Could There Be an Antidote for “Toxicity”?

Dec 2

The American comedian, Bill Maher, has often said that the only way to avoid a second American Civil War is for people to stop hating on each other. He has also described simply disagreeing with someone else as not being the same as a moral wrong, a view that sounds like what psychologists might describe as maintaining one’s personal boundaries.

In Shakespeare, the only figure who is empowered to speak wisdom to the Monarch is the Fool, the comedian of Elizabethan Theatre, while today, even comedians must tiptoe carefully through the linguistic garden.

To the forebears of Shakespeare - the ancient Greek philosophers and playwrights - Honor was a character virtue worth devoting years of one's life to study and practice. Yet today we rarely hear the word honor spoken, sought after, or cultivated while it is just so much easier for us to Twitter-rant.

“What if honor could be codified and made practical in application? A psychological antidote to today's war of words? Its mature boundaries, an alternative approach to disagreement in derogatory terms such as "toxicity", "gaslighting", and others like them?”

Part of the reason for this may be that a driving principle within honor is the strength and virtuous use of one’s personal boundary: a two-way street of both self-respect and respect for others that takes effort and practice, even and especially when we disagree on things. Boundaries, like most psychological processes, are invisible to the eye, which can make them that much harder to learn or grow.

What if honor could be codified and made practical in application? A psychological antidote to today's war of words? Its mature boundaries, an alternative approach to disagreement in derogatory terms such as "toxicity", "gaslighting", and others like them

Further, what if every one of these reappropriated words so newly in vogue today – les mots nouveaux – are all nothing more than synonyms for the same thing – an opposite of honor? What if they represent a collection of immature and maladaptive traits that collectively have been recognized for the past hundred years as narcissism.

Honor could then be an antidote for narcissism in the same way that strong, more mature personal boundaries are the antidote to immature weak ones with which we all start out in life, as toddlers. From there, with patience and time, we mature, refine and solidify them through diverse experiences of social interaction among people who have very different ideas from our own.

We are all on different paths and working on our boundaries at different paces. In so doing, we are shedding the narcissism of our younger years – which can be all the more challenging when there can exist people so disrespectful, dishonorable, entitled and violating enough of the well-being of others that they may be called not just narcissistic, but pathologically narcissistic.

“The temptation to join the crowds of the outraged on the internet seduces us into being like the goddess of discord from ancient Greek myth, *Eris, who hurled a golden apple into the center of the Olympian garden party to which she was not invited. Eris etched on its surface, the words, "for the fairest"…”***

While professional psychologists are trained to diagnose the latter malady in specific individuals, the rest of us, as laypeople can sense it in others even though the terminology may be quite foreign to us. Instead, we conjure nonspecific pejoratives such as "toxicity", sometimes applying them to anyone and everyone we disagree with, irrespective of where they are on their path on the spectrum of growth. Indeed social media tends to obscure the true age of the person we are interacting with, so we can’t tell if a stinging remark is from a surly curmudgeon or from a well-meaning but clumsily inarticulate youngster.

The temptation to join the crowds of the outraged on the internet seduces us into being like the goddess of discord from ancient Greek myth, Eris, who hurled a golden apple into the center of the Olympian garden party to which she was not invited.

Eris etched on its surface, the words, "for the fairest" in the way we barge into today’s conversations - many we know not much about - spouting brief, seemingly virtuous phrases that please some, insult others, and in the end don't accomplish much except the spreading of discord.

Alternatively, when we spend our idle time reading peoples’ insults to each other on the internet, we are like the attendees of the Olympian party, failing to notice Eris rolling that apple of discord into our midst. We fail to grasp her action as the actual start of the Trojan War in the myth, her presence in our ordinary lives at the very least bringing ruin to what could instead have been an enlightening, pleasurable conversation.

Perhaps the myth’s lesson for us is that conflict doesn’t need whole armies to start it, while it takes only one person to spark discord, whose roots are in jealousy, which once lit, spreads like a fire that burns everyone within the garden gates.

The world has been steeped in more crises in the past two years than in the past twenty. In the midst of all this stress, someone, somewhere has likely called you a derogatory word such as "toxic" or "weird" or "stupid." Perhaps, in the heat of the moment, you might even have issued such insults at the other person.

The interaction diminished the dignity of both of you by robbing you of a sense of honor. A disrespect and violation of each other’s personal boundaries.

Still, nothing hurts as severely as having such synonyms of narcissism as “toxic” paired with an inborn, immutable, unique part of your identity: "You dirty, rotten 'x'…" or "You stupid, little 'y'…"

It wasn't the toxic, the dirty, the rotten, the stupid, or the little that injured you all that much because you knew deep down that these were vaguely insulting and inaccurate grasps at the essence of who you uniquely are. In fact, all that these crude, nonspecific terms did is to put the immature boundaries of an obnoxious, argumentative stranger on display.

“Even if we were the one wielding the verbal weapons, having won the meaningless argument, we have destroyed the intellectual feast, like Eris, when we simply wanted to be honored with an invite to attend.”

No, it is the cleverly implied, false link to your inborn traits that does you the most profound harm– the shaming phrase, an illogical, irrational but emotionally-charged connection to your geography, ethnicity, age, race, body type, sex, socioeconomic level of origin, or other immutable descriptors of your identity which have nothing valid to do with concerns of character virtues or vices.

Even if we were the one wielding the verbal weapons, having won the meaningless argument, we were left feeling empty. We have destroyed the intellectual feast, like Eris, when we simply wanted to be honored with an invite to attend.

This is what the word "toxicity" does to us all. It robs everyone at the feast of their honor, and torches the creative, intellectual collaborations that could have been.

Like so many of les mots nouveaux that we bludgeon each other with, it is the apple of discord, rolling silently into the sacred spaces where we used to learn from each other, not in spite of, but because of our differences.

In this way, narcissism dumbs down the individual, their tribe, and the society.

When we use shame to coerce others into thinking, believing, saying or doing what we want them to, we are manipulating them. We deny them the space to figure out who they want to become. While we might be able to force a fake apology with shame, we will be doing nothing to bring out the best in people or in ourselves.

Because of the unalienable function of personal boundaries in our psychology, we will never change people’s beliefs or choices. The most we could ever do is to generously encourage the dignity of their own moral self-correction. To invite them to think.

When we abandon shame in favor of honor, this also doesn’t mean that we are naïve or are somehow betraying ourselves. Honor respects one’s own past but also respects the future potential in others. It seeks interdependent, joint effort toward shared goals, even if we are in passionate disagreement today.

Les Miserables - one of the most well-loved novels of all time - shows us this polar difference between shame and honor, the “moral self-correction” inherent in honor as the key to lasting change for the better.

Anyone who has ever been considered "toxic" could still turn their life around in an instant of interpersonal insight - not unlike that of novelist Victor Hugo’s character, Jean Valjean.

Minor as it seems, Valjean did break the law when he stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. After nineteen years in prison and as a galley slave for the theft, he is finally freed. Yet, as an ex-convict, no one will take him in for the night but the kind Monseigneur Myriel.

“Shame doesn’t change people for the better on the inside. Setting boundaries with the expectation of noble conduct, and forgiveness that gives breathing room for their dignity leads them to more honor.”

Upon awakening, this basically good man has another moral failing - Valjean repays Myriel’s hospitality by making off with his silverware. When the former prisoner is found with the property, he is quickly brought back by police to the Monseigneur for questioning.

However rather than sending him back to prison in abject shame, Myriel claims that the silverware is an intentional gift, and reaffirms that Valjean has truly reformed.

The Monseigneur’s faith in Valjean’s potential character virtue - setting the expectation of future magnanimous conduct - sparks a passion in Valjean to earn the honor of being treated so kindly, of worth and with dignity.

Myriel’s moral wager on him is accurate, and Valjean goes on to build a factory that brings prosperity to the whole town of Montreuil, he supports the single mother, Fantine, and adopts her daughter Cosette when she tragically dies.

A Valjean is not possible without the private forgiveness of the Monseigneur he had wronged - the sharing of honor by generous example, and from which moral self-correction can produce durable change in one's private, personal "code of honor." Not just an ingenuine apology.

Shame doesn’t change people for the better on the inside. Setting boundaries with the expectation of noble conduct, and forgiveness that gives breathing room for their dignity leads them to more honor. Then, they become a more fit collaborator, a colleague in the intellectual feast that the internet could be.

The world is filled to the brim with Valjeans, just waiting to be given the honor of sitting at your table.

Invite them. Instead of those other words we’ve been using.

The President who would end the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, knew this principle well, that shame does not unite people, but honor does.

“We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

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