I once entered a “safe spaces” Discord server with literal flowers and stuff. It looked very innocent and welcoming and it was just for gaming. Turns out, they were making fun of their members on it, fake-crying to mock a depressed user, and kept telling the users to “let them see their cuts”. It was so disturbing. These were literal 18-20 year olds, too, and I was like 13.
Because people do everything to silence the pain in themselves, even if that means inflicting pain onto other people.
Hmm, makes a lot of sense.
I feel you. Case in point; I just got torn up in an autism community after saying I had some science ideas I wanted an objective take on to determine if they had merit. Apparently I was not qualified to have ideas because I’m not a professional scientist, so it’s guaranteed that my theories are trash right out the gate.
“I’m too afraid to think and share my observations and hypotheses for peer review so nobody should, else I’d feel challenged/incompetent and that’s just too much for my little heart to bear.”
@[email protected]
I sometimes get the sense that so much of the harshness of such replies come from active students in academia, not so much from professors and TA’s, etc. Probably multiple reasons for that, but one of them might be that they’re smack in the middle of a ‘this is the right way to learn and do things!’ process and mindset.
Whereas most teachers would probably be much more inclined to say something like “okay, let’s break those ideas down, shall we?” But already being teachers, they’re probably plenty occupied with such, and not as much of a regular online presence. Or something like that, haha…
They come from the “average man”, intellectually cowardly and living by inertia, and whose entire ideology was most likely fed to them by mass media and propaganda, IME. They’ve never thought independently about anything deep, and if they did at some point it brought nothing but frustration and further confusion to their lives so they’re triggered by anyone trying to have a thoughtful exploration as it might bring the house of cards that is their worldview down. As such, their gut reaction is to “shut it all down”, using whatever poor argument they have at hand to do so (because if they were wise enough to be honest about their reasons for being against this potentially productive convo, they wouldn’t react this way in the first place). 🤷
I don’t know that I would personally make so many specific conclusions or necessarily group individuals together like that, but… as individual points I’ve no doubt that they do accurately describe various types of thinking and character.
I would also tend to think that if that whole package of characteristics does indeed describe lots of people in academia who happened to want to teach, then they’d either have to work to become better human beings, or get sort of ‘locked-in’ to being shitty, unpopular professors. Which could of course greatly impact their career upsides. *shrug*