In my short time on Hubski, I'm noticing a stark dichotomy between two types of comments:
First: Helpful, positive, encouraging, neutral
Second: Combative, hostile, argumentative, attacking
The first, I like. The second...
I've studied the nature of violence, psychopathy, conflict, chaos et al. Life is a continually in flux thing, where emergent growth comes into play. Life, death, growth, decay, violence, peace, orgasm, anhedonia, conflict, resolution, postmodernism, classicism: each of these things are needed. It's the evolving cyclic interplay between these things that makes life, forward motion possible. It's how the universe was formed. Insisting on one way of being over another fails to take the complex nature of life into account.
Yet, I've been befuddled and annoyed by the argumentative, hostile comments I'm finding on Hubski. Why would someone choose to act like that? When it is painfully obvious that it detracts rather than helps? (Realizing full well my own subjectivity in this.)
Then I skimmed through a hostile comment today. Structure, syntax... it seemed oddly familiar, and I couldn't put my finger on it. Then I realized: I used to do the very same thing.
I was a wordy, ponderous idealist in my younger years. It was very important that others have the same beliefs as me, and if they didn't, I saw it as a personal attack, one which I HAD to defend myself against.
There's a friend I used to have, who was very impressed with how well read, educated she was. Our conversations were filled with labels, textbook definitions, elite narcissism, which I tolerated. And then she "attacked" me one time. For the sake of anonymity, let's say she was an avowed socialist, and she wrote me a lengthy email on how I was a capitalist, and all the ways I was wrong in being so. I was incensed, wrote an even longer email back, delving head first into dismantling her argument, that I was not, in fact, a capitalist, and insisting on how she was wrong, couldn't she see how limited she was?
I stopped being friends with her because of this. That wasn't an isolated incident. Embarrassingly, I can remember too many times in which my insistence on literalism and adhering to rigid ideals hurt relationships, how it pushed people away. Thankfully, with time, I learned to be less rigid, more open-minded. And I continue to try.
So I wonder: the hostile vs positive comments--is it a matter of maturity, age? Or is it something else instead?