Moral Polarization: The Good, The Bad, And The Abuser
If you have been on tumblr even a short amount of time in the SJW blog-o-sphere you will have noticed by now the obsession with call-out culture -- either the perpetration of callout posts, which can vary from crimes such as ‘i don’t get along with this person’ to brutal sexual assault -- or the outright complete criticism of this culture, and the damage that is brought about from the community’s expectation of treating every callout post with the same level of importance, no matter its contents.
When involved in the culture that aggressively mandates the silent boosting of callout posts, no matter how many degrees of separation you have from who the post is about, it has uniquely roped you into what can be considered a form of crowd-sourced slandering.
As touched on in a previous post, there are many loaded words in the language of SJW cultic communities. Many of these carry the sole purpose of devaluing, silencing, and othering any given individual whom you or your peers disagree with.
And one of these words, which had already carried a very heavy meaning before its mass appropriation but the SJW community, is “Abuser.”
Anyone can be an abuser in this community. Disagree with you on a very heavy political topic and yelled at you about it? Abusive. Someone treat you like shit for the duration of your friendship because you didn’t actually get along even though you were both pretending you did? Extra Abusive. Someone give you flashback after flashback for refusing to trigger warn their posts? Literally Hitler.
And with many things in the SJW community, there is no gray area for the this broad term -- abuser -- and all are treated with equal hate, disgust, and othering. Once someone has been deemed an “abuser” by another in their community, and the callout post has cycled, no matter the content, it is aggressively mandated to cut off all contact with the criminal.
One of our mods, in 2014, had a callout post created about them by someone they considered a close friend. Their crime? Disagreeing on if an ironic novelty gay-furry-pride nazi armband with a rainbow pawprint that one of their friends made was anti semetic or not. The post was erected with very little text, their name clearly bolded in the title of the post so those could easily knew who was being exhumed without having to go through the effort of reading the post and deciding for themselves. It including several screenshots taken out of context on twitter of their argument, and a claim that this person had caused these people a lot of harm... by not getting along with them.
Even though the post detailed a situation which should have never entered the public eye because it was not describing a public menace like the tone of the post phrased it to be, and anyone who took the time to read and consider the context of the post would see it as a petty interpersonal drama, it began to circulate.
The post circulated quickly, and overnight, the subject of the post had many ‘friends’ drop completely out of their life. Their friends had been encouraged to immediately drop contact. Someone, who had already dropped them and grew to dislike the supposed moral criminal, added to the post on how they were definitely abusive because their url had a reclaimed slur in it that personally offended them, despite their own moral logic allowing slur reclaiming.
Our mod left tumblr, terrified of who in their immediate vicinity might spread the slander further in an attempt to produce good karma within their cultic community. They still live in paranoid terror, even though the other author of the callout post had personally apologized to them, disengaged with the person who proposed the callout, and reconnected with them, including others who had also been manipulated into contributing.
But their public apology to our moderator was left unnoticed. Mostly due to the fact the people who saw it had already forgotten about the callout, having either not read it before boosted it silently from pressure from their peers, or it had completely left their attention span.
But the damage that had been done was deeply rooted and long-lasting. They were branded an “Abuser” by the tumblr collective. All for making the mistake of disagreeing on an ironic novelty armband.
In a previous post, we posted a very important video. A video which describes the social and psychological effect of moral-panic and loaded words of call-out culture. It describes the public spectacle that was destroying a women’s entire life and mental health because of a single, misinterpreted joke that made a jab at her own ethnicity. Her life now lays in ruins, depression overtaking her health -- but to the rest of the world, she is yesterday’s meme.
The word “Abuser” was not mentioned, but it is the same functional outcome -- Any one you disagree with, do not get along with, can be labeled to the one of the two sides of the polarized scale: Good or Bad.
You’re good if you follow the moral ideology of your peers. You’re good if you do not side with a labeled “abuser”, thus making yourself an abuse-apologist, no matter your reasoning.
You’re bad if you disagree or do not get along with anyone who has any iota of power within the community. You’re bad since there is no other way to describe you. If you are not perfect in the eyes of your community, you are not flawed, you are not human, you are not ‘normal’ -- you are bad. Flatly bad.
This polarization is encouraged so heavily in SJW communities, since without it, many of the moral laws begin to fall apart. If someone can not be easily categorized in an “in-group” or an “out-group”, then a lot of the moral distinctions stop making any form of logical sense, since many of them rely on moral abstraction as opposed to the functional, tangible reality that they claim to explain.
This abstraction of moral polarization is uniquely able to exist in environments that allow this disconnect and abstraction from the real world. Tumblr, Jonestown, any community of cultic religious or moral beliefs that specifically places themselves in remote parts of the world to cut their members off from anything that would shatter their fragile ecosystem of beliefs of “good” and “bad.”
It is much easier for one to view those whom they dislike as a polarized concept of “evil”. And since it is encouraged to such an extent in the SJW community, can be easily used as a tool to damage anyone you do not like.
Because, how could one feel at peace if they come to terms with the person that they caused irreparable psychological damage to wasn’t evil after all, just a complex, imperfect being with many unique life experiences just like themselves?
They can’t, because that would make them bad. And they certainly aren’t bad, no no. Because they’re not the other.
Until they make that one fateful, imperfect mistake.