I had a confrontation today. Nothing particularly serious, though it could have escalated to violence if mishandled.

For about a year I haven’t had my hair cut. It’s about shoulder length, and I wear it free, not in a pony tail. I don’t look normal, though I don’t go out of my way to look abnormal.

I was walking through a farmer’s market when I heard a man say to the woman he was with, “Avoid the weirdo.”

I immediately turned to him and said, “What did you say?”

He got right in my face and we stared right in each others eyes. I leaned in and said, “You’re an asshole”.

He said, “There you are.”

He put his fist against my chest and said, “Don’t touch me.” The woman he was with tugged his arm and said something about walking away which I didn’t hear clearly.

I called him an asshole again, and waited two beats. Then I turned away.

He said “weirdo.” I turned to look at him, we were about two paces away. He didn’t close the distance.

He said, “Have a good day weirdo.”

I said, “Have a good day, asshole.”

And that was the end of that.

It’s been a while since I’ve had this sort of confrontation, because I’m in my 40s and young men don’t usually bother older men with such posturing.

Of course, I should have just ignored him. One of the problems with socialization is that it teaches the wrong lessons. When you’re young, you deal with the same people over and over again. This was especially true of me, because I spent my teen years in boarding school.

With people you will see every day, you can’t let insults or threats pass. You must not let anyone push you around. It took me a long time to learn that.

But as an adult, with someone you don’t know and will never see again, you should just walk away.

Usually, in fact, I do. Today I didn’t, and an old reflex was triggered.

I tend to walk around in a state of general benevolence, regarding most people with good will, but for about two hours after my little confrontation I looked at people with threat goggles on: “Is this person dangerous?”

People who strongly identify as “normal” are very dangerous to anyone who they think isn’t normal. It’s old pack programming. Anyone who is not part of your band of killer apes is wrong, dangerous, a threat, and must be dealt with as such.

I’d lay long odds and real money that the young man today regards himself as normal.

Unless they’re broken, and a lot of “weird” people are, I feel much safer around freaks and weirdos than I do around norms. They usually have a live and let live attitude. This is true even in periods where I’m passing as normal, which I can do if I care to bother.

Consider, now, that I am a white heterosexual male. I’m not brown. I’m not gay or trans. I don’t have tattoos (well, that’s normal now, not freaky) or wear my hair in a mohawk and so on. Right now, I just have long hair.

So, normals, dangerous to anyone they consider not a normal.

Let’s discuss why I said I wasn’t in real danger, and neither was he.

Normal violence inside a society (and not including domestic violence, which has its own fucked up dynamics) occurs under two scenarios (and one failure situation).

Scenario One

Three or four men confronting one person. They are confident of victory, because they outnumber the person they want to victimize and they emotionally feed back to each other, convincing themselves they are in the right and that the victim deserves a beating.

Scenario Two

One man who has a good reason to believe he can win a fight and and has an onlooker or onlookers who urge him on.

Usually, this means a man who is bigger than his victim, or who is trained in violence. But it can also mean a victim who acts scared, who doesn’t face the other man (this is almost always about man vs. man) squarely.

I faced the man, I looked him in the eyes. I leaned in. I did not flinch when he put his fist to my body. I insulted him before I turned away and I gave him two beats to swing at me after I insulted him.

And the woman with him didn’t want him to fight. No one was egging him (or me) on.

I did not act like a victim. I acted like someone who thought he stood a decent chance if we fought.

I also fulfilled the requirements of the ritual. This sort of stuff is a ritual, and you must do what you are supposed to do. If you do not, you mark yourself as a victim.

That’s the failure state.

Note that this stuff scales. So if there are ten of them and three of you, you’re still in danger, and so on.

Humans are pack animals. Normal humans are dangerous when they identify you as not one of the pack or having violated the norms of the pack (pretty close to the same thing) and when they have the approval of the pack to hurt you.

If that’s the situation, it’s very hard to diffuse. Showing your belly might work, but it might not, and if they’re people you’ll deal with in the future, it makes you a permanent victim.

I learned all this stuff in boarding school, the hard way, by not meeting the ritual requirements for years. As a young man, I lived very close to the street, but I’d learned my lesson by then, and had learned how to meet the ritual requirements and fight if necessary.

I’m not a trained fighter, I never bothered. Instead, I’m a “flip”, which is to say, in a fight, all the normal social prohibitions turn off for me. Ordinary people treat fighting as a social event. I don’t start fights and if I wind up in one I feel completely justified in breaking whoever started the fight with me. I’m the sort of person you shouldn’t start a fight with unless you really know you can win.

Which is to say, the kid was right, sort of–I am a weirdo. I’m not normal. He was also wrong, of course, because I’m not dangerous at all to anyone who isn’t dangerous to me. It is in this way that most weirdos and freaks are different from normals, actually. They aren’t dangerous to other people who leave them be.

Let us discuss the really dangerous people now. Not precisely sociopaths, though most are sociopaths, but people who are dangerous alone.

When I was a teenager there was one kid in school who liked tormenting me when no one else was around.  He was the actual dangerous one. All the other bullies were just pack animals. Most were actually nice to me if we were alone together.

This kid, he was broken. He was really dangerous.

Anyone who likes hurting people when no one else is around, and this includes enjoying hurting animals, is truly dangerous. Get away from them, or break them, there are no other solution to such people.

Now note that while a lot of these people are sociopaths, many aren’t. And many sociopaths are actually great people. Two of my closest friends were sociopaths, one is even clinically diagnosed, the other I’m just sure he was. Sociopaths can be wonderful. They just don’t feel your emotions. If you’re happy or hurting, they don’t get emotional contagion. That’s why they’re dangerous outside of packs.

But they don’t all like hurting people, and there are entirely “normal” people who do. After all, you can learn to like the emotional contagion of other people’s fear, pain, terror, and humiliation.  Sociopaths can be frightening, but normals make the best torturers because they can feel your pain, and they like it, and when a normal learns to operate without pack approval, you get the most depraved of monsters.

I generally like humans. But I’m very aware that humans are killer apes who are barely capable of rational thought and who, when they are, mostly use it to get what their emotions tell them to get and those emotions often tell them to hurt, kill, and rape, especially anyone who is “other.”

Now this conversation is from the point of view of a man. Women face different challenges which I’m not entirely competent to speak to. The permanent perception of weakness, of every man believing he will win a fight with any woman, leads to some really unpleasant consequences. When added to the fact that for many, perhaps most, men, women aren’t part of the pack, unless they are family, the consequences can be horrific.

Women aren’t men, and men often don’t see them as human. And when that happens, and it often happens for millenia at a time, well, you get history.

Humans. Love them, care for them, but treat them like tigers. No matter how much you think a tiger is domesticated, it never is. That may not be true for some individual, decent humans, but for humans as a group, it is always true.

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