The Nature Of Aggression: We Never Feel Aggressive, But We Mimic The Aggression Of Others: Covid Made Us Weird

We All Feel It, But Where Did It Begin? Surely, It's Others

“You know the modern world is essentially critical.”

—Rene Girard

“I condemn neither the living nor the dead.”

—Osip Mandelstam

Warning: This might be a depressive post. It’s certainly humorless. Please don’t think I’ve lost hope.

Neglect

It’s become close to impossible to be a human being in the way one wishes to.

Close to impossible to maintain human to human connection, as one is always distracted by the tides of lies and the vainglorious addiction to batting and swatting at them. A video game with no end in sight.

The only solution would be to quit cold turkey, to admit defeat. To forget it all, leave it all alone.

This would be the only path back to becoming a complete human being again. Exiting the so-called Matrix.

But outside this thing, would we encounter any old friends? We’re covered in positions and opinions and grievances; Nobody ever accuses us of lovelessness, because it’s so easy to hide, in cloaks of I’m just looking for the truth.

We should be accused of lovelessness. But it’s entirely concealed. This vapor nobody acknowledges, that kills fast. I can remember being a person who was driven by the wish to know people.

I never meant to become somebody who lives in the Matrix, issuing opinions, unable to stop, or know when to shut up. To be born anew would be to be rid of one’s opinions, and defenses.

It took 35 years to remove the isolating cloak of “AIDS denier,” which was a cloak of humiliation and murder. We clawed and screamed to get out of it, to be considered “good.”

AIDS was Act One: The first Monarch agenda in the form of insane and baseless virus “theory.” Act Two—Covid—was much worse.

Lovelessness is the plague, and it attacks us all.

I used to say AIDS was one frequency: Accusation.

I was right. But the frequency of accusation afflicted also the dissidents who began to hate the dissidents who were moderate on the subject of the existence of the negative deity that existed as a perfect psychosis. No matter which way you turned, you were induced to accuse/abject/reject/mock—in the name of a cold mountain peak with perhaps three people on it. The most right.

I want to devote my mind and time to poetry, see if I can describe what makes it poetry.

That would feel worthwhile, since I love words and seeing all the things they can do, in different sequences. Maybe you would all leave, or find me pretentious. Poetry can make us actually happy (which is why they took it from us, decades ago.)

I think we agree: Life is only “worth living” because of people and memories, but we dig and dig through the Matrix, seeking to find them again, as soon as we have settled mountains of complex arguments, designed to evade resolution. Why? Because the goal, the neurosis, is accusation, and more accusation. Maybe we will get around to love when we have finished accusing, but that day never seems to come.

Being right is a sterile substitute for being with people, but it’s all they gave us, the technocrats who built this thing.

It’s become nearly impossible to reach people, or be reached by people. To see people, to hear people, to know them or trust them. Trusting people is happiness. Why can’t we do it? Because we’re addicted to accusation, which promises to purify, offer catharsis, but never does.

How did this happen? Aren’t we complicit?

It must mean we are already augmented, part Borg. I believe they have done something to us, I feel it, the diminishment of humanness I once took for granted. It hit me like an illness, in 2020, this alien version of myself, who drifted in outer space, thinking and thinking and thinking. Countering lies like a bat swallows flies.

Richard used to call me every single evening: “Celia, I got you,” he would say, with his warm voice. He was held prisoner in a veteran’s home in Minneapolis, and we knew all forms of reaching one another that were possible “before Covid,” were off limits, but one could not quite say why. When they let him out of there (once) to come visit me, it meant he had to be isolated for at least two weeks when he returned. Everything was separation, punishment, insane rules, and more separation. What was this, a penal colony? Americans, suddenly, had to agree that everything was dangerous. This was the new “debt.” Richard never despaired; I always despaired. When I got the call that he had died, it felt like some kind of digitized message—a mistake of some kind. I would grieve alone, though we were once part of a group of friends who convened in person, each year. Now it was unheard of. Everybody was either alive or dead but either way, equally unreachable. Somehow.

Everybody was far away, and the living were farther away than the dead. How did they do it? I don’t mean to be creepy or scary. Maybe I should write about more concrete things, like how many dead we can count, today.

Accusation

Everybody is a false thing, a bad thing, an un-knowable thing, nobody is good enough, or good at all. This kind of kindling keeps us alive, these days. We bond through mutual antipathies. It never produces happiness.

Somebody installed a mimetic accusation virus, and we can’t seem to rid ourselves of it.

What Are We Guilty Of?

I’m so glad you asked.

We’re guilty of lovelessness, pretending to be the opposite of credulity.

Hostility pours forth, between people with only fractionally different positions. Why is it so beguiling to people to condemn people they have so little evidence against? Why is it seemingly enough to say: “I never trusted…” such and such?

Imagine how different it sounds to say: “I trusted…” such and such. People brandish their loss of trust like lace collars signifying social status.

The dance goes on.

Distrust is not admirable, per se. It is sometimes necessary.

One man who had the answer was Rene Girard. He said that aggression is imitative. “Mimetic.” He said that all of human history is driven by the cycle of scapegoating and purge (release from tension, imagined purification.) Rene Girard said that both our desires and our hostilities are created by witnessing others (what they have and what they are angry about.) If we see somebody turn against somebody, we imitate that aggression, and imagine it to be our own. Aggression, according to Girard, is highly infectious, (mimetic.) This makes man a very dangerous animal, for he engages in what Girard calls “bad reciprocity.” Revenge.

Animals don’t murder. They only take each conflict to the point of domination, says Girard.

I’ve weeded through many Girard videos, and videos by Girard-ologists, who are often tiresome. We saw him speak about Peter’s denial recently, and I think we all agree he’s worthy of our trust.

We need to examine how we are behaving when we think we are behaving as “self.”

Who will be tomorrow’s scapegoat?

I myself have “murdered” old friends since 2020 because they got behind Covid lies, and I felt the need to condemn them, and now I can’t take it back. See what they made us do? I don’t feel right, or good, or pure. Do you?

How can reciprocal aggression be stopped?

The second speaker, at the 20 minute mark, from Northern Ireland, speaks to this beautifully.

I’m railing against the downgrading of Human 1. to post-Covid Human 2.0, a thin-skinned, brittle cynic who tosses off our own like a princess, feeling the pea.

Who will be left, when we supposedly win, but lose ourselves in the process?

What’s it all for, if we’re all trash? Must we all be trash? Can’t we be people?

We Could Be Heroes Just For One Day

In the first years of Covid, there was a feverish drive to mint heroes left and right. Dazzlingly gifted hosts with huge audiences and powerful conversations. That kept us company, after they aborted our lives by changing the spaces between us, even if we did not believe a word of it. I keep coming back to the same word: “Somehow.”

This is some next level frequency sorcery these people are up to. Question is: How to go back, go forward, find each other, get out if this murky grey dream. Can we?

Next act:

In 2023, it became all the rage to tear every last person down. Two sides of a coin, admiration and accusation. Both are enemies of human connection.

I never use the word hero—not anymore.

Nobody ever does anything to be a hero. People just do what they do, for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes, it yields some piece of truth that sometimes helps people get out of a trap.

Draw people, when you draw, don’t draw heroes. People are not great for being void of flaws or infractions, but for their actual people-ness, the moss and sound, the twinkle in the eye. Work to bring back this concept: People.

The speaker from Northern Ireland points out that when a mass violence, mass death has occurred, you get entire nations of victims with no perpetrator.

“Nobody did anything.”

I think about trying to express remorse, but I can’t find anybody who might receive it. They’re all gone.

The best I can do is commit to being loyal now, even if it’s ghosts I am loyal to. I want to tell you about some people who I think you would have loved, if you knew them. I want to paint them alive and laughing, human and flawed; I want to take them out of these graves, where lovelessness turned them into fossils. We shouldn’t love people for being right. We’re trading in a false currency, so proud of our mind-centered sterility. Ashamed of anything that would make us wrong, but never ashamed of becoming loveless, which is really the great crime we all pretend we did not commit.

Now I’m worried I have alienated you for real. Delete or publish? Does it matter?

I volunteer to be embarrassing, because I’m breaking a window, rioting against myself.

Tell me, please, what you would like me to write about.

Tell me if any of this sounds familiar. If it doesn’t, unfortunately, I’m crazy.