Aggressiveness

Being a person who always searches for a logical and reasonable way, these days I felt I needed to get to know more about aggressiveness, regarding the atmosphere on CS blogs lately. What I read, can be summed up in the following way:

There are two main reasons for aggressiveness:

1. Fear (of being hurt, revealed, abandoned, etc), therefore the aggressive behavior is self-defence through attacking;

2. Striving for justice (defence of someone, of some idea, cause, etc), therefore the aggression is a try to make the world a better place through imposing some "ideal model".

The aggressiveness has many faces, from mocking, sneaky comments, and sarcasm to direct personal attacks (here I won t comment the physical aggressiveness which is not relevant in our case).

The first impulse of the attacked one is to reply with the same and even more so the initial attack soon turns into a fight where there might be a logical winner (the one who uses strongest arguments or the attacked one) but actually there is no winner. Why? Because the aggressiveness unlocks irrational energies, where the logic and common sense always fail. The irritation, fear, fury, jealousy, envy, and hatred are very strong feelings coming from the dark realm of the unconscious, and drag us back to the uncivilized.

What to do when we meet aggressiveness? Obviously, there are two ways: to react or not to react. They both have their strong arguments. The psychologists suggest several steps to deal with aggressiveness. First of all, to try to understand the attacking person. To see their fears, or other reasons. Not to speculate with them, though. Understanding the other helps us seeing them rationally and with empathy, not as some furious monster who menaces our inner peace. This understanding extinguishes our anger and stops us from replying to the attack with attack.
A second step could be either ignoring the attacks or replying in a firm but calm and polite way.

Remember: You can never change the other person. You can t "bribe" an attacking person with kindness nor defeat them with logic. Better focus on yourself and leave them fighting with their demons.

Pro Domo Sua

The net and especially CS (blogs) unlock aggressiveness in many people, including me. For quite a time I have asked myself why. The well-known argument of feeling safe while being hidden behind the pc is true. We d never talk to someone the way we talk here if it was eyes in eyes.
But for me, there is another, more intriguing reason. The weird, awful familiarity between people on the net. The luxury to share everything, even the most intimate stuff with random people has a very high price: we get terribly familiar with these people and therefore we lose our private space. There are no limits between us anymore which means no inhibitions for our interference in the personal life of completely unknown people. We allow ourselves to give advice and to comment without being asked, to be mentors, to ask arrogant questions etc, etc, everything that in "real life" would be considered utterly unkind and out of the bonton.

I myself, having some intelligence, logic and ability to express myself well, have been tempted to feel superior to many here. Yes there are silly people, hypocrites, mean people, arrogant ones, etc, etc. I felt it my "cause" here to defend justice and to impose some ideal model on CS blogs. Model which was in my head and according to which everybody here should be smart, interesting, writing great intelligent blogs, not attacking each other, always saying the truth, etc.
Totally unreal aim. The world and CS blogs in particular, are far from perfection. We can t make the fool clever, the hypocrite frank, the mean one an angel.

We can only work on ourselves and express ourselves in a balanced way. Whoever has ears will hear, whoever has eyes will see.