The Martialist: The Magazine For Those Who Fight Unfairly

Suspense and Suspicion:

Politics, Cowardice, and the Herd Mentality Online

By Phil Elmore



The failing of good men and women, I have heard it said, is that they have a hard time believing someone could look them in the eyes and lie to them – or lie about them. The irony to the falsehoods spread through media of mass communication – in print, on the radio, on television, and across the Internet – is that so many of them are about and accepted by the good people who should know better. These same men and women also fail, routinely, to understand irrational behavior. They are reasonable and they cannot imagine why anyone else would behave differently. They learn harsh lessons as a result.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Why is this a topic of discussion in this issue of The Martialist? Simply put, we must never forget context, for facts without context are meaningless absolutes. Nothing exists separate and apart from all other existents, unconnected to other facts of reality. The Martialist is published in the midst of the vibrant and very active medium that is the Web. We cannot, therefore, ignore the landscape on which our house is built – or the highway across which we must walk as we attempt to avoid speeding cars.

The problem of which I speak is one that affects all discourse online. Take, for example, this publication. It contains articles on self-defense, some of which are general and others of which are specific. Anyone could (and should, in some instances) disagree with what is written here. We encourage this, in fact, for this magazine is a venue for the exchange of ideas and for frank talk about realistic self-defense. One can learn as much from what won't work as from what will.

For this approach to function, however, we must receive feedback. We must expect others who see something they do not like to take the time to write something constructive and send it along. What we can't accept is simply being written off as heretics, as unbelievers, or as infidels for daring to write something contrary to the opinions of... whomever. There are people in the world willing to discuss ideas they don't like, for the sake of exchanging information and achieving a more refined and perhaps deeper understanding of what they do like. Sadly, there are also plenty of people who consider any deviation from a particular set of party lines to be thoughtcrime of the highest order.

The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed – would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper – the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it...

...If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that event, it never happened – that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death...

- George Orwell, 1984

Everyone and everything has a shatterpoint, a stress threshold. Quite frankly, I've reached mine. The trick to knowing your own shatterpoints is understanding that snapping isn't necessarily the same thing as breaking.

I do not accept the politics.

I do not accept the complex intersection of Venn diagrams detailing who is on speaking terms with whom, who likes or dislikes whom, who will speak with or otherwise behave civilly to whom.

I am tired of it and I think you should be, too – for it is all counterproductive. Worse, it is often shrouded in high-minded, moral terminology that is diametrically opposed to the very behavior cowering behind that aegis of words like "honor" and "brotherhood." At some point, those who believe they are "looking out for" one another simply become a gang, a cult, a bunch of thugs who've abdicated their responsibility to think for themselves, in their haste to see as enemies the latest additions to their faction's official list of unbelievers.

...Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary...

- George Orwell, 1984

CLOSE TO HOME

Recently I had my own experience with this phenomenon, though I can't say it was the first time. At an Internet discussion forum where I was part of the "inner circle" of privileged members, I ran afoul of a political dispute in which friends of mine were engaged. Summarily banned from the forum by association, I made a few queries of the administration to see if my friendship with those considered persona non grata was the reason I had been shown the door. (Ironically, I have friends on both sides of the dispute.)

I was not given the courtesy of a reply.

Not long after that, one of the other members of that "in crowd" made some very hostile comments at another discussion forum. Confused, I e-mailed him to find out what was going on. He refused to answer my questions. I could only conclude that he was the worst sort of coward, a passive-aggressive errand boy pursuing the grudges of others. These sorts of people derive great power from the umbrage of the mob, for they hide behind majority opinion in order to take jabs at those whom they'd never attack by themselves. The coward's comments, however, tied to some disturbing rumors being sent my way via e-mail.

I was forced to deduce, though I had no real evidence and could not believe it, that things were being said about me that were not true. My reputation for honesty was being smeared at the forum from which I'd been banned. The coward's words pointed to this. The administration had proclaimed me, without appeal and without explanation, a heretic, an infidel. I was being demonized in my absence. As a result, people I did not even know were willing to think ill of me, despite all evidence to the contrary.

For all I knew, in fact, theirs was some form of righteous indignation. My mind began to reel as I considered the implications. Manufactured evidence, edited posts, unrefuted lies... What was being said and done? I had no way to know. To be unable to give my side of the story, to be unable to deny the (apparently minor, but no less galling) accusations, to be unable to stand up for myself or even know exactly what was being said, was very distressing.

This was uncharted territory for me. I am an honorable man, a person of integrity who adheres to a very strict moral code. I could no more do the petty, silly things of which I'd been accused than I would steal from or defraud someone. I am very unyielding on this issue: I do not lie. I am a very outspoken person and I make enough enemies with the truth, trying to be as objective as possible. I see no reason to add to my woes by being less than honest at all times.

I learned a very valuable lesson from the whole affair. I am a naive person, despite my positions on the need for awareness from physical threats. I have a hard time believing people would intentionally say things about me that are not true, specifically to hurt me. I have a hard time believing stupid online politics would be reason enough for others to do that. I learned, however, that these things do happen. This drove home the need to be extremely wary of, and reject whenever possible, the politics of human interaction on the Web, particularly where it concerns publications like The Martialist and online discussion sites focusing on weapons and self-defense.

...It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody... And the people under the sky were also very much the same – everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same – people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world...

- George Orwell, 1984

Think of the time and energy wasted pursuing stupid political or emotional disputes and grudges. If any of the people who have sent me hate mail or otherwise tried to deride, intimidate, or mischaracterize me online tried to do that to my face, I'd spit in theirs. I never say anything online that I would not say in person – and I have nothing but contempt for cowards. Those who subscribe to the herd mentality so common to online politics are just that, too: cowards. They are intellectually bankrupt, emotionally retarded, mindlessly hostile boys and girls who do not understand the world of adults and do not grasp their failure to join it.

...All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

- George Orwell, Animal Farm

Amusingly, the very people living out swaggering, tough-guy, mall ninja fantasies are the ones quickest to accuse me of committing those same sins. That doesn't matter much to me. I don't take myself very seriously and never expect anyone else to, either. I try to do what I do, write what I write, and offer what I offer while ignoring a lot of the nonsense about which I used to spend so many hours arguing. The problem is that members of the herd create a lot of grief for those who deserve better – or who, at the very least, don't deserve the less that is often what they get.

The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

- Ayn Rand

ATLAS SHRUGGED FOR GOOD REASON

Ayn Rand wrote of noble, idealized heroes who epitomized "the good." The good are persecuted simply for being good, according to Rand, because lesser men and women are envious of what those good people do, are, and create. While it's tempting to hide behind this, dismissing all criticism as jealousy or pettiness, it holds true far more often than it does not. Those who create, those who produce, those who have the courage to speak out, to be honest, to be objective, will always be targets for those who cannot or will not do any of those things. They will be vilified by those whom Rand called "second-handers" and they will be derided by those who are intimidated by that which they will never be.

What we all must do, individually, is refuse to be part of the problem while resisting, with every molecule of our beings, those that are. We must recognize their cowardice for what it is. We must stare unflinchingly into the dull, empty eyes of those who hate us for no good reason, even into the eyes of those who believe, wrongly, that they have cause and right to bring us to what they believe is "justice." We must stand up for the truth. We must respect those who have earned it. We must sneer contemptuously at those who would sit in judgment on us in ignorance or from deception. We must refuse to give sanction to evil.

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
- Ayn Rand

The Martialist and its publisher do not recognize petty politics.

I, as a man, do not recognize stupidity.

Those who disagree with anything said here, by anyone, are encouraged to share their perspectives here in print, with honesty, like adults.

Those who disagree with anything I, Phil Elmore, have said or have done are encouraged to face me like men and name their grievances in the light of day and in the public square.

Those incapable of doing so are invited to go to Hell.

Guilt is a rope that wears thin. - Ayn Rand
	No amount of philosophy or facts will deter those determined to think ill of you. Remember that.