Curtis, I'm finally getting back to this post of yours, which I think was an important one. Possibly later today I will riff on it in the context you presented -- the danger *to* guru-wannabees of followers projecting their shit onto them. But this morning I'm going to take it in another direction, to another danger I perceive in the world we live in.
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <curtisdeltablues@...> wrote: > > This speaks (outside this particular context) of whether > or not we ever are doing someone a favor by conferring on > them guru status. At first the payoff seems obvious, they > get rich, and if they are so inclined, they get their pick > of some high end tail. But unless they really have the > narcissist or psychopathic tendency strongly, somewhere > there is a disconnect between the image projected on them > and who they know they are inside. The direction I'm going to shift this insight onto is not the world of spiritual groups and cults, where such dangers have been known and recognized for centuries. Instead, I'd like to rap about another type of group, one that is similarly inviting and encouraging border- line personalities with a strong leaning to narcissism and psychopathic behavior to *act out* that behavior, get recognized and even praised for it, and thus have those tendencies in them become more pronounced, and often spiral out of control. I'm talking about the Internet. On it, people who are basically no-talent nobodies can drop into a chat forum and *suck attention*. In real life, no one would give them any; they'd just look at the person acting like a clownish troll and walk away. But on the Net, people don't seem to have the discrim- ination (or compassion) to do that. They actually *fall for* the troll's attempts to get attention, and give their attention to them. They praise them, they cheer them on when they're acting out, and they in some cases become *enablers* helping a mentally ill person to become more so. Segue to the subject of bars. This is not as much of a non-sequitur as it seems. My contention that Internet chat groups like FFL are much closer to barrooms than they are ashrams. And one of the things you learn about bars is that some people just can't handle alcohol. They reach their limit and then just keep drinking, becoming abusive and picking fights. On the Net, some people can't handle attention. They do the same thing. A few years ago I lived in Back Bay Boston, and worked a walk away from my apartment in the same neighborhood. Therefore it really *was* my 'hood; I rarely ever had to use my car to go anywhere. The closest bar to my apartment -- really -- was the bar used as a model for the TV show "Cheers." I used to go there from time to time. And what I learned was that it was NOT the friendly neighborhood bar where "everybody knows your name." Yeah, it had it's share of Norms and Cliffs and Sams, but it also had *more* than its share of angry, abusive drunks who couldn't hold their liquor. It was a rare night when one of these lonely nobodys would *not* pick a fight -- either verbal or physical -- and ruin the vibe for everyone in the bar. And then one day I noticed that this behavior had stopped. Almost overnight. The drunks stopped getting sloppy drunk and picking fights. The sociologist in me wondered why, so I looked into it. What had happened was that Massachusetts had passed new laws that allowed victims of drunks to sue not only them but the *enablers* who had allowed and encouraged them to get that drunk. If someone was hurt as the result of someone driving drunk, they now had the right to sue the bartenders, waiters, and waitresses that had served the driver enough alcohol that he or she *was* drunk, and then allowing them to drive. If someone was beaten up or raped by a drunk, they too had the right to sue the enablers. So bartenders and waiters and waitresses started *cutting the drunks off*. Instead of allowing them to sit there and keep drinking long past their limit, and thus get sloppy drunk and become abusive and angry and a danger to themselves and others, they started cutting them off after a reasonable number of beers or whiskeys. And the vibe of Massachusetts bars changed overnight. They became nice places where "everybody knows your name" again. I honestly think the same thing should happen more often on the Internet. There are mentally ill people on the Net. And moderators of forums who allow them to act out in an attempt to suck attention from others and thus feed their narcissistic or psychopathic tendencies are NOT doing them a favor. They're *enablers*. They're helping these people to get WORSE, not better. And in the process they're lowering the vibe of the very forums they moderate. They're allowing them to become the brawlpits that the Cheers bar was before its bartenders started cutting the chronic drunks off when they'd reached their limit, or banning them from the premises altogether after they'd started one too many fights. It took doing that for Cheers to become a decent place to hang out with friends again. And it took that for several of the chronic drunks to realize that they *were* drunks, and get help. I think that many people on the Internet need help. And they're getting the *opposite* of that help from people who glom onto them and actually encourage their anti- social and sometimes sociopathic behavior. These people don't need to be told how special they are; they need a quick, cold-water splash of reality and to be told to keep their ego-dicks in their pants, OR ELSE. And if they don't listen, they need to be told to go away. It's the compassionate thing to do to people who just can't handle attention. To give it to them when they have a proven history of becoming abusive and threat- ening *when* it's given to them is to encourage them TO become abusive and threatening. And thus to encourage them to become even crazier than they were before. That's dangerous, and the very opposite of caring and compassion. That's encouraging someone who is already damaged to damage themselves -- and possibly others -- even further.
