Yes. I’m also saying it’s common for human beings to use absolutes as a means to disclaim responsibility for their own choices or motives while emotionally blackmailing others to do what they want. This has less to do with the absoluteness of the proposition, and more to do with the concealed message that “you deserve to feel bad about yourself if you don’t comply with my (concealed/disclaimed) wishes”.
I call this an “FBI message”, i.e. “feel bad if”. People tend to focus on the seemingly factual/reasonable part of a communication or idea like, “you failed at X”, and then feel bad about themselves because, well, that sounds like a fact. But the implicit, unspoken part of the communication was “You deserve to Feel Bad If you fail at X.”
In the case of absolutes, they’re a red flag because they usually conceal an unquestioned FBI message: the absolute part is like a stealth wrapper for the toxic payload. So ironically, the more reasonable, obvious, and factual-sounding the wrapper is, the worse it is for you, because it keeps you from questioning the toxic payload: feeling bad about yourself.
There are lots of justifications our minds use to rationalize feeling bad about ourselves, but these justifications are smoke screens to keep us from being aware that the only real reason to feel bad about ourselves is to send costly signals to other people in order to influence their behavior. Feeling bad about ourselves doesn’t perform any directly useful function for the individual at all!
In an abusive environment, sincerely feeling bad about yourself communicates to the abuser that their goal has been achieved of crushing your spirit, so they will hopefully be satisfied and don’t keep escalating. But once you’re out of that environment, feeling bad about yourself no longer serves any useful purpose whatsoever, as it’s costly by design and can be thought of as a button for “Quick! Turn down the volume on all of my individuality and its expression!”
Anyway, it’s definitely possible to communicate something as an absolute or universal without tacking an FBI message on it. But the kind of people who conceal their motives using absolutes are nearly always sending FBI messages along with them, so in that context ANY absolute is likely a carrier for one and should be detained and investigated. ;-)
Yes. I’m also saying it’s common for human beings to use absolutes as a means to disclaim responsibility for their own choices or motives while emotionally blackmailing others to do what they want. This has less to do with the absoluteness of the proposition, and more to do with the concealed message that “you deserve to feel bad about yourself if you don’t comply with my (concealed/disclaimed) wishes”.
I call this an “FBI message”, i.e. “feel bad if”. People tend to focus on the seemingly factual/reasonable part of a communication or idea like, “you failed at X”, and then feel bad about themselves because, well, that sounds like a fact. But the implicit, unspoken part of the communication was “You deserve to Feel Bad If you fail at X.”
In the case of absolutes, they’re a red flag because they usually conceal an unquestioned FBI message: the absolute part is like a stealth wrapper for the toxic payload. So ironically, the more reasonable, obvious, and factual-sounding the wrapper is, the worse it is for you, because it keeps you from questioning the toxic payload: feeling bad about yourself.
There are lots of justifications our minds use to rationalize feeling bad about ourselves, but these justifications are smoke screens to keep us from being aware that the only real reason to feel bad about ourselves is to send costly signals to other people in order to influence their behavior. Feeling bad about ourselves doesn’t perform any directly useful function for the individual at all!
In an abusive environment, sincerely feeling bad about yourself communicates to the abuser that their goal has been achieved of crushing your spirit, so they will hopefully be satisfied and don’t keep escalating. But once you’re out of that environment, feeling bad about yourself no longer serves any useful purpose whatsoever, as it’s costly by design and can be thought of as a button for “Quick! Turn down the volume on all of my individuality and its expression!”
Anyway, it’s definitely possible to communicate something as an absolute or universal without tacking an FBI message on it. But the kind of people who conceal their motives using absolutes are nearly always sending FBI messages along with them, so in that context ANY absolute is likely a carrier for one and should be detained and investigated. ;-)