[Original Novel] Pariah of the Little People, Part 14

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“Ever since I met you” he ventured, “I felt like you just plain don’t like other people. I dunno how else to put it. I mean, I have all the reason in the world to feel that way but I don’t. They don’t just pick on me because they’re evil. They’re rebuking me for my sinful choices. I remember that whenever it hurts, whenever I want to say some unkind thing to them.

Jesus told us to turn the other cheek, after all. So I listen and try to learn from it. To find out what I’m doing wrong so I can change. Then they’ll welcome me as a friend, because I’ve gotten right with the Lord. Even if they seem cruel, I know in the end I’m the one that’s wrong because scripture says so.

Being set straight when you’re in the wrong can be painful. In fact it usually is. But you know what my Dad told me? He said we’re like glow sticks. Sometimes we need to be broken before we can shine. If you look at it that way, they’re doing me a favor.

But you. You take it all personally! Gushing a gallon of blood from every little nick and scrape, falling apart every time somebody has a little fun with you. They’re not that bad, you know. I don’t think you ever really gave them a chance.”

I thought about it. Then thought about it some more. It sickened me to hear him defend how they treat him. Stockholm syndrome, I think it’s called. I sat there, mulling over all of it, trying to pick out what I did and didn’t want to tell him before deciding I may as well just lay my cards on the table.

“I didn’t start out life hating people” I began. “In fact I spent the last ten years or so trying like hell to be likeable, because I was lonely and wanted friends. But no matter what I do they hate me, something about me attracts aggression. I still don’t fully understand it or I could make it stop. I can tell you what I’ve figured out so far, though.

The first thing I noticed is that people I’ve just met often don’t understand me the first time I say something. But I don’t slur my speech. Nor do I have a thick accent, so what gives? The best I can guess is that the human brain, to conserve calories, focuses mainly on picking out the most commonly used phrases.

A sort of subconscious level of speech recognition that keys into cliches, colloquialisms, pop culture references, slogans and so on. If you don’t communicate that way, people stumble over your words. It forces them to begin consciously interpreting what you’re saying which annoys them as it requires more energy than usual. This makes for a less than ideal first impression.

It’s not like I do it for fun. I’ve always preferentially used the most accurate phrasing over the most familiar. Precision of language was important to me because I thought it would prevent misunderstandings, and that misunderstandings were why people hurt me. Now I know it isn’t that simple, but I by this point I don’t know any other way to express myself.

This often makes them irritated at me, even though I’ve not said anything unkind to them. This in turn makes me irritated back, but they don’t recognize they’ve done anything unreasonable. So when I retaliate, to them it seems unprovoked. Something about how their brains are wired, or how mine is, causes the maximum possible friction between us. I don’t want it to, but I don’t know how to be any other way.

Worse still is when you can get them to understand what you’re saying, but because they don’t understand what you mean, from their perspective you seem like a rambling madman. You can’t ever suggest that the problem is their incomplete understanding of it, or any other topic, because to them it feels very much like they do understand it completely.

They aren’t aware of the parts they don’t know about yet, so whatever portion they do know about seems like the whole enchilada. From their perspective I must seem unjustifiably sure of an idea that to them seems like nonsense, because they interpret the holes in their own understanding of it as holes in the idea itself.

If these were the only problems, I wouldn’t hate other people, but myself instead for failing to engage and integrate properly with them. But they aren’t simply lazy or difficult to communicate with, they’re proactively malicious.

When they’re irritated, they do not hesitate to misrepresent you. Yet they cry bloody murder if you misrepresent them, as if that’s a tactic reserved for their exclusive use. They impose themselves as far as their strength allows, then collapse in tears and cry persecution if ever the fellow under their boot gets the whip hand over them.

The very best outcome you can hope for when you argue with one of these creatures is that he’ll privately recognize you are correct. Even then, he will dig in his heels because he wants to win the argument, or at least not obviously lose it. But then the next day you’ll overhear him repeating your ideas to somebody else as if they were his own.

If after having raked you over the coals extensively based on a misunderstanding, they discover that they were in error to do so, they expect immediate forgiveness. Dreading the prospect of being on the receiving end of such treatment in retaliation, they will all of a sudden say very noble sounding, superficially high minded things.

They’ll say that violence never solved anything. That holding onto hate does more to harm you than the other guy. Can’t we sit down and reason together like civilized people and so on. Ideals that were nowhere to be seen a minute ago!

How forgiving or judgemental they are depends entirely on whether they already like or dislike that person. Which in turn depends in large part on whether or not he agrees with views they’re emotionally invested in.

If he is especially intelligent and uses it to argue for their views more articulately and effectively than they’re able to, they will regard him with extreme favor. A sort of cognitive exoskeleton to augment their own ambitions, the only application for intelligence in excess of their own that their ego allows them to appreciate.

As a consequence, there’s a lot of money to be made eloquently telling people that whatever they already believe is the truth. But if the same man uses his faculties to instead dismantle, diagram and discredit those views, the ogre reacts with horror and fury, as if you’re somehow brutalizing them.

Such people can abide a simpleton voicing opinions on either side of an issue without feeling threatened. It’s only when they hear something disturbingly credible which they can’t abide if true that they fly into a rage, no matter how politely it’s put forth. As if they can make it untrue by killing the messenger.

They do this because for an ogre, there is no such thing as entertaining an idea without also accepting it. To them, argumentation is not the reasoned exchange of ideas in pursuit of improved understanding, but a fight to the death.

If ogres have a pre-existing affinity for someone, most likely because he does a good job of stumping for their ideals, that guy can do no wrong in their eyes. They will rationalize any transgression of his, painting him in the best possible light and giving him the greatest possible benefit of the doubt. This is the essence of politics so far as I’ve been able to tell.

However, if they harbor a grudge against the fellow, they will instead pick out and magnify any past transgression of his that they can dig up. If they cannot find any dirt, they’ll either invent some or grossly exaggerate. Never will they feel a hint of remorse for slandering him! Even less so if they are part of a group. Ogres are pack animals you see.

The magic of mob aggression is that no single member feels responsible for harm they collectively inflict. And should the target complain of the harm visited upon him by this mob, they will trivialize it, accusing him of exaggerating his suffering in order to play the victim because that’s the narrative necessary to stave off remorse.

That is, until one of them becomes the new target. Then, one of the very same people who before mocked the suffering of the fellow he and the others inflicted it on suddenly howls in agony, believing that it’s an entirely different matter now that he’s on the receiving end.

These qualities make it impossible to convince myself that I’ve merely misunderstood them, that I’m entirely at fault for how they treat me and so on. The exhaustive gauntlet of self-scrutiny I put myself through years ago, reasoning that if so many people react badly to me, I’m the common denominator and therefore bring it on myself.

But none of them ever experience self-doubt to that degree, or they couldn’t carry on as they do. Even if I am constitutionally abrasive, I cannot find a way for it to justify the awful things they’ve done. They even seem to recognize that cruelty is what’s wrong with the world...when done to them...but never make the connection that they’re the sort of people who make it that way.

Don’t let them make me ugly, I used to tell myself. Fight it at any cost! For all the good it did. My insides are much uglier now than even a year ago. I can feel the stains they’ve left on my heart. The more I think about what they’ve done, the more I want to hurt them. I should be free to put back into the world the suffering it inflicts on me, right?

Whatever others do to me, I may do to them. If that’s not the case, it means I am the one person in the world who’s fine to abuse, where others are not. I want to reject any line of reasoning which leads to this conclusion as it’s transparently designed to screw me.

...But at the same time, "Everybody else does it so it's okay for me to" is naked, empty rationalization. There’s still a piece of me which realizes that it’s hardly a valid justification for anything. If everybody else thinks that way, the world stays shitty. Last year I figured out that I have a choice whether or not to contribute to that.

It’s the only power I have in this world. They can trample into the dirt everything I ever cared about, everything I liked about myself. They can ruin every precious thing, drag my battered body through the dirt, feed me leaves, call me names and make me cry.

But they’ll never, ever make me hurt anybody weaker than I am. Not for revenge, and certainly not for fun. I’m still firmly in control of that. So long as they’re powerless to make me cross that final line, they can’t make me into one of them. If they do, then there’s no point in asking Jesus or anybody else to save me. There’ll be nothing left worth saving.”

It must’ve been a lot to absorb, as he looked drained just from listening to the whole mess. It was a solid minute or two before he could think of anything to say. I don’t blame him. I’ve been bottling it up for so long, the resulting deluge was bound to drown anyone nearby once I finally pulled out the cork.

“That’s really how you see humanity? No wonder”. He gazed mournfully at me. “What it must’ve been like for you, looking at other people that way for all these years. I can scarcely imagine it. You know, you’re the most thoroughly lost person I’ve ever met. But you’re not alone anymore.” He leaned in and embraced me. I sat there in shock for a while before relaxing and hugging him back.

A feeling of lightness came over me, like the next gust of wind might carry me off. I laughed, not at any joke but rather the only fitting expression of how I felt as much of the accumulated weight of my life experience until now was lifted from my shoulders. In that moment, I rejected monster world. I just couldn’t sustain it anymore, not after meeting Jennifer, certainly not after meeting Tyler.

It felt precarious and terrifying. However bleak, there’s also a degree of comfort to be found in monster world, if only because it’s so familiar to me by now. If I really meant to destroy it, I’d have to swear never again to retreat into it, no matter how painful life may become. Like ripping off a bandaid, best done all at once lest fear stop you. So just like that, I did it.

The two rays of sunshine piercing the grey stormclouds multiplied. Faster and faster, merging as they met, until there was only sunshine all around me. My heart soared. Exhilarating, but also scary. I couldn’t shake the feeling that a huge part of myself had just died.

Tyler reached out, smiling gently, and wiped the tears from my eyes. I’d not even realized they were there. “I wanna tell you something”, he said. “You’ll roll your eyes I bet. It’s Biblical. I’m not trying to make you believe anything, but there really is a lot of stuff written in there that relates to what you just told me. Can I share it with you?”

I grimaced a bit, but right then I found it impossible to deny him anything. So we picked out a spot in the shade of a tree amidst a sun soaked meadow, then settled in and began talking. Tyler did anyway, for the most part I just sat and listened. “You know, early Christians were persecuted by everybody. Jesus himself was mocked, wounded and crucified for delivering a message the people at that time did not want to hear.

As you say, the world is a dark, evil, sin drenched place. Because Satan rules this world. Nothing good comes from it, but there is hope. For Christians, this is not home. It’s a temporary gauntlet we endure to prove our worth, on our way to our real home in Heaven where our real father is waiting.”

I protested that I already have a real father who I love very much. He had an answer for this however. “Matthew 23:9 says we are to call no man on Earth father, for our only real father is in Heaven.” I didn’t much like the sound of that, but kept listening.

“In Matthew 10, 34 through 37” Tyler continued, “it is written that sometimes following Christ will make enemies out of the members of our own family! But that our first loyalty must be to Christ, even over family members, and that anyone who loves their mother, father or siblings more than Christ is not worthy of him. If my parents were to insist that I not worship Christ, I would be right to cut them out of my life.”

That only made it worse in my mind. I don’t love anybody more than my family. I didn’t even love Jennifer that much. If some strange man told me to love him more than my family, and that if I don’t then I’m not worthy of him, I’d tell him to fuck off. But I promised to hear Tyler out, so I made an effort not to interrupt again.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 15!}