Wolves Aren’t Welcome in my Head Space

I won’t engage with people who don’t show intellectual honesty

The internet is a hostile wasteland. It’s littered with broken and delusional people who are somehow under the impression that the only way to escape from their misery is to harass innocent and anonymous strangers.

It’s wrong to fall under the mistaken opinion that mindfulness or diligence can spare you from being the victim of an online attack. There are certain truths which, when spoken publicly, send a sweet scent through the woods and instantly bring down a pack of howling wolves upon you.

When that happens, it’s the common inclination of decent people to reassess their own perspective. But that’s exactly the reaction the wolves want. They aren’t interested in engaging in intellectual discourse to change your opinion. They want you silenced. The only option is to silence them instead.

Blocking is not censorship

I have a friend who refuses to block hostile profiles. He argues that he is anti-censorship and that it is hypocritical to use the block feature.

Although this idea has its roots in a generous sentiment, he is really setting himself up for undue torment. Blocking hostile internet personalities isn’t censorship. You aren’t stopping them from speaking their opinions. You are just preventing them from harassing you, and from using your platform to spread their destructive ideas.

If they want to spread their ideas, they should take the time to build their own platform. The fact that nobody seems to want to listen to them should provide an indicator of the quality of their perspective.

The hit and run

The worst part about when the wolves come is the underhanded tactics that they use. One of their favorite actions is to walk up to you and slap you in the face, hoping that you will return the slap as a reflexive reaction. The second your response has landed, they adopt a horrified expression, step back, and point at you to draw attention to your “lowly,” “violent” nature.

Wolves know that nobody scrolls back up to the top of an argument thread to see who was the true aggressor. They do whatever they can to draw you down to their level and then they berate you for responding to them in kind.

It’s infuriating, but again, that’s the point. They want to disrupt your head space. They want you to spend the rest of the day thinking about the unfairness of their behavior, and not engaged in your productive labors. This is how they derail the progress of intellectual discourse. Chaos is their only objective.

The bots

The other thing to keep in mind is how many individuals on the internet aren’t even human beings. Artificial intelligence has progressed to the level where the Turing test is passed every day.

Alan Turning conceived of the Turing test in 1950. The basic concept is that an AI is able to interact with a human being through a text based interface without the human becoming aware that s/he is talking to a computer, then the machine has passed the test.

AI bots are used to fleece people out of money through those “foreign prince wants to give you a million dollars” emails. You’d think those interactions would be easily spotted as fraudulent, but their prevalence shows they must be having some success.

AI bots can appear in strange places. I once posted a comment on Facebook expressing my irritation with how Windows updates always seem to come right when you need your computer. Instantly the post was flooded with corporate sounding comments about how Windows updates make computers run faster, more efficiently, and with greater security. I blocked them all, there’s no way there can be people in the world that actually think that.

A curiosity versus an ear worm

There’s not much you can do to prevent exposure to the occasional hostile internet interaction. Reading comments from like-minded individuals is one of the greatest joys of writing. Sometimes you’re a line into a comment before you recognize that the individual is antagonistic.

The trick is not subjecting yourself to a worthless argument thread. That can go on and on and on and, believe me, nobody reads it. Consider what it does to you. It’s as if you’ve allowed a pack of feral beasts into your mind to disrupt your organized structure and wreak havoc on your ability to function.

You don’t owe that to anyone. You’re allowed to fortify yourself and only let in those you choose. Frankly, there’s no argument which should compel you to let anyone in.

The post and block

My favorite tactic when faced with that kind of an individual is to respond to their comment in a way that’s as dismissive as insulting as possible and then block them. The effect is that you get to have the last word on the issue, and you can put that person out of your mind.

We live in an era where multitudes of people entertain truly deranged perspectives on a variety of topics. It does you no good to allow yourself to be exposed to their backwards, illogical thinking. I used to feel a certain compassion for these lost souls, as if I had an obligation to help lead them to a place of greater clarity. However, I’ve come to realize that they have put themselves in their tormented position out of deliberate action, you don’t owe them anything.

The most likely outcome of any interaction is not that you will lead the opposition out of darkness, but instead that they will lead you into it. Your position is in your articles. There’s no need to donate your time to every disabled soul that comes pounding at your door demanding extra attention. If they want help, they can read the article and reflect on it honestly.

The bitter pill of popularity

I’ve written enough popular articles to know that engagement has its downside. We often claim it’s otherwise, but the fact is that there are forces in this world which quickly align themselves to suppress you. It doesn’t matter where you start making personal advancement, a forward step seems to cause ripples in the ether that incite a horde of dark entities.

All you can do is fortify yourself against the blow that you know is coming. Ultimately, you have the power to repel them. They rely on your goodness and decency to disrupt you. It’s noble to have the inclination to help others, but always remember that you can’t help anyone else unless you first attend to yourself.

Here’s an article of mine that incited the enemy to rouse an army: