Motus Mentis

5 Comments

1. Joseph A. says

   I hope that you’re doing well on the mend.

   This image is fun, but my inner autiste protests. The third party fellow’s decreasing portion should rather be orange — the dominant belief of the heckler. Perhaps, the heckler’s yellowism is what has been triggered by the poor candycane heretic, but it is simpler to assume that it’s his inner dogmatic orangist that won’t suffer any dissent.

   Posted October 7, 2020 at 11:55 pm | Permalink
2. JMSmith says

   The cartoon made me realize that the proper name for the character in the middle is a “scold.” Americans used to use this word as a noun because they recognized the scold as a distinctive character type. I would describe the scold as a self-righteous moral bully. In old American fiction, the scold was usually a wife who enjoyed denouncing the sloth of her no-account husband, but the name can be easily extended to social busybodies who fail to see the wisdom of a live-and-let-live philosophy.

   I wonder if scolding is counterproductive because scolding is such an unpleasant trait. The fact that an egregious scold opposes some act or opinion seems to be strong evidence in its favor.

   Posted October 9, 2020 at 8:11 am | Permalink
3. Malcolm says

   Joseph A,

   Yes, that bothered me too.

   Posted October 10, 2020 at 1:10 pm | Permalink
4. Malcolm says

   JMS,

   You’d think that everyone would understand that nobody likes a scold, and that being scolded just makes people angry and defiant, and so is generally counterproductive — but that doesn’t seem to prevent an awful lot of people from being scolds anyway (and more and more of them, it seems, as things get more divided and polarized).

   I think that people enjoy the power of being able to scold others when they know they have a mob at their back. It’s a terrible feedback loop that accelerates factional strife toward civil war.

   Posted October 10, 2020 at 1:15 pm | Permalink
5. JMSmith says

   Perhaps we should teach our children about the dangers of moral intoxication. I don’t suppose this will be more effective than our lectures on the dangers of alcoholic intoxication, but it might save one or two. It is easy to see moral intoxication at work as a scold “warms to her topic,” and I suspect we’ve all had subjective experience of this agreeable glow. Insofar as a liking for moral and alcoholic intoxication has psychological roots, I suspect they are the same roots. It’s the need for a weak ego to feel big. I should add that those of us who complain when we are scolded are sometimes being told off for perfectly good reasons.

   Posted October 16, 2020 at 8:34 am | Permalink