The awfulness of comments on the internet / polyamoury
So, back when I was young and idealistic, I thought the internet would end war and result in people finally having hoenst conversations and result in us looking beyond superficial things and in general make everything roses. I now look at the comments on news posts, youtube posts, etc, and realize that Anonymous is right – none of us are as cruel as all of us.
This is particularly depressing when I look at comments on the polyamory articles on Medium. We’ve been trying to make happy monogamous pair-bonding work for years and largely failing, and yet every commenter feels the need to speak superiorly about how of *course* polyamorous relationships are going to fail. The unstated subtext is “because humans are made for monogomy” which we most certainly are not – it’s *really* clear that we’re wired to fall in love over and over, and we’re not really wired to want to let go of people in our lives.
Howsomeever the people who write the memetics for the human race – have I ever mentioned how much I loathe the people who write and maintain things like organized religions? – like the idea of monogamy – possibly because it makes it clear who we should be charging child support to. (They also don’t believe that the entire tribe should support the children – this is especially true of modern republicans who have done a steady and disastrous series of various types of damage to public education – a side effect of their love of organized religion combined with their love of money)
Anyway, of *course* it’s going to be difficult to be poly right now. We *don’t really know how*. We don’t, in general, know how to love very well – and we have non-stop memetics in the USA encouraging us to prioritize other things (like a new car or keeping the carefully balanced 2-party system war going – or, just keeping the war machine murdering folks in general) over learning how to love.
Part of why I’m hesitant to risk too active of a polyamorous lifestyle despite it being my ideal is I would be in essence a memetic beta tester – of some memes that are not exactly stable software. There’s also that I have managed to get in one relationship that I’d describe as a visit to hell, and also behave horribly and in damaging ways in another relationship, and also that I carry the scars of being exposed to random and scary violence as a child – while being actively poly sounds appealing, it also sounds like something I might have to wait a few more lifetimes for in the hopes that I land on some planet that *does* know about love and does care more about average happiness in the system as a whole than GDP – not to mention values feeding everyone over blowing things up more and more spectacularly.
Anyway, to bring us back to the original topic at hand – all these haters, and there are many, generally probably can’t make *one* loving relationship work, much less several, but they feel the need to dump their cynicism and lofty predictions of failure on us anyway. As with Christians, it’s their tone of lofty superiority that really bugs me. Of course, the smartest thing is for me to just stay away from such places and things – I have far better things to do with my time, when I think about it.