The Purge Fantasy
The urge for sanctioned criminality and abuse
Every turn of the new year, I notice how many cowards with bottled-up frustrations and festering insanity presume that it’s “justifiable” to manifest their psychopathy, simply because “it’s New Year’s, bro!” In fact, the celebration has nothing to do with anything. There is nothing for them other than a plausible excuse for acting like rabid animals, for manifesting their true nature. Consistently, we witness the same psychopaths look for any excuse to behave like rabid animals; any pretentious celebration, any stampeding looting frenzy, any call to the mass schizophrenia of war.
Almost every celebration, protest, or generic social event seems to be plagued with psychopaths reenacting scenes from The Purge: this dystopian fantasy story about sanctified lawlessness, depicting how otherwise “good people” can descend into sadistic violence during the single day each year when the government grants them permission to do anything without repercussion.
Cowards are abusers, and abusers are cowards.
Only a coward would play nice with others only until he randomly finds himself in a position of circumstantial power (physical, institutional, numerical), and then use that power to abuse those who are situationally weaker.
It takes true strength to hold power and be merciful, humble, respectful, and empowering to others. It is true strength to be free from the desperate need to dominate, this pathetic need for cheap validation driven by insecurity and weakness.
These dangerous cowards walk among us and seem reasonably harmless, not because they are held by some moral principle to respect others — psychopaths have no ethos, no self-reflection, no inner dialogue, no consideration for anyone. Instead, the only thing that keeps them from slaughtering us all and raping our carcasses is the fear of reciprocity in a society where government provides a miserable excuse for policing, while making it very hard for sane people to defend themselves; an artificial monopoly of security, and we know that monopolies are always inefficient and ineffective. More importantly, psychopaths don’t slaughter us all because they fear direct reciprocity from people whose ability to defensively reciprocate has been crippled by the same government that supposedly protects them.
So, the psychopaths among us are in desperate need of “legal” and “excused” violence, a “justification” and “sanctioning” of murder, theft, torture, rape, and any other indignity they relish to impose on others. They need excuses for their transgressions. Therefore, you will find them in positions where they are allowed to use violence under very loose and subject-to-interpretation conditions: police, military, government indoctrination camps (schools), and politics. It’s no wonder that the wife-beating cop, the raping, looting, mass-murdering soldier, or the pedophile politician are stereotypes. Psychopaths target and work hard towards positions where they are allowed to be psychotic and get away with it.
But these are not the only psychopathic cowards looking for any excuse to abuse others when the circumstances are favourable. You see them everywhere: your neighbour who thinks he can act like a rioting, suicide-bombing lunatic just because “it’s the fourth of July”, or just because “muh team won the World Series”, or just because “it’s a protest for <enter pretentious grievance here>”.
Their cowardly, sadistic tendencies are found in the way they choose to torture others: with sound pollution, the easiest way to inflict pain on others and effortlessly get away with it. Because it’s easy to pay good money to make your car and motorbike sound like a perpetually farting, giant vibrator on a megaphone under your ass, and then disappear, never to be caught. It’s easy to torture your dog and have it bark all day and night, because most people feel sorry for the animal, instead of resentful of the sadistic owner.
It’s easy to rape, kill, and pillage when you can just enlist as a mercenary to kill hopelessly outgunned, out-trained, out-teched, and outnumbered mullahs far away, if you enjoy the sanctioning of your atrocities by your government, media, and the idiot, complicit taxpayers who gleefully pay you to kill in their name, and they “thank you for your service” on top of it all.
There is a large number of psychopaths among us. They are the ones who, at the first sign of a collapse of social structure (be it due to disaster, war, or social upheaval), will act as they always wanted: as opportunistic predators, instead of a force for good.
Who are they? Those who always seem to profit from crises.
In the fog of war, they are the first to violently settle old disputes because they were too cowardly to do so when there was the slightest chance of them getting caught by whatever “authorities” were still standing.
During natural disasters, they are the looters instead of the rescuers. In prison, they are the rapists instead of the supporters.
In school, the bullies are instead of the friendlies or the encouragers.
At work? They are the passive-aggressive, back-stabbing hypocrites whose fake smiles and toxic positivity are there only to lower your guard, open up to them, and not see them when they badmouth you to get ahead at your expense.
In relationships? They are the control freaks, the dominators, the gaslighting sociopaths who manipulate using a combination of abuse and faux kindness to instill Stockholm syndrome in their victims.
In social life? They are those who are rude to the waiter and cruel to children, only because the circumstantial power dynamic favours them.
Online? They are the influencers who will disrespect their gullible following by selling them any garbage promoted by their sponsors, or those who guilt-trip you into “donating”, otherwise, “you’re a freeloader” for consuming their free content.
Look for these signs of psychopathy — being abusive and disrespectful only when power favours them — and steer away. And in the end, all abusers rely on situational, circumstantial power. No one will attempt to abuse you when power dynamics favour you.
True accomplishment is having power and, regardless, not feeling the insecurity, and thus a desperate need to abuse power to cheaply validate oneself.
