It’s a death sentence, and it’s a death sentence all around you everyday. You can probably list more than a few you know are too unhinged to handle anything because they’ve been coddled (or, read as: avoided) all their lives.
Maybe there’s a balance, or maybe there never was. I don’t know what a healthy connection looks like, but both “healthy” and “connection” feels like the benevolent Masters’ slogan making this rat cage.
They say indifference is more insidious than evil – that “[…] it makes the angels weep.” But there’s something sickening about setting it all up as failure, masqueraded under prettier words like “care, pity” when it’s preparing one for slaughter. Cast out to tundra so one is devoured by wolves.
You can either turn your head away or wonder how much longer it’ll take for you to accept Nature’s ways.
In the meantime, one can clutch their pendant of Negative Liberty, hoping it all goes away. Waiting for everyone to disappear, so you can disappear too. Staying close to silence between the outside wailing or impositions – demands which are rather innocuous but chips at one’s understanding.
It may seem like a lackluster solution – Negative Liberty, somewhat of a dream, half-reaching – but the beauty here is that, well, if you cling tightly enough, well, you’ll manage to avoid everything. It’s the second best solution.
Maybe in time we’ll all come to know the morning star, and inaugurate the Devil’s party, let the angels weep.
Because, ultimately, Indifference is Nature’s way.