When Brainstyles Clash

Mr. Megacredits pissed me off again this weekend.

Not with the gaming. We went after a couple of elites, he was leading the pack, there were two more players with us and we got one of them to level 70, and made lots of cash and prizes. So far so good.

Then our guildleader addressed the posts I and Rose had put up when the guild was losing members. We thought maybe assigning people areas of responsibility would help morale. So the guildleader assigned Mr. Megacredits a responsibility, that of looking for leaders of the professions and classes, and suddenly it was constant negativity. Most of it taken on a personal level, like:

“What about the idea of having high ranking guild members have low level apprentices?”

“Well I don’t want to have to sit and watch some level 8 mine copper when I could be making money.”

Go figure. The guy nearly has a big fight with me over his frequent issuing of (frequently dumb) orders. He was one of the ones ready to split off into a small elite guild branch for high levels. Yet given some actual authority to make some changes and all he can do is complain about them as they reflect on his individual style.

I can tell he’s starting to get on the nerves of my other guildies too, which makes me feel uncomfortable, caught between a rock and a hard place. I don’t like apologizing for him. Earlier I said he was a swell guy, and basically a power gamer struggling with being a noob on a new server, and said that once he got some authority he’d chill. Yet he gets that authority and all he can do is be negative, especially after I stood up for him.

I felt similarly uncomfortable about teenage drama girl. I had recommended her for leadership, knowing that she was immature but figuring maybe it would help her learn faster. She immediately takes up with some user and has a big public meltdown. And here I am in a similar position, sticking up for a guy who’s being irritating. I don’t like it.

Oh yeah, I finally did talk to the guildleader about teenage drama girl and her meltdown. Apparently the guy I kicked tied up the guildleader’s attention for an HOUR protesting his innocence. The guildleader, after checking with several witnesses, concluded that I had done pretty much what the guildleader expected I’d have done and that the kicked-out guy was lying. I’m furious with her though, for wasting everyone’s time with this retarded exercise, especially after I was one of the idiots who recommended her for promotion. I’m really disliking my laid back “oh let’s encourage them, it’ll build self esteem” management style today.

But anyway, we had a morale-building guild party last night, at which I participated and took screenies, but I just couldn’t get into it somehow, too annoyed with the interpersonal politics. I had more fun building a corporate big-box fashion store and forcing my sims to shop there, and in fact, it’s going to put Lorelei Lye, my disbarred personal injury attorney/failed con artist/media tycoon and her upscale fashion boutique, OMG Clothes!!1!, straight out of business. Oh well, too bad for her, life’s tough and then you become a ghost, deal.

Speaking of politics, though, I read this piece on Spike by Frank Furedi about what he refers to as neo-Malthusians, which I think may be my most recent Last Word on Knocked Up, feminism and greenish ecological movements, apocalypsism and all the rest of the subcultures that seem heavily invested in the proposition that humanity is just bad. Here’s more.

I’m basically in favor of women having economic and social freedom and of ecology in general but I can’t stand the negativity, the conspiratorial thinking, the deep seated loathing for humanity that’s present in so much of what passes for progressive politics these days. It’s not right for me, and if I get together with those type of people, pointless arguments will erupt and nothing productive will be achieved.

Back to last week’s rant, where I boldly went out to state that last century’s incapacitating mental illnesses are today’s highly prized job qualifications, and that things like autism and OCD are tendencies we all have, pronounced to an extreme degree in some people.

That’s kind of how a lot of horror stories work, by putting you in the POV of someone who either suffers from paranoia and anxiety . . . or is having a perfectly sane reaction given the fact they’re being chased by monsters or aliens or a satanic cult or whatever.

Now I know a number of people with large amounts of anxiety and/or depression that are drawn to the extremely pessimistic neo-Malthusian “humans suck” POV. In fact, you could say it’s deliberately sold to them, in the same way “make a gazillion dollars in real estate overnight!” seminars are sold to impatient optimists and “OMG you’re fat and unstylish!!” is sold to the socially phobic.

We’re probably all just insane enough to fit into some marketing niche calculated to exploit it, or several.

Problem is, once you start luring people to your subculture by appealing to their unique brainstyle, you wind up with lots of that type of people, and they proceed to band together, compete to see who’s most extreme in whatever their mutual characteristic is, and chase away anyone who’s too different.

One negative and anxious person in a group is no problem. In a big enough group, a few of them are not a problem. But once they start reenforcing each other, they make it impossible for anyone who isn’t negative and anxious to get anything done. Suddenly all ambition is discouraged, all projects are shot down by criticism before they even get started, more time is devoted to listening to people complain than to getting anything achieved.

And last night, Mr. Megacredits was playing right into it. Like some of the ones who previously left, he wanted to feel empowered . . . by having his complaints attended to by people who aren’t him, and then when they go the distance and make the effort . . . more complaints . . . and when given a position of power so he can right some of the wrongs that made him want to splinter . . . too busy complaining . . . about what the other people are proposing.

It can work in different ways with other brainstyles. Assemble a lot of intensely competitive people and you’ll have the situation seen in a lot of pvp-oriented virtual realities, people devoting most of their waking hours to forum smacktalk, endless grudge wars and appeals to the developers to either make them more powerful or handicap their enemies. Put a lot of greedy materialists together and as soon as they finish comparing houses, spouses and bank accounts, they’ll start cutting business deals.

Get a lot of people that thrive on interpersonal drama together and, well, don’t invite me to that one, I’ll be having a headache on that day.

And, having seen first hand what happens when a lot of negative angry nihilists get into a group and devote its focus toward complaining, I’m not going through that again. I don’t want it in this group. In fact, I can sense that this one doesn’t even really want one complaining nihilist in its midst, and I’m feeling awkward for bringing them someone who is rapidly becoming one.

So we shall see how Darth Bunny Wabbit plays this hand. It has painful echoes from IRL adventures where I was forced to decide between continually being exposed to people preoccupied with angry self-loathing and cutting them off for the sake of my own peace of mind. But until the zeitgeist finally changes, it looks like an issue I’ll probably be presented with again and again.