A question I was made aware of:
Is it more important to you that you are tactful, or truthful?
This starts out as a soft and gossamer question which transmutes into to something that probes deeper into the human depth.
Initially: My view on this is that if you care about truth, you will realize that at least some degree of tact is necessary to make that truth take hold in the minds of others. You may be an obnoxious loudmouth that doesn’t care about speaking properly to people, at least as a token of good faith, however:
Opinionated, obnoxious or even toxic people are causing much damage with their vitriolic behavior as most people simply do not differentiate between a persons opinions and their behavior towards them. This is – when observed solely from the perspective of propagation of valid knowledge – a sad fact of the human condition, though entirely understandable: We modern apes are emotional beings first, and cognitive high-function beings a far second. Verbal and emotional abuse is damaging not only to the social fabric, as it causes individual distress and as such, loss of useful cognition in a specific field (or worse in the case of HSP’s – Highly Sensitive Persons – where it may sow the seeds of anxiety and depression), it causes loss of the possibility for an idea, or a set of ideas, to propagate through human society and civilization. (I will not go into the consideration whether disgust for abusive persons has roots in evolutionary biology).
If the person is intelligent enough to understand this dynamic AND that they care enough for their cause in the sense of the successful promulgation of it, they will eventually change their behavior to be more accordant with others.
If they are intelligent enough, but do not moderate their behavior due to lack of empathy/empathetic understanding of the other party , then it is because they are sociopaths or suffer from a neurological disorder. Sociopaths are erratically emotional people prone to angry or abusive outbursts or consistent abrasive attacks on opponents. (Sociopathy is covered under the ASPD diagnosis).
Regardless of being intelligent enough though having a mostly normal empathetic sense, if abusive people do not moderate their behavior, they then throw abuse for egotistical reasons, ie. ego-boosting, showing their supposed greater ability than their target off in public, or simplistically gratifying themselves by trouncing their unfortunate victims. This is a trait of both narcissism and psychopathy.
Narcissists (having the condition NPD: Narcissistic Personality Disorder) are people with a pathologically inflated self-image, but shrouded, low self-esteem – they usually behave vainly and with low empathy or recognition of others. If someone pokes unpleasantly close to their core of low self-esteem, they suffer a so-called “narcissistic injury”, which will result in a overblown response (verbally pointed, abrasive or even physically violent) to the words that preceded it.
Psychopaths are people, while usually intelligent, have a severely weakened sense of empathy and regard of the well-being of others; they will always tend to seek out positions of power and high social standing and are usually good at achieving these; as such, they get to be in positions where they can use this power or influence to not only disregard the well-being of their subordinates (not merely in contexts of the conventional political or business organisations, but in less hierarchical environments such as clubs, communities, forums, physical or on-line) without fear of consequences to themselves, but disregarding their dignity to such degree that they toy with others for their own entertainment (verbal abuse being a form of ‘toying’). (Psychopathy is a subgroup of ASPD).
Lastly, if they consistently trounce others in public or private simply for the fact that the others are “wrong”, it doesn’t matter if they are intelligent, and it doesn’t matter of they are empathetic (though this behavior usually wears off for empathetic individuals and also usually with age), they are fanatics, the kind of person that hold no blows back against a specific (real or imaginary) opponent, where opponents are often dehumanized (as an inhuman, or as sub-human*, is easier to massively smear and once their flock is numerous enough), where abuse against out-group individuals is dismissed at the wave of a hand.
Fanaticism is typically instilled from ideology (political or religious), during the formative years, or during a vulnerable period, of that persons life. While attempts to reason (and as such moderate that persons behavior) with a fanatic will usually bear no fruit of itself, it can have some efficacy if that people has started to see problems in that person’s ideological/religion in-group (this, ironically, usually caused by abusive behavior of those persons themselves).
Nevertheless, the sad fact in the case of online abuse seems to be that the person you are facing** are most likely not giving much of a damn about you (and far less likely to ever apologize), either because they are unable to due to for reasons of a disorder, or because their disorder is that of the meme called “ideology” has taken over (at least temporarily) their brain. While physical venues and online forums can be somewhat safeguarded from these abusive individuals, private conversations and exchanges generally cannot, and you are best off by adjusting your expectations about the sort of behavior you can expect from others – without stooping to their low levels (in which case they have not only caused discomfort for you, but they have won insofar that their abusive behavior has left a long-lasting scar on your person).
*) Subhuman doesn’t not nescessarily refer to being considered a different race or ethnicity, but also as having purported debilities or undesirable traits, these traits including “bad ideas” such as opposing religion, which of course includes opposing political ideology or ideological fragments; certain ideological extremists regularly justify their own abuse directed against the opponents by their opponents holding opinions of “low empathy” or “low solidarity” (though the terms of course mutate from time to time. You will also notice that in terms of political ideology, the justifications of the so-called “left” and “right” are practically mirror images of each other.
**) Obviously not, as the behavior that some people put on display in public electronic debates, or private internet exchanges, would see them mauled in short order if they were in reach of their victim.
