Insults and Civilization

Divine Madness Series

Insults as Holy Language

An insult is communication that sustains emotional injury through the medium of words. But it’s what’s left unsaid that does most of the offending. Wisdom tells us that if you want to insult someone, it’s best to leave them where they offend themselves on your behalf. In other words, the actual work of offending someone is done by the victim while the assailant enjoys the pleasures from witnessing emotional harm but done at the expense of the injured. The offender does less of the actual insulting and more of adding stumbling blocks for the victim to trip up using his own words. The common advice we’ve been told is,

you cannot be insulted by someone else unless you let him or her.

By this, it means that an insult serves less like a trap and more like an invitation. But I partially agree. Most people when they insult you will make it clear that their intent was to offend. You will be left with no doubt but to either accept you defeat or defend your honor. But I will also argue that it’s morally acceptable and honest to trap someone in a self-injury of words. It’s the trap that puts the victim of an insult to properly arrive at auto-injury, skillfully placed by the enunciator of speech with the intent to offend.

The above phrase could be reworded as,

you cannot be insulted by someone else’s words unless you’re too stupid enough to let it offend you.

This phrase sums up what the original spirit of the first sentence but it’s incomplete. The above sentence condemns the action while simultaneously using the action to show why it’s condemned in the first place. It suggests that if you become offended by someone else’s words, then maybe you deserve it.

How moralism breeds politically tame citizens

This paradox of condemning while approving verbal violence shows that insults appropriately belong in the political arena. This paradox shows why the ability to insult someone without them know it forms the basis of a literate civilization. It’s also the source of religious and divine experience. We shall examine insults as verbal violence in the political realm. If we are to accept that humans invented morality just to have the species get along, and justify their existence in civilization, then insults and verbal violence would seem to destroy civilization.

Moralism is for losers who lose political arguments. What makes insults so impactful is that it can elevate people’s self-worth or devalue them without having to be taught anything of it or how it works. Compare this to the Western philosophic tradition in that it helped humanity progress from a primitive violent animal into a social and political animal. The history of individual rights and freedoms always improves the human being as long as he comes to know these rights and learn them through lessons. People have to be taught not just about this knowlege but of themselves. The danger is that the human will become too aware of their position in politics. But if comes to embody these rights and freedoms not in the classroom but in the battle field, then the “lessons” comes precisely from sources which cannot be thought. It is because it can not be taught that allows for the possibility of rediscovering great political speech from great leaders or teachers.

Liberalism says that human beings are capable of having self-control and thus are free choose to live their lives according to what seems best for them. And justice - to be treated as to how one wants to be treated - all without the government telling them what to do, is the liberal progressive. Liberals are thus said to be progressive individualists. They believe that winning individual rights (like freedom of speech) is synonymous with coming to know rights, justice, and morals. Once a society receives a basic education in becoming a trusted well informed member of society, such a society can be trusted to govern itself. This society is more pleasant to live with and it saves up on costs were it not to hire policemen to patrol people everywhere. But it doesn’t seem obvious as to why people would come to insult each other. (It has to do with skillfully and artfully evading detection). Verbal violence is the opposite of a diplomatic, polite, cosmopolitan.

Economic foundations and Man’s Burdens from Nature.

If a nation develops a powerful economy, it can generate a ton of goods and services that facilitates the living conditions of citizens in order to relive man’s estate from the burdens of nature. People will choose to enjoy their life in the incentives that money and capital can buy. There exists sufficient alternatives in finding enjoyment in one’s environment than that which comes in the suffering in others. The maturity that undergoes to a nation’s citizens to develop in an economy where sacrificing insignificant and petty issues to go after nobler and bigger conflicts creates long-lasting happiness. So then why do people choose to stoop so low by insulting others which is politically and economically more “expensive”? It would logically follow that only those who are “losers” of the liberal project, the one where people can’t escape nature’s hold, are resentful of other’s who succeeded. But iron sharpens iron and a sword can potentially be crafted out of it. How is developing a thick skin anything less than an escape from the very think you are trapped?

Not just communication breakdown

We have literary allusions like, “give him enough rope to hang himself” to describe the conniving and cunning arrangement of words to properly offend someone. If the enunciator of speech speaks (a string of phonemes- sound words) in a fashion to be interpreted as an insult by the receiver, then many people will dismiss verbal violence as relative and open to interpretation. This is why many people come to believe that people misunderstand each other and that if people simply had better communication skills, people would never get offended. Even worse is the “official” or “proper” way to handle an insult is through imagination - “imagine your opponent having a bad day” or “imagine the actions that lead him or her to resort to insulting and you’ll understand that it’s one big misunderstanding.” This is the polite and diplomatic way to deal with insults according to the neoliberal regime since insults are simply a communication exercise prone to misunderstanding. This pig-headed determination shows up in the political arena known as relativism.

Not just “Game Theory”

It is the receiver that must complete their own injury moving pain past the domain of the physical to the spiritual. It is this that makes it go beyond being a simple misinterpretation or a mere psychological phenomena. Self-injury internalizes into the sensible and emotional/ psychological. The enunciator of speech, if he intends to insult someone, must hide the insult with speech if it is to land correctly. There are 2 reasons. (1) The principle of defense and (2) humiliation insurance trap.

The principle of Defense