There is a pernicious idea in the human mind and heart, and I’m real tired of it. The basic idea is simple: “Someone hurt or angered me in some way, therefore I am going to seize any necessary rationale to go and do it to someone ELSE.”
Note that this isn’t when you go kick Frank in the pants because Frank peed in your Wheaties earlier. That’s simple revenge. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, I’m simply defining the situation.
No, this is more like Frank peed in your Wheaties and for some reason, you can’t go kick Frank in the pants, so you go and kick George instead, who may or may not have any idea who you are or why you kicked him in the pants, but he really didn’t have it coming, but by ghod you were going to go kick SOMEONE in the pants, and George was either handy or peripherally connected to the whole situation or whatever rationale you have latched onto that makes it okay to kick George in the pants.
Examples:
A teacher of my acquaintance often gave her students a difficult time, taking advantage of her adult status and authority to screw with them in mildly unpleasant authoritarian ways. Once, after she got a few drinks in her, she admitted that her reasoning was, “well, my teachers gave ME a hard time when I was that age, and now it’s MY turn.” (based on my observations, she also didn’t like kids much in general).
A person of my acquaintance once gave a booth babe at a convention a very hard time for being “fake” and “not geek” and “attention whore.” I pointed out that the person in question was being paid to wear a costume in order to publicize a product, and never claimed any geek cred, and that giving her a hard time served no real purpose aside from letting everyone know he was a jerk. He maintained that only real geek girls should be permitted to cosplay at conventions, and that he could tell who was real and who wasn’t, and reserved to give the “fakes” a hard time. (and again, based on observation, I’m guessing that he’d been shot out of the saddle by a variety of women, geek and otherwise).
On one occasion at work, an administrator screwed up a kid’s schedule. Later, the kid’s parent complained about this, but the administrator in question had gone on leave, and was not available to fix or address the error. The parent came to me and complained, and I went and saw to it that the error got fixed; the kid was, after all, in my classes. Shortly thereafter, in a meeting, the parent complained about the administrator’s incompetence and then gave ME a faceful about it, because “someone’s got this coming, and if it can’t be (administrator), it might as well be YOU.” (despite the fact that I hadn’t made the error, had nothing to do with the error, and had in fact, when informed about the error, gone and FIXED it.)
In the novel Stranger In A Strange Land, our protagonist goes to the zoo and looks at monkeys. Someone throws a monkey a peanut. A bigger monkey comes and snatches away the peanut, and knocks the first monkey around, then eats the peanut. The first monkey sulks for a moment… and then goes over and attacks a SMALLER monkey, who gets the crap beat out of him despite not having any idea what just happened. Our protagonist bursts into laughter, because he now understands all of human nature, as a result of witnessing this incident.
[soapbox/] This is a remarkably immature and counterproductive way to deal with your feelings and address problems, people. I expect this from five year olds, but if you can read this here and now, you’re really too old to be managing your life in such a rotten way. Let’s not be like that, mmkay? [/soapbox]
As soon as I read your opening paragraph, it made me think of the scene from Stranger In A Strange Land. Thanks for saving me the trouble of typing it out! I think about that passage often when trying to understand human behavior. I agree with you that it is immature, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has some sort of evolutionary basis.
There is a book called Dinosaur Brains by Albert Bernstein that attempts to explain much of human illogical behavior, especially in the business world, from the perspective of evolutionary advantages. I found it both humorous and enlightening.
I endured crap like that from my teachers. Once one got on my ass for making a paper airplane in her class, while completely ignoring the little jerkwad next to me doing the. exact. same. thing.
All that did, when I became a teacher years later, was inspire me to bend over backwards to be as fair to my students as I possibly could be.
There are a lot of generational cases of this, similar to the teacher.
A young wife is treated like hell by her husband’s mother (my observation of this was mostly in Japan, but probably applies to other cultures as well), only because that mother-in-law was treated like hell by her mother-in-law, and so on back through the generations. When the young wife later has a daughter-in-law herself, does she break the chain of abuse? No, because it’s her turn to get some of her own back, even on an innocent victim. Because she can.
My father learned how to raise kids from his mother, who was an uneducated person with a temper and who learned how to raise kids from her parents, and so on. Assuming that he learned his child-rearing lessons well, she was really bad at it. I probably only broke the chain by having no kids; my sister broke the chain, sort of, by abandoning her kids when they were little. (Actual abuse is different; I think it does get carried forward but for different reasons.)
An excellent question. The person in question does not much like kids, and does not relate to them well, and is one of those teachers of the “shuddup, siddown, and do as you’re told” school of classroom management. I’m assuming she thought teaching would be a neato career field, all the way up to the point where she got her first teaching job and discovered that small humans require a whole different set of management skills than the bigger ones, and is now simply marking time to retirement.
My old man was a pillar of the community, a paragon of his workplace, a reasonable role model, and a terrible parent. When I found myself with a small human in my responsibility, my first thought was often “what would the old man do?” and then do the exact opposite.
I’m kidding a little, but not really. It also led to an interest in sociology and psychology on my part, and led me into behavior management and teaching… simply because* so many, many methods of interpersonal communication you see every day do not work or are counterproductive to what yer tryin’ to accomplish. *
And it still dismays me to see some of those methods used by people who really ought to know better.
Permission to stand with the venerable and great Master Wang-Ka on the same soapbox, please.
I do believe “Getting Even” is a part of human nature, so I understand young ones may struggle with the concept. However, I simply cannot understand how adults, especially so-called professional and educated, live their life using “Getting Even” as the main theme. I too, have seen and experienced it too often to recall all instances. It is very discouraging and disappointing. I just continue to focus on being my best self as an example.
I’m with you all the way, except where you accept their explanation of their behaviour.
It is my observation that people often have no idea why they behave the way they do, are unable to analyse their own behavior, and are unable to articulate what they know. And I’m not required to accept their rationalisations. (As Ben Franklin wrote* … “'So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do”. )