The Unkindness Pandemic
It's never been more obvious that the average person is evil.
Last month, a Mexican woman muslim convert, who goes by the username halalfrijole on Twitter, posted this photo of herself cradling her pregnant belly to celebrate reaching 33 weeks of pregnancy.
Then on a few days later, a young couple (or at least, they’re presumed to be a couple) visited an Omah Lay concert, and called up to dance by him, the presumed girlfriend got very carried away in a decidedly intimate performance with the singer behind a sheet, while her presumed boyfriend looked on in dismay.
The common thread between these two is that they quickly became the target of massive online campaigns of vicious bullying, when arguably, both were the victims of their situations.
Growing up all over Nigeria, my extensive personal and community experience with Islam unfortunately cottoned me on quite early, to how bullying, coercion, and other tactics are employed on a daily basis amongst Muslims to extract compliance from believers, who are almost always conveniently women and girls.
My childhood sequentially had Anglican, Catholic, Muslim, and even Atheist atmospheres, so I had plenty of opportunity to observe just how ingrained the constant reinforcement of dogma is in these various religious communities, and nowhere is it wielded so harshly, as it is in Islam.
And then there’s the unkindness against men that’s baked into patriarchy.
Why is a guy’s girlfriend leaving him at a show something to laugh at him about?
What is it about the way men are socialised that stops them from comforting each other in the very human way that we all need?
Instead, men look to women for comfort, but never other men. If there are no women around, young men learn very painfully that they can’t rely on one another for kindness in a moment of distress.
I’ve been online longer than most people on the internet today, and I’ve watched it go from an empty, yet wonderful, fascinating place, so full of potential connections, to this soulless hellhole full of roving psychopaths, and the banally evil masses who cheer them on for their own entertainment.
Both offline and online, I learned a simple truth:
The average person is evil.
Not in the grand, theatric way you’re used to thinking about as portrayed by famous villains, but in a casual, unobtrusive, and totally unremarkable way. So banal as to be completely forgettable, yet I would say that this kind of casual, everyday evil is possibly the most impactful.
And I’ve been the recipient of a lot of it, so perhaps I’m somewhat jaded.
How have people been mundanely mean to you?