Passive-aggression is among the most irksome of all human behaviors. Most individuals I’ve conversed with about the issue agree that it is both profoundly insulting and utterly cowardly. But why is that, exactly? What about this behavior makes it so reprehensible?
The laws of war are instructive on the matter. Generally, it is understood that wearing the uniform of the enemy, or clothing a combatant in civilian dress, is a violation of the laws of war, and the perpetrator may thus be treated as a spy. Passive-aggression operates under a similar principle. Somebody intends to do you harm, or may even be in the process of doing you harm. He is your enemy. And yet he disguises his actions as a sort of non-combatant so as to avoid retaliation. He may even pretend to be your friend.
Naturally, this is a favored tactic of the Political Left, at least when it possesses insufficient power to work its will more directly. Leftists are able to wear your uniform as a good, concerned, moral citizen, and do you harm in this disguise. A Progressive might say that he is merely concerned with accessibility of healthcare for the poor, downtrodden folks of wherever. In truth, his main concern is personal power. As the arbiter of wealth redistribution, he may decide who to rob, and who to pay, and how much he might take for himself.
Dinesh D’Souza explains:
The relevant quote is this: “…[Obama] holds a gun to your head and says ‘Michael, turn your sandwich over to Dinesh’. And so you do. And then he puts his gun back and rides away. Now, the outcome is the same, I have the sandwich. But the moral content of that transaction is completely different. You deserve no moral credit, you didn’t give willingly. I don’t even feel a sense of gratitude, I feel a sense of entitlement. I feel that you actually owe me seven sandwiches, but you only gave me one.”
The thing to note about this transaction, is that the guy with the gun gets to take all the credit. He gets to say “if I didn’t do this, he would have starved.” And yet the guy with gun didn’t give up his sandwich. Me merely stole it from another man. So how is it that he gets any moral credit either?
So a “concerned citizen” might point out that one person has a sandwich, and somebody else needs it, then appoints himself to be the arbiter of sandwiches. The “concerned citizen” aspect is a ruse. It is a lie. He put on your uniform, and then uses a form of passive-aggression to bully you into nominating him for power. The implication being, of course, that if you disagree with his redistribution of sandwiches, you are a bad person and you want everybody to starve.
Unfortunately, unlike spies caught in time of war, we are not permitted to hang these cowardly cretins.
It goes further, however. Selective statistics are another favored weapon. During the Obama years, many of us on the Right mentioned that the reported numbers on unemployment and the economy didn’t add up. Obama claimed to add millions of jobs, and claimed a massive reduction in unemployment, and yet individuals would look around their communities, and still see the effects of terrible recession. They weren’t getting jobs. Their friends weren’t getting jobs. So who was getting all these jobs?
Of course, the unemployment rate figures have been bogus for as long as I’ve been alive. It’s a manipulated statistic. Aside from not including those who are no longer seeking work, it fails to account for underemployment. So it is easy for the government to move numbers around, change the definitions of those seeking work, and otherwise manipulate the figure. In terms of jobs added, one might fail to mention the jobs lost in the same period. “I added 1 million new jobs!” Well, great, how good is that if, in the same period, 2 million people lost their jobs?
Now, suddenly, the mainstream media has rediscovered that the official unemployment rate is bogus, because that number has dropped since Donald Trump took office. This was more or less ignored, or at least buried in the back pages, when Obama was in office, because the media wanted him to look good. The media was filled with headlines telling us how great he was doing.
It’s absurdly easy to do this with any statistic. You can find statistics telling us that Soviet economy was just fine. This article cites many. You can find the same telling us that Cuban health care is great. Yet my father-in-law, who escaped from Cuba, explains that if you get a cut, you need to bring your own needle and thread to the doctor to stitch you up, because you are lucky enough if the doctor even bothers to help you. He certainly won’t supply you with anything.
Now, the Leftist might claim something like “well, that’s anecdotal evidence, and anecdotal evidence is the weakest form of evidence.” Perhaps that is so in a formal debate, where the objective is to convince others. But in truth, it is among the strongest forms of evidence for you, personally. It is precisely how you can avoid someone telling you that 2+2 = 5, even if that person is more educated or intelligent. It is how you avoid being gullible.
It is telling that the Leftist essentially tells you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes, and trust him, because he is the expert.
Like the man who wishes to be the arbiter of sandwiches, these sorts of people want to be arbiters of knowledge, and decide what is true, and what is false, by fiat. They are a collective Xerxes, whipping the sea for disobedience.
Again, the objective is control. These people want power for its own sake, and merely dress themselves up in the uniform of reasonable intellectuals so as to avoid triggering resistance.
Marxism has always operated this way. It is the ideology of cowards and spies. It is passive-aggressive behavior turned into a code of political conduct. And were the full power of Western civilization ever deployed against it, it could be wiped out entirely with relative ease. So the objective of the Marxist is always to clothe himself as your friend, as a concerned citizen, as a reasonable intellectual, as anything but what he actually is, so as to avoid retribution. Never let the Marxist fool you into believing otherwise.
FIRST! 😉
And now to my second and less intelligent comment:
When progressives/SJWs grandstand, preen and pose, the counter-argument is simple:
“Show me how it’s done. Set the example and lead the way.”
They will likely balk. The proper response is laughter and mockery. Humiliate them. Make them HURT.
They may claim to have already done so because they ‘gave money’ or ‘volunteered.’ Tell them they need to do A LOT MORE and that you need their help as well. If they refuse, call them selfish, uncaring, greedy and CAPITALIST. Remember: MAKE IT HURT.
Regarding the unemployment numbers:
The stats on unemployed, ‘underemployed’, people retiring, size of workforce, etc….are all readily available on the net, usually from the BLS. I actually analyzed those numbers in 2015. They clearly showed that the then-advertised 5% or so unemployed number was a laughable contrivance, and the number was somewhere between 2x and 3x of that. It was OBVIOUS from the arithmetic.
There will be an awful backlash against the powers-that-be for this kind of chicanery. Notice what happened when, for instance, the communist government was overthrown in Romania.
If the current elites do not voluntarily give up their power and influence and retire peacefully into the background without interference, the same will one day be meted out to them
That’s not a threat. It’s simply history.
They are good at coming up with excuses for why they don’t have to make sacrifices. Al Gore will fly around the world in his private jet, then tell you that you shouldn’t drive a car, because it’s bad for the environment. Hillary still blames the Russians, Comey, the electoral system, and a thousand other things – anybody other than herself – for her humiliating loss.
This doesn’t humiliate them. Or, rather, it doesn’t humiliate them *enough*. In my experience, the only way to really embarrass them is to strike at the heart of their perceived superiority. They think of themselves as better than you. So, if you manage to demonstrate convincingly that they are idiots… that truly does get under their skin. They self-destruct very rapidly when their intellectual weakness is demonstrated in public fashion.
How come you linked to that commie Gowans?
Sometimes, I like to see what sort of idiocy the other side is spouting. It’s often educational, if not precisely in the way they intend.
I really like the sandwich analogy you go through in this article. I would just add that the situation is slightly worse than the story implies.
Sometimes that man that is forced to hand over a sandwich to another man. In this story the government is acting as a thief, or, more properly, a robber, and thieves transfer wealth rather than destroy it. The government does exactly that. The government holds a gun to your employer’s head and tells him to give you a sandwich. You think that the government is giving you a sandwich but the employer is taking the money to pay for the sandwich out of your paycheck, so you don’t even get a transfer of wealth, you merely lose discretion and control over the money you earn.
Of course, it looks like it is coming to you out of your employer’s pocket and in the very short term that may well be true, but in the long run you are only paid as much as your labor brings in to the company. If you cost the company more than you benefit it you don’t have a job (this is a slight simplification because we have to take into account the price elasticities of the labor market and people that have not bargained well with their employer to get a wage that matches their marginal productivity, but it is true to a first approximation). So assuming you are paid more or less what you contribute to the company, all the government does by forcing your employer to ‘give’ you a sandwich is make you take some portion of your pay not in the form of money but of sandwiches.
This is what happens in the case of employer provided health care, for instance.
The reason this is worse than the original story is that the you aren’t gaining any wealth, you are losing freedom. Instead of money you get a sandwich. If you wanted a sandwich you are, at best, no better off than before. But if you did not want a sandwich then you are losing wealth. Indeed, society is losing wealth, for the money that could have been converted into a good that you valued more than the money disappears and is replaced by a sandwich that is worth less (to you) than the money. This is what economists call ‘dead-weight’ loss. Robbers at least take wealth from one person and give it to another. The government cons you into thinking you have gotten something for nothing when in fact the the opposite has occurred, some of your wealth has been turned into nothing. You have been bribed with your own money and taken a loss on the deal, and the con man expects your gratitude.
Excellent.
They take from you, and give back some percentage, in a form they choose, and claim moral superiority for having done so. It’s an old trick.
I just wish more folks saw through it, I suppose.
Jimmy Kimmel IS an “Arbiter of Sandwiches”
Truth.
Given that the left has already destroyed hundreds of millions lives should be a clue as to what their real intentions are…. and it sure isn’t ‘justice’ or ‘equality’.
But they still cloak themselves in those things. We see through them, but if even a few regular folks are convinced by the disguise, they win. After all, they already have Romney’s 47% who are net dependents.