In 1981, when I was a freshman in college, my roommates and I returned from our spring break to discover that our dorm room apartment had been burglarized.
Wow, didn’t know where this was headed but I like the point you made. I think it’s accurate. In the absence of real answers making other people as miserable as you are suffices I suppose.
This was a great one. I see a lot of self defeating behavior in the neighborhood where I live and work. It’s hard not to get sucked into it when dysfunctional behavior is normal. It’s so sad to see how it affects kids. I teach urban kids and I worry a lot about how federal policies may affect them. These kids have not had tine to make their own decisions in life. It’s easy to write them off as downstream effects if you never see them but they’re real little kids (well very big actually - middle school kids are giant these days). They need more help resources and attention not less. Like the cat they are really innocent victims.
Your "capricious cruelty" is the way a narcissist bullies us into attracting attention required to fuel their need for attention. Starving a fire of oxygen is extinguishing.
Thanks for this one. What a fun, disturbing, and real essay. You made great points, and the imagery of the various scenes, from your dorm room to the fancy dinner to the burning fire, made me feel I was there. I am on my couch watching it all burn.
Is the issue perversity, or the use of moral agency to choose our own path? As noted in your inclusion (at the end of your post) of the painting of Adam and Eve at the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we all have moral agency, or the ability to choose our actions. I am not surprised this is a story from your first year of college (the first year fully away from the control and counsel of your parents). Perhaps that was the first time you really felt totally free to choose for yourself? I think that once we have that agency, and some experimentation (good and bad) with it, we learn we can choose our actions, but not the consequences that logically follow those actions. As we grow more experienced in the exercise of agency, we hopefully realize what is good or bad for us. Just a thought.
Such a great essay! Oh, yes..."capricious cruelty" is a part of human nature...I remember that feeling distinctly as a kid - while babysitting my brother (especially if he wasn't listening to me). Needing him to 'know' my power over him, would lead me to make him sit in 'couch prison' and watch "The Little Mermaid" to exhaustion OR run laps around the house. "The Little Mermaid" is now a traumatic memory for him and another little girl I babysat. It wasn't just discipline. It was a feeling of power. I admired my OWN ability to "make him do things..." Dictators, like me (back then), get a hit of dopamine watching others squirm under our tyranny.. I need to apologize again.. :) LOL
I can't recall, or with any great aha or clarity, ever wanting to do this to another person. I am sure I have. Maybe I hide this from myself to make me feel better. I think there are yin and yangs to ever relationship and when I read your comment, I feel the yin part of me being more of my operating system make-up. Maybe you would relate more to the yang part of the way you approach(ed) life? It is interesting to ticker tape through relationships in my life and see this dynamic play itself out over and over. Interesting.
I don't know too much about the Yin and Yang philosophy...but I am hesitant to think of this experience as a binary human quality i.e. "You're this or that".... The power-mongering trait I was exhibiting - wasn't part of my everyday personality, but more so as a feeling that took over me when I was given power. I had not yet experienced that before. My mom was single-parenting and working full time -- I had to babysit at a young age. The power I felt, reminds me of the frightening power that the ring, from "Lord of the Rings" had over, anyone who possessed it. It is interesting. Reminds me of that quote: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men..."— Lord Acton (1887), Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton
Yin is feminine energy, accommodating, accepting, soft, nurturing (think about our anatomy). Yang is masculine energy, penetrating, directed, outward, rigid (again think about men's anatomy). We all have both. It is a matter of dominance in our ways, balance etc. I could also say there may always be victims and perpetrators. That sounds much more harsh though and on the ends of the spectrum of energy. So maybe we live within those ends as more passive or accepting or always on the bottom, while the other may be more outright, forceful, always on top. And none of this is to say one is wrong or bad. Again on a spectrum. Where I think it goes wrong and could have "bad" consequences, is at the ends where a narcissist annihilates another.
Your friend's husband is literally the reason we got Trump, twice. He wanted to 'own the libs' and he got a crashing stock market, global instability and married women potentially unable to vote because the name on our driver's license doesn't match the name on our birth certificate.
Apparently a passport will still allow me to vote, but I'm betting most women don't have one.
When I was a recent college grad in the 90’s, someone broke into the Brooklyn apartment I shared with two roommates. They ransacked the room of my fastidious roommate. They left the room of the total slob roommate completely untouched. In my (neat) room, everything seemed intact, but I knew *something* was off. Then I spotted it; the lid on my tin of coins was slightly askew. All of my coins were gone.
The person who “broke in” was a neighbor, a local from Atlantic Avenue, back when it was a sketchy strip with nothing more than a few non-trendy antique shops. I remembered that many months before, my boyfriend and I had given them a key so they could feed our cat while we were away. Well, said boyfriend apparently never got the key back and then we had broken up and he moved out, and I lost track of the missing key. I think our intruder knew my room was mine and still felt some sort of warm place in his thieving heart for me, and thus only took my coins.
I guess sometimes it pays to be a troglodyte. Until it doesn’t…
I don't assume or expect that too many "Republicans"/"Trump voters" are perverse in the sense that they want to destroy institutions and hate Democrats 'just because'...
They don't hate (all) the Democrats' "virtues," but they hate their arrogance, with which they, just as incorrigiable as Trump, want to push through everything without a second thought, without any *self-criticism*, just because they assume they are "the good guys."
Democrats still have countless „friends", for example, among "Palestinians" – before and after October 7th – who proudly and happily killed, tortured, raped, and burned people "just because they could" – or "because they were Jewish."
And if you criticize the supposedly or actually legitimate concerns of the "Palestinians," you get labelled as "Islamophobic," "reactionary". Jews, universities, and others had to / were allowed to be terrorized by this—sorry, SCRATCH—"until Trump came along": why didn't the oh-so-"good Democrats" wanted to solve this problem themselves?
Values in themselves are neither "good" nor "bad"; they are simply a framework, a guideline against/upon which one can examine or align one's way of leading his life. What can make even "good" values bad, destroy them, cause harm and turn them into their opposite is absolutism of "values" and the lack of constant (self-)examination and (self-)criticism.
How many "family values," which may in themselves be understandable, justified, or valuable, have long since been perverted behind countless shining facades of "perfect families"?
All of this makes neither "democratic virtues" nor "family values" wrong.
These allegedly „conservative“ values have harmed countless „Conservatives“ and families, just as „vaccination critics“ harms kids with measles a.o., which but doesn´t make any so-called „alternative medicine“ or sustainably and wholesomely nourishing and leading one´s life wrong in itself.
I ask myself why is the vast so-called „majority“ of „We The People“ - who are allowed to „vote“ - SO DUMB to be unable to think clearly and critically ?
What makes them wrong, what makes them PERVERSE, is the inability for self-criticism, for constant self-examination, for constant respect for "others" who still might tell you something you are unaware of.
Nowhere in the world—most often and most frequently (by no means everywhere, of course) but to my knowledge in Israel or among Jews—do I see these true and fundamental values realized and recognized as essential.
On the contrary, the "trend" is moving BACK toward being "proud" of one's damned "nation", "class,“ , „family“ and "origin" and "not questioning" them:
THIS institutionalized PERVERSION is declared as „normal", the terror of "majorities" at the expense not only of those declared „minorities", but of every individual who wants to be free and "only" be committed to their honest heart, which can never, will never, and should never rest—otherwise, one is dead.
And most of them are, and their reaction is to make others as miserable as they are themselves, or kill them.
It´s obvious that quotation marks (here) are used intentionally and for reasons. If someone doesn't want to be fond of the apparent intentions, they should talk about this; anything else would be meaningless and ineffective.
But I stopped expecting anyway a productive, controversial discussion on Substack a long time ago, since Substack is explicitly not designed for this, and solely for "affirmation". Subscribers pay for "reassurement", not for discussions, possibly even with people who disagree with them... ! Unthinkable.
Of course, "democratic values" will be strengthened by this.
I can only appreciate it when someone tries to contribute something to the topic and content instead of just ranting. Anyone who feels addressed but then doesn't even want to express where and how they feel addressed is at best rude, malicious, or emotionally impoverished.
I have too much guilt to engage in the practice. These are superficial instances like the country club, private school, and alumni situations, but I can't do it.
To take part in and enjoy the demise or mockery of others, including children, to use this little "power" to blackball someone from an institution. It feels like a slippery slope to something.
Also, i think they would call your freshman year a depressive episode.
I pulled the wings off a fly once when I was maybe 10. Felt terrible and haven’t done anything perverse since.
And now we know you went to Penn. How’s it feel to have the same Alma Mater as President Trump? And why do Ivy leaguers always find a way to tell you they went to an Ivy League school? I have a theory, but I’d like to hear from an Ivy leaguer.
I didn't want to go to Penn. I wanted to go to Princeton. At that time, in 1980, I thought Penn was not right for me. It was my "safety school." It was pretty easy to get into Penn those days. Tougher to get into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
It was in my essay as an explanation in part of my unhappiness during my freshman year.
The Tyranny of Merit by Micheal Sandell is a really good insight into how those top USA colleges and the top Oxbridge universities in England keep their 'exclusivity' that of course bumps up their market value both in what they can charge and the value of a degree from them in the careers market or jungle.,while seeming to welcome Diversity (in income level ) and being more open. It's very clever and a right old stitch up.
I agree that we are living in a time of perversity. Interesting take. I do wonder though if your freshman year was less perversity and more depression. (I’m not a doctor nor do I play one on TV.)
Wow, didn’t know where this was headed but I like the point you made. I think it’s accurate. In the absence of real answers making other people as miserable as you are suffices I suppose.
Beautiful essay. The vulnerability makes it so strong.
This was a great one. I see a lot of self defeating behavior in the neighborhood where I live and work. It’s hard not to get sucked into it when dysfunctional behavior is normal. It’s so sad to see how it affects kids. I teach urban kids and I worry a lot about how federal policies may affect them. These kids have not had tine to make their own decisions in life. It’s easy to write them off as downstream effects if you never see them but they’re real little kids (well very big actually - middle school kids are giant these days). They need more help resources and attention not less. Like the cat they are really innocent victims.
Compelling post, David. Very interesting.
“My misadventure as a college freshman troglodyte” could be the title of a cult classic.
Your "capricious cruelty" is the way a narcissist bullies us into attracting attention required to fuel their need for attention. Starving a fire of oxygen is extinguishing.
Thanks for this one. What a fun, disturbing, and real essay. You made great points, and the imagery of the various scenes, from your dorm room to the fancy dinner to the burning fire, made me feel I was there. I am on my couch watching it all burn.
Is the issue perversity, or the use of moral agency to choose our own path? As noted in your inclusion (at the end of your post) of the painting of Adam and Eve at the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we all have moral agency, or the ability to choose our actions. I am not surprised this is a story from your first year of college (the first year fully away from the control and counsel of your parents). Perhaps that was the first time you really felt totally free to choose for yourself? I think that once we have that agency, and some experimentation (good and bad) with it, we learn we can choose our actions, but not the consequences that logically follow those actions. As we grow more experienced in the exercise of agency, we hopefully realize what is good or bad for us. Just a thought.
Thanks Kirk!
Such a great essay! Oh, yes..."capricious cruelty" is a part of human nature...I remember that feeling distinctly as a kid - while babysitting my brother (especially if he wasn't listening to me). Needing him to 'know' my power over him, would lead me to make him sit in 'couch prison' and watch "The Little Mermaid" to exhaustion OR run laps around the house. "The Little Mermaid" is now a traumatic memory for him and another little girl I babysat. It wasn't just discipline. It was a feeling of power. I admired my OWN ability to "make him do things..." Dictators, like me (back then), get a hit of dopamine watching others squirm under our tyranny.. I need to apologize again.. :) LOL
I can't recall, or with any great aha or clarity, ever wanting to do this to another person. I am sure I have. Maybe I hide this from myself to make me feel better. I think there are yin and yangs to ever relationship and when I read your comment, I feel the yin part of me being more of my operating system make-up. Maybe you would relate more to the yang part of the way you approach(ed) life? It is interesting to ticker tape through relationships in my life and see this dynamic play itself out over and over. Interesting.
I don't know too much about the Yin and Yang philosophy...but I am hesitant to think of this experience as a binary human quality i.e. "You're this or that".... The power-mongering trait I was exhibiting - wasn't part of my everyday personality, but more so as a feeling that took over me when I was given power. I had not yet experienced that before. My mom was single-parenting and working full time -- I had to babysit at a young age. The power I felt, reminds me of the frightening power that the ring, from "Lord of the Rings" had over, anyone who possessed it. It is interesting. Reminds me of that quote: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men..."— Lord Acton (1887), Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton
Yin is feminine energy, accommodating, accepting, soft, nurturing (think about our anatomy). Yang is masculine energy, penetrating, directed, outward, rigid (again think about men's anatomy). We all have both. It is a matter of dominance in our ways, balance etc. I could also say there may always be victims and perpetrators. That sounds much more harsh though and on the ends of the spectrum of energy. So maybe we live within those ends as more passive or accepting or always on the bottom, while the other may be more outright, forceful, always on top. And none of this is to say one is wrong or bad. Again on a spectrum. Where I think it goes wrong and could have "bad" consequences, is at the ends where a narcissist annihilates another.
Forced watching of The Little Mermaid is a particularly gentle type of "torture."
😂 💯 and they won’t let me off the hook for it!
Your friend's husband is literally the reason we got Trump, twice. He wanted to 'own the libs' and he got a crashing stock market, global instability and married women potentially unable to vote because the name on our driver's license doesn't match the name on our birth certificate.
Apparently a passport will still allow me to vote, but I'm betting most women don't have one.
You grew out of your perversity, he never did.
When I was a recent college grad in the 90’s, someone broke into the Brooklyn apartment I shared with two roommates. They ransacked the room of my fastidious roommate. They left the room of the total slob roommate completely untouched. In my (neat) room, everything seemed intact, but I knew *something* was off. Then I spotted it; the lid on my tin of coins was slightly askew. All of my coins were gone.
The person who “broke in” was a neighbor, a local from Atlantic Avenue, back when it was a sketchy strip with nothing more than a few non-trendy antique shops. I remembered that many months before, my boyfriend and I had given them a key so they could feed our cat while we were away. Well, said boyfriend apparently never got the key back and then we had broken up and he moved out, and I lost track of the missing key. I think our intruder knew my room was mine and still felt some sort of warm place in his thieving heart for me, and thus only took my coins.
I guess sometimes it pays to be a troglodyte. Until it doesn’t…
I have a suspect in mind for our burglary but I have no proof. It seems like you know who stole from you!
Definite limited utility in being a troglodyte.
Now that was a great essay.
This was raw and moving. It will stick with me for a while.
I don't assume or expect that too many "Republicans"/"Trump voters" are perverse in the sense that they want to destroy institutions and hate Democrats 'just because'...
They don't hate (all) the Democrats' "virtues," but they hate their arrogance, with which they, just as incorrigiable as Trump, want to push through everything without a second thought, without any *self-criticism*, just because they assume they are "the good guys."
Democrats still have countless „friends", for example, among "Palestinians" – before and after October 7th – who proudly and happily killed, tortured, raped, and burned people "just because they could" – or "because they were Jewish."
And if you criticize the supposedly or actually legitimate concerns of the "Palestinians," you get labelled as "Islamophobic," "reactionary". Jews, universities, and others had to / were allowed to be terrorized by this—sorry, SCRATCH—"until Trump came along": why didn't the oh-so-"good Democrats" wanted to solve this problem themselves?
Values in themselves are neither "good" nor "bad"; they are simply a framework, a guideline against/upon which one can examine or align one's way of leading his life. What can make even "good" values bad, destroy them, cause harm and turn them into their opposite is absolutism of "values" and the lack of constant (self-)examination and (self-)criticism.
How many "family values," which may in themselves be understandable, justified, or valuable, have long since been perverted behind countless shining facades of "perfect families"?
All of this makes neither "democratic virtues" nor "family values" wrong.
These allegedly „conservative“ values have harmed countless „Conservatives“ and families, just as „vaccination critics“ harms kids with measles a.o., which but doesn´t make any so-called „alternative medicine“ or sustainably and wholesomely nourishing and leading one´s life wrong in itself.
I ask myself why is the vast so-called „majority“ of „We The People“ - who are allowed to „vote“ - SO DUMB to be unable to think clearly and critically ?
What makes them wrong, what makes them PERVERSE, is the inability for self-criticism, for constant self-examination, for constant respect for "others" who still might tell you something you are unaware of.
Nowhere in the world—most often and most frequently (by no means everywhere, of course) but to my knowledge in Israel or among Jews—do I see these true and fundamental values realized and recognized as essential.
On the contrary, the "trend" is moving BACK toward being "proud" of one's damned "nation", "class,“ , „family“ and "origin" and "not questioning" them:
THIS institutionalized PERVERSION is declared as „normal", the terror of "majorities" at the expense not only of those declared „minorities", but of every individual who wants to be free and "only" be committed to their honest heart, which can never, will never, and should never rest—otherwise, one is dead.
And most of them are, and their reaction is to make others as miserable as they are themselves, or kill them.
I appreciate your strong feelings about the subject. Thanks for commenting.
I appreciate your use of inverted quotation marks here. Very effective.
It´s obvious that quotation marks (here) are used intentionally and for reasons. If someone doesn't want to be fond of the apparent intentions, they should talk about this; anything else would be meaningless and ineffective.
But I stopped expecting anyway a productive, controversial discussion on Substack a long time ago, since Substack is explicitly not designed for this, and solely for "affirmation". Subscribers pay for "reassurement", not for discussions, possibly even with people who disagree with them... ! Unthinkable.
Of course, "democratic values" will be strengthened by this.
I can only appreciate it when someone tries to contribute something to the topic and content instead of just ranting. Anyone who feels addressed but then doesn't even want to express where and how they feel addressed is at best rude, malicious, or emotionally impoverished.
“OK”
I have too much guilt to engage in the practice. These are superficial instances like the country club, private school, and alumni situations, but I can't do it.
To take part in and enjoy the demise or mockery of others, including children, to use this little "power" to blackball someone from an institution. It feels like a slippery slope to something.
Also, i think they would call your freshman year a depressive episode.
I pulled the wings off a fly once when I was maybe 10. Felt terrible and haven’t done anything perverse since.
And now we know you went to Penn. How’s it feel to have the same Alma Mater as President Trump? And why do Ivy leaguers always find a way to tell you they went to an Ivy League school? I have a theory, but I’d like to hear from an Ivy leaguer.
I didn't want to go to Penn. I wanted to go to Princeton. At that time, in 1980, I thought Penn was not right for me. It was my "safety school." It was pretty easy to get into Penn those days. Tougher to get into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
It was in my essay as an explanation in part of my unhappiness during my freshman year.
The Tyranny of Merit by Micheal Sandell is a really good insight into how those top USA colleges and the top Oxbridge universities in England keep their 'exclusivity' that of course bumps up their market value both in what they can charge and the value of a degree from them in the careers market or jungle.,while seeming to welcome Diversity (in income level ) and being more open. It's very clever and a right old stitch up.
I agree that we are living in a time of perversity. Interesting take. I do wonder though if your freshman year was less perversity and more depression. (I’m not a doctor nor do I play one on TV.)
Could have been depression.