Limbic Spastic

My second essay about societal bullying dynamics.

I. The Contradiction

Elephant in the room
2024/09/14. During the long discussions of late in which the social abuse I’ve suffered at the hands of my speedrunning community, SMS, has been laid bare and the moderators have grappled desperately for excuses to do nothing, I’ve become more and more aware of an elephant in the room. It seems to me like the outcome everyone expects is for me to kill myself. It’s seemingly the only thing that would disentangle the knot, and it would do so in one swift blow.

They relate to it
To take a more nuanced look at this, we have a basic contradiction. The moderators and community at large aren’t bothered by social abuse. They don’t think it’s abuse, are privileged to have never had anything remotely like it happen to them, aren’t capable of empathy for those it happened to… there’s actually even one moderator whose best friend endured a similar social abuse situation, who very effectively pretended to understand and be able to relate that to me, before proceeding to not care or act at all on my situation for one year. The moderators relate to social abuse.

[koishippt:] plankton said something along the lines of jpep’s behavior was a reasonable human response. i said it absolutely isn’t. and zel disagreed with me. that’s when i started really losing hope

I can’t live with it
OK, fair enuff. On the other hand, I can’t live with social abuse. I’ve written a lot in my case files, tweets and journal about how I react to losing swathes of friends over the interventions of liars and manipulators that pass by undetected. If I stand to lose friends like this again, friends I have good relationships with that are then torn away by other people, then I am vulnerable. So I simply no longer have friends and don’t go outside. The logic is pretty simple, and the conclusion is that I can’t live with it.

Cause and effect
So, if they won’t act on and protect me from abuse I can’t live with, then I should be dead, yes? Ignoring for a second that these people think a therapist can simply wash away this kind of trauma, as if the causality isn’t established for it to happen again and again. Ignoring them trying to get rid of me so I can simply go and endure this same problem elsewhere. If I actually can’t live with it then I should be dead. If I’m not, then the cause and the effect are disconnected from each other, and that’s where the cognitive dissonance comes from.

And for what it’s worth, they’ve tied themselves up in a contradiction. If they disavow bullying as a cause of suicide, then they can’t have spent the last decade pretending to take the epidemic of transgender suicide seriously, since one of the most direct causes of it is social ostracisation.

II. Limbics and Rationals

Limbics
PumpMan explained this last year in a way that was ahead of its time to me. He said, you can’t force people to rationalise their emotional reactions to people. They just kind of know. There’s a tweet I’ve lost (hiss) that explains this better – it said something like, don’t forget that your emotional system is something evolved across many millions of years compared to your relatively recent cognition, which only gives you the illusion of control, of knowing why you feel things. That emotional system is what I’m calling the limbic system. It’s hard for me who’s spent most of his life learning to interpret his emotions and understand accurately why he feels as he does, hard for me to relate to all of the normal people of the world who just have emotions out on each other in spasms like this. The limbic spastics.

Aside about SDLL [CLICK TO EXPAND]

It reminds me a lot of SDLL. it didn’t matter the year of bullying Luke had done that he’d hidden from Theo – once Theo was informed, he fit it around his model of how Luke was “slipping up” occasionally, which he’d predetermined going into the conversation. Since his true motive was to be with SDLL, which sheltered Luke and was “all [Theo] had left”. It also reminds me that what set Luke off in the first place to socially abuse me was my lousy attempt to imitate his limbic spasticity back at him. I tried to be normal 🥲.

Ew, zoomer
So why then did the SMS community permanently ban and cancel EquivocalGenius for example? His friends had been bullying many people and were caught making simply despicable comments privately, hitting all the tropes-of-the-day of racism and transphobia. EG had gotten somewhat taken in by this. Had betrayed some moderators and some friends. It’s interesting looking at why he got lynched for this. I had always wondered why the moderators at the time refused to treat the people in that case as individuals. They convinced me that they were just exhausted. But in hindsight, I think Bingo Player (and SMS moderator at the time) JeffCompass said it best. Referring to EG:

PK, while saying hurtful shit here or there, said a few dumb things, that weren’t okay, but not on the level of a zoomer

Tribal moral panic
I always read those last two words in scare quotes and a kind of melodramatic dun-dun-dun voice. All of the people associated with that case are being homogenised into a “zoomer”, which gets its own “level”: a simplified disgust reaction that doesn’t distinguish between them as human beings. The motive is a combination of tribalism, since there were dozens of people who had been made fun of in those leaked conversations, and dozens more who were keen to defend their friends’ Honour. And the other side of it is the moral panic. JeffCompass himself wrote a piece of libel about one of them that tremendously overblew an accusation into something that various other people believed and then were keen to see the person criminally prosecuted over. The review of how this libel came to pass is a great insight into moral panics in practice.

Squirreled away
What distinguishes the years of social abuse I endured, which were unapologetically perpetrated and purposefully (yes, purposefully) left unmoderated, from this? Well, we see it comes down to a question of how to trigger the correct limbic response. Per my first essay on bullying, social abuse spirals in such a way that it effectively disarms the victim from being able to take advantage of tribalism especially. There’s not much moral panic that can be incited over it, either, since unlike with transphobia, this disgust reaction over bullying and social abuse is squirreled away solely in the depths of pro-choice suicide forums, which elaborate on the primary ways that society makes people kill themselves, safely out of the prying eyes of the Normal Person.

Read for Yourself [CLICK TO EXPAND]

Sanctioned Suicide is a forum that openly discusses suicide and is routinely smeared by mainstream media as being a pro-suicide cult that preys on vulnerable people. Its head moderator, RainAndSadness, writes:

If you want to prevent young people from committing suicide, society needs to strongly crack down on bullying. Bullying fucked me up for good and damaged my mental health long-term. I never felt accepted and supported by anyone back in school and didn’t have any friends. I was excluded and abused instead, for years. The bullying actually made me suicidal when I was 14 years old and neither my parents or my teachers took this issue seriously. In fact, society in general doesn’t take this issue seriously at all. We accept and tolerate bullying as part of growing up and that’s wrong. That’s one issue I can think of that’s bothering me a lot. It hurts whenever I read that very young people, children, commit suicide as a result of bullying and neglect. Parents often don’t care about it.

Emphasis is original. The essay next mentions parental neglect, transgender discrimination, and poverty. Then it concludes:

These are just some of the issues I believe we can tackle with enough determination and activism because they affected me and my own mental health a lot. The issue is, nobody is listening to suicidal people. This forum here already tells all the stories of mentally struggling people, there are hundreds of threads talking about these issues but instead of taking us seriously, addressing the concerns voiced in this platform, they call us sickos, incels, predators and murderers. Instead of helping us, they attack and smear us. They pretend we’re a cult and they think by banning us, they could actually fix suicide. No, you’re simply moving issues under the rug. And that’s why we’re suicidal in the first place. You’re never gonna make this world a better place by banning SS.

It’s worth adding that at a cursory glance of Wikipedia, it says that bullying doesn’t cause suicide, rather it causes depression, which causes suicide. In the same way that cigarettes don’t cause death; they cause cancer, which causes death? I wasn’t joking when I said mainstream suicide discussion is straight propaganda. Pretending depressed people are insane is just victim-blaming.

Key quote in case you didn’t read for yourself:

The issue is, nobody is listening to suicidal people.

III. Resolution

Resolution
OK, so people can’t understand social abuse. They can understand these other kinds of abuse that the victims can live with just fine, since their reactions are but tribal moral panics. So, in order for them to understand, the actual suicide is required.

Against bullies
From my perspective, I think the limbic disgust this would provoke at the people responsible would be uncompromising. I think this because the perpetrators don’t contribute to the SMS community at all, rather just cause drama, so nobody would want to have them stick around since their wall of supporters would be awfully quiet at the prospect of having bullied someone to death (especially since the bulk of all they’ve ever said about me has been lies and this is well-known). The disgust is why, contrary to the contemporary centrist arguments talking about rights for bullies and the like, nobody really cared what the “zoomers” I mentioned above thought or felt for example. I also noticed, while thinking about the comments of Theo from SDLL, that one of the most useful outcomes of suicide is it’s no longer possible to justify abuse by pretending to be scared of the victim.

For bullies
But there’s always a counterargument, exploiting, per my first essay on bullying, the total isolation that social abuse causes of the victim, that nobody likes the victim as a result of the bullying, and so it’s easier to gaslight everyone into thinking the victim was just “crazy”.

Peace
Either way, the suicide, by connecting the cause with the effect, would resolve the cognitive dissonance, and so allow people’s limbics to react accordingly. It’s like, the rationals of the situation are all on the table, but they’re too hypothetical, expressed in terms of risks to the victim – the limbics can’t be on the table unless these risks turn into actual consequences. If the people are disgusted then all’s well that ends well; if they aren’t, there’s no victim left to make them feel guilty, or to feel the pain of his abusers being welcomed in the community, so they can move on guilt-free.

I think it’s cringe that dying is required to show the consequences of bullying, and I will always resist that and make my life about myself, not them. But the logic of how death is incentivised, as I’ve set out here, is just there whether we like it or not.

IV. Responsible Victimhood

Endless cancer
One of the few apologies I have to everyone who’s been observing me and my victimhood is that I didn’t effectively put effect to cause in a reasonable timeframe, before it dragged out into a pattern from which everyone involved is coming off worse for wear. Per the details of the SDLL story, it would’ve made the most sense to do it in early 2023, after lumardy had faked a disappearance and then come back unapologetic, trying to dominate me on social media. It feels like the story was easy to understand then, and my dragging it out has muffled it into a soup. But I feel like staying alive a bit longer is inherently a plus for observers? Maybe not if one no longer has friends.

Wokes and alphas
The other thing I’m quite annoyed with myself about is the extent to which I leant into, well, what can be described as wokeness I suppose. Here, I just mean the idea of being, not oversensitive, but at-all sensitive to other people’s struggles and so making the world a better place for the weak. I can’t disavow having been anti-abuser for the past 9 years, and the efforts I put into clamping down on the army of manipulative liars who’ve struck me down. But I feel like the rot that has resulted from me and the SMS community trying to handle abuse like this has been detrimental overall, what with the amount of bullying rights activism and blind eyes to lying and manipulation we see from the moderators today. It’s important to just not be a pussy about being abused to an extent, learn the game and how to bow out gracefully. Given my life circumstances prior to SDLL, I think social abuse was a fatal blow to me even when it was just lumardy, but I think, really, being pro-victim ought to become less about this kind of wokeness and more about making it as easy as possible for victims to take the L. A bit of a right-wing shift, then. So in that sense, I think maybe the future of abuser justice is supporting a victim’s right to die?