Spite is an extraordinarily powerful drive, despite being nearly as unpleasant to the holder as to the target. I suspect people latch on to it because it saves you from the even more inpleasant emotion of terminal despair.
Conversation
Spite is when the only agency you see available between you and complete helplessness is the agency to deny someone else some sort of satisfaction, even (and especially) if you can’t stop them prevailing. Spite seeks to poison an adversary’s success rather than prevent it.
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But that’s true of other actions, not just spiteful ones. Like moral last stands that aren’t rooted in resentment. Where you act to prevent a practical victory being claimed as a moral one.
Spite I think arises out of a personal animus against a specific evil-twin archetype.
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You never see spite directed against an abstract class of adversaries. You see it directed against specific archetypes the spiteful person has intimate knowledge of. Like the mutual spitefulness of 2 people who grew up poor, of whom one broke out and succeeded. Mutual shadows.
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Spite is powerful because it is rooted in confidence that you know a non-abstract class of people better than people who might view them in an an abstract, default positive way due to less info. You believe others are cluelessly oblivious to true nature of target of your spite.
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X leaves poor small town to succeed in big city where a shallow bourgeois P appreciate him, while Y is left in poverty. P also has sympathy for Y’s plight. But X and Y hate each other and dismiss P’s support of their rival as clueless at best, and moral failure at worst.
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X to P: You don’t know the real Y. They’re not oppressed.
Y to P if they ever meet: you don’t know the real X. He used to be an asshole.
Both accept benefit of doubt directed at themselves but not at others. Indirect attribution bias: you’re right about me but wrong about them.
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P often *is* being lazy and clueless and assuming the best of people based on no evidence, often because they’re privileged enough to have never had to play nasty. They’re nice and assume the best of others because they’ve never been forced to play not-nice.
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Macro-cultures of spite are often a case of Y’s vs P’s. The distant party that chose the wrong side in the moral battle between X and Y, upsetting the balance of good and evil.
It’s the spite triangle. X, Y, P. Evil, good, weak.
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There’s a stronger kind of P, P++, who bets on best of others despite knowing their flaws intimately. But it’s admittedly rare. Lazy goodwill is the typical best case.
P’s are also found alongside Q’s who pick a side in X vs Y based on pure self-interest, not moral judgment.
Replying to
There’s a basic asymmetry here: Ps and Qs are closer to Xs than to Ys. This is the root of the bad social pattern. Ps and Ys must form mental models of each other rooted in mutual ignorance and the untrustworthy attitudes of Xs, who are not neutrals.
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Xs are social migrants who trigger spite games by crossing from one milieu to another. Specifically from Y’s milieu to P+Q milieu, usually a socioeconomically higher milieu. Almost all macro spite dramas are triggered by a thin trickle of successful social mobility
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Red to blue
Ghetto to bourgeois
Developing to developed
Trad communities to modern
Classes that are truly sealed off from each other can only have theoretical suspicions of each other. Social mobility serves as tests of those theories on both sides.
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The social migrant is data, but very distorted data. The fact of their leaving colors origin-milieu perceptions (betrayal etc). Their success (new money, model immigrant etc) colors perceptions in destination milieu. They make world look darker at origin, rosier at destination.
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I should label these
X = little pig who went to market
Y = little pig who stayed at home
Ps = lazy-goodwill NPCs in market
P++s = Idealists in market
Qs = grifters in market
Spite is the driving force in the lives of this crowd, though only X and Y are actively driven by it.
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In a way the problem of counter-programming spite is getting disconnected classes to experience *random* samples of each other rather than the highly distorted samples created by migration. Migrants across boundaries are *always* outliers in consequential ways.
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And since deliberate migration is nearly always socioeconomically upwards, there is a further distortion. Migration the other way is either failure (whether one-way fall or return trip from failure to exit). Deliberate down-migrants are also outliers but merely curious weirdos.
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I’m starting to think spite is the most powerful social force in the world today, and has been since about 1992 when a lot of upward social mobility was unleashed worldwide. It’s the negative externality of social mobility. Global spitefilling. The CO2 of individual success.
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Only known way to drive random sampling is travel, and even that has limited potential, since it’s generally only the better-off that can afford to travel. A lot of tourism is down-class in comfort.
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This riff inspired by Liz Cheney defeat as an important 3rd act predictable event in the Great Weirding tale, but also relates to that big paper about disadvantaged people succeeding if they have friendships up-class
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Kinda feeling too lazy to translate this model from my internal X/Y type representations (sadly, this is really how I think on the inside, like a cartoon engineer) to fun memes and tv references.
The perils of INTP TiNe y=thinking styles.
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