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I thought about just trolling this thread, but the broader subject is something that I have an interest in. A useful quote for understanding why someone like FearlessJ wants to posit himself as a fearless fighter is this:
"Violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem"
The man picking fights is not a fearless man, he is a deeply frightened man, carrying around shame, looking to replace it. When he picks a fight, he is presenting a bill for his shame, a demand for payment off another, in the form of self-esteem. The tragedy is that he will often present it to another man desperately worried about his own shame, and determined not to cede any self-esteem. So two frightened men will fight, each desperate not to be shamed, people will be hurt, and at the end of it, one man will carry a little bit more shame, and the other man will have learned that shame can be dissipated through violence - but it's temporary. It will quickly revert.
Don't believe me? Look up what Mike Tyson has to say about it.
And this stuff is deeply, deeply ingrained. We shouldn't knock or damn men who want to revel in their own supposed bravery and propensity for violence. Machismo applauds the "tough guy" or the "hard man." The trouble is, prisons are full of them, as are graveyards, and it's self-perpetuating. The more a man goes around presenting demands for self-esteem via violence, the more men are shamed and seek their own redress. It is wrong, and should be challenged.
So, who is the more secure man, the braver man; the man wanting to be seen as "tough" or "hard" by starting a violent altercation, or the man who simply says "I do not want to fight you. I have no need to fight you"?
It's only by breaking down the mechanics and underlying tensions of the supposedly violent man that we can begin to address the problems caused by these men (and it is usually men, and other men are most often, but by now means exclusively, their victims).
This man has some interesting things to say about this.
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