We do have measures against predators though. They are allergic to lead.

It’s because everyone feels the need to enforce things, and these people think that they must enforce a hierarchy where smart, strong people pick on and scam weakers, dumber people who they assume are either also scammers or dumb enough to deserve it. These groups believe in things like might makes right and ableism. They do not care to build a reality based on science or facts or good faith arguments, instead it is based on hierarchy and bullying. They do not even understand what a good faith argument really is.

Can’t be explained easily. It’s a bunch of variables triggered at opportune moments setting in place a mish-mash of values that somehow manage to work.

Take a day in your life. Think about what was good and bad in it. Then think what it would’ve been like had the good things failed and the bad things succeeded instead. Would that change your perspective on how the day went? As day after day pass, these small, usually things cement themselves into a view on life. Who learns what changes from person to person because what, when and how we learn creates differences in values and personality.

An example, you and your brother argue over a toy as children. If the argument escalates and you hit each other, the winner and the loser of the fight will have different perspectives on the situation. Same if a parent or an adult interferes and casts judgement unilaterally. Each person involved will learn something different from the others and this will shape in which direction their overall personality will view the world.

The good and the bad change depending on the position each person is in and each situation can evolve in many uncontrollable ways.

The closest that gets me to empathising with them is thinking about times in my life where I have done stupid, harmful-to-me things as a sort of lashing out to claw back any agency I could. For example, deliberately flunking a test because failing by choice felt safer than trying as hard as I could and doing badly anyway; I didn’t realise what was happening at the time, but in hindsight, decisions like that were all about my inability to cope with uncertainty and vulnerability.

I think that people who are unfathomably kind are probably a lot like me, in that they feel scared if they look at the state of the world. They probably recognise in their gut that there is very little that they, as individuals, can do to improve things, and that’s scary to them. However, instead of learning to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty and learning how to lean into the vulnerability to do some collective action, they lash out at the world. Being awful to some poor person who is also overwhelmed doesn’t solve any of the root issues, of course, but I think that it’s cathartic to them to be able to impact the world in some tangible way — it makes them feel less powerless to be able to fuck up someone’s day. Plus I reckon there’s probably some transference stuff going on, where being unkind to an individual may set them up to be a sort of repository for all the bad feelings they have inside them, like a subconscious scapegoat

Hateful people still baffle me, but over time, I find myself able to empathise with them more. I find people like this quite tragic, because I know that I would have killed myself long ago if I didn’t find community and solidarity to keep me pushing onwards. It seems like quite a bleak existence, and it hurts to see them poisoning themselves with their shortsighted hate.