Smashing
Nature
gives us warning signs about people as clearly as it puts stripes on
bees or hourglass figures on spiders. These are signals that the
creature we face is toxic and ready to destroy.Among the advanced simians with car keys that populate our cities, the warning signs generally center around a lack of stability or purpose. You see them for example when you drive down an unknown street and see people just hanging out on their balconies, porches and lawns, with no clear purpose. Or when you find some person who is evasive about personal details or their reason for being somewhere. Even someone overly friendly and helpful can be a sign of a scam, if there’s no reason for them to be so.
Another warning sign is subtler, but it’s this: many people never escape the mode of outrage at their upbringing, heritage and society. They are programmed to destroy because they are filled with rage, fueled by a sense of hurt, and sustained by a low self-esteem that requires an external target or it will turn on itself.
Their mentality is one of smashing. They do not construct; they do not have enough love for life, or themselves (and the two require one another), to do construct anything. All they know is their pain, and since they have not replaced it with success or honest enjoyment of life, they can only smash and destroy and hope that somehow they will purge the poison that torments them.
The only glitch with this plan is of course that their torment is within. Even if what happened to them was external and bad, their reaction is within, and like the swelling of a wound, it can be more fatal than the injury itself if not stopped. But they feed it, because it has become an identity. They are no longer normal, like the others. They are different, exiled from happiness, and filled with a desire for revenge.
Desires of this nature are so penetrating that they form the core of the personality. This process starts with a few simple decisions, such as those to be a deliberate outsider and reject the rules of the herd. These are usually innocent errors, throwing the baby out with the bathwater and condemning society because you hate your parents.
These then accelerate when self-pity becomes involve. It is at first a gentle invitation, as if from Satan, to pursue a mentally easier path. Soon it becomes a crutch. As with all addictions, the first one is free.
Finally it becomes an identity after years of alienation cement the role. The original injury long gone is replaced by an ongoing process of self-injury, by which the person keeps resentment alive because it explains their lives to this point in a handy narrative. It also allocates the blame elsewhere. Even if the blame originally belonged elsewhere, at some point the burden has been assumed by the individual. But like most addictions, this is not made explicit and the person lulls themselves into thinking that others have done this to them.
The result is a compulsive need to smash that can only briefly be sated, and then will need recharging again. Mouths dripping (metaphorical) blood, they rush from one beautiful thing to another, motivated only to disable, subvert, poison, besmirch, pollute and eradicate. They learn early on to do this with substitutes. If you find a work of beauty, replace it with a work of neurotic hatred, and a 200-page document explaining why your work is profound and insightful because it addresses pain and not beauty. Pain, after all, is how we relate to others who are suffering.
People who have a need to smash eventually lose the ability to stop themselves. The personality has entirely been replaced by the impulse to destroy, which is routed not in a lack of belief, but in a belief in the self as all which crowds out everything else. That self then must consider it injured, even when it is not, to justify its ongoing plunder.
Smashing their way through lives, these people eventually find themselves in a void, as they have removed all that is challenging — repeating the pattern of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, they destroyed adversity alongside their tormentors. Instance replaces essence. Values are forgotten, and instead a person exists who reacts radically to any imposition on their autonomy.
The West is inundated in people who are addicted to smashing. The process snowballs: for each broken home, more are made. They reinforce each other and congregate wherever discontent can be found. Together, they form a mob that uses all possible simian cleverness to justify its underlying agenda of destruction, which it will never admit.
If left unchecked, such people drag civilizations down to a third world level. They sabotage, vandalize and steal so that any who rise above their level of mediocrity are brought right back down. Those who are not infected with the smashing virus are always caught by surprise, as it doesn’t occur to them to want to destroy, even as they are destroyed.
The long-term enemy of the smasher is the accumulation of information. These people fear the connection between different pieces of data more than anything else, and seek to deconstruct them. They fear these chains of clear thought because in those can be found the antidote to smashing: making sense of what is wrong, and putting it below what is right.
You would think they might embrace that type of solution. But they do not, because they are addicted to smashing. It feels good to them, in their misery. As the years go by, it becomes clearer how infested with such people we are, and how much better our fortunes would be if we left them elsewhere.
