The Psychological Cost of Malice: When the State Becomes the Abusive Neighbor

When I was a child, our upstairs neighbor was a real abusive scumbag. He would terrorize his stepson.

One day, the stepson came home to find all of his belongings in the trash—punishment for some imagined transgression. It’s a sick, cruel thing to do: destroy someone’s possessions just to prove a point. It’s a pure exercise of power and dominance over someone perceived as weaker. I hope the stepson grew up into a man who successfully challenged that bullying.

We only rented that home for a few years. We moved on, and the upstairs family probably moved on. But the memory remains. It stuck with me how a father (stepfather in this case) could be so cruel. Even at five or six years old, I intuitively knew something was wrong. I couldn’t reconcile the cognitive dissonance of the father, who would kindly smile and say hello when I saw him outside, but would be so cruel to his son behind closed doors.

The Energy of Malice at Scale

I bring this up because that specific, cold-hearted malice—that energy of pure dominance—is precisely what we are witnessing now.

A very sick, cruel, sadistic, manipulatively maladjusted sociopath is punishing the half of the country who haven’t sold their souls to him. The Democrats refused to allow him to strip working-class people of food stamps and healthcare. Surprisingly, they held their ground as he and his minions kept the government closed—among other things—to stave off a vote to release files that could further prove his reprehensible actions. Now he’s making everyone suffer. Just like the abusive husband or father: “You made me do this.” It is textbook abuse. He will continue to destroy, to dismantle, and cover what remains with gaudy, diamond-encrusted gold to show his opulence as millions lose food stamps and health insurance. Let them eat McDonald’s.

Can we talk about the gold? If you asked a child to draw up a palace of riches, they would create the same ridiculously gaudy display. It’s like something out of an old Richie Rich comic. It’s so unironically tone-deaf that it goes beyond parody. It should be embarrassing, but he has no shame.

The Moral Schism and Cognitive Dissonance

And to be honest, I’m perplexed. I’m entirely at a loss. I’m a ball of rage, despair, sadness, and confusion because the cognitive dissonance is baffling. People are still supporting this man. I can’t understand it.

I watched people crash out over Obama wearing a tan suit. I watched white people cry because they didn’t recognize their country anymore. After all, a non-white person became president. I watch people pontificate on the sanctity of national monuments to defend the Confederacy and then not even bat an eye when their leader destroys an entire wing of the White House. And this after saying he wouldn’t even touch the East Wing. The East Wing is now resting in a place where all truth goes to die in this regime.

And I’m back to the cognitive dissonance of watching the neighborly stepfather smile and wink hello to me after hearing him toss his stepson against a wall the night before. Nothing makes sense.

But I need to transcend this somehow. I have to function in this country for the time being, and as much as I would love to move to a Toronto suburb and be a much more pleasant upstairs neighbor to my former home, my life, my wife, my family, my job, and my house are all stateside. So what’s a boy to do?

The Zen Diaphragm: Forging the Diamond

Spin that Zen Diaphragm where the rubber hits the road, where the external meets the internal, and¹ we forge lead into gold… wait, no. Not gold. Let’s make a genuine diamond from the charcoal and ashes of existence. Let it shine from our hearts and light us from tip to toe.

1. I lose control in deep-focus my venn diagram loses it’s zenn diaphragm and hypervenntilates as the circles drift apart and my inner children run off chasing them like hula hoops down a hill laughing joyfully as i get more and more resentful and forget that those laughing kids are happily doing their job chasing these circles because without their joyful curiosity i’d have no hope of finding myself. A person as sensitive as I relies on these two circles being in alignment on that zenn diaphragm (The Zenn diaphragm — great visual — the tympanic membrane of the soul — the zenn diaphragm is my version of the vesica pisces — when the psyche is in perfect alignment it forms the zenn diaphragm — a diaphragm vibrates creating waves, and we know that waves create everything). ↩︎