Humiliation

Of the many lessons to take away from the COVID saga, one should be that your political enemies will do irrational things just because they hate you. The stream of dictates that flowed from local and state governments, such as closing churches while issuing official statements in support of race riots, were not designed to curb the spread of COVID-19 or to make rational sense to those adversely affected by them. They were intended to humiliate.

Bewildered libertarians and the smirking “gotcha-core” conservative pundits that spent countless hours laying out the flawed logic of their enemies’ actions failed to appreciate this simple concept. They kept pointing out absurdities, but the absurdity is the point. It’s a key element of demoralization, like when Pravda in the Soviet Union would churn out a fresh set of lies to the population about crop yields or battlefield victories even when they knew no one believed them anymore. The people were not going to protest — they would accept the lies in public and live by them without complaint. They were cowed.

Humiliation is a dangerous game though. It can lead to mistakes, the overstepping of bounds. It’s a clear signal that there will be no “good faith” negotiations going forward - that the time for arguments is over. And once that happens, the calculus becomes much more direct and potentially much more vicious. You are at war once the humiliation starts, whether you realize it or not, even if shots have not yet been fired. Indeed a humiliating peace made to end a war is no real peace at all, merely a call for intermission, since it all but guarantees the war will resume at a later date. The writers of Versailles would admit as much, if only in private.

There’s an old proverb that says to never humiliate a man. Either kill him or leave him be, because once humiliated, he becomes your enemy for life.