Lovely gifts of perspective

Dear Brooksy,

Jeez, I feel awful about this. I thought you said you never read the comments?

It’s too psychologically damaging to read these comments as evaluations of my intelligence, morals or professional skill. But if I read them with the (possibly delusional) attitude that these are treasured friends bringing me lovely gifts of perspective, then my eye slides over the insults and I can usually learn something. 

If you'd been a little more truthful I might have been a little more constructive. So that's one gift of perspective I can offer; people will be more polite to you if you don't pretend you're not listening.

Also, some of the things you might have been able to learn would be directly relevant to your professional skill. You could try thinking of these things not so much as a condemnation as an invitation, to become a better writer. I've always felt you had a good deal of talent that's just in need of a little cultivation and discipline. If you'd pay attention to criticism you might use that, to improve yourself.

For example, the "possibly delusional" parenthesis knocks all the breath out of the corpulent and short-winded sarcasm of "treasured friends" and "lovely gifts", subverting your attempt at wit before you've even arrived at it. If you'd given an editor time to look at this copy instead of filing it (as my phone tells me) at 3:27 in the morning, she or he could have helped you point it a little more sharply.

The natural but worst way to respond is to enter into the logic of this status contest. If he puffs himself up, you puff yourself up. But if you do this you put yourself and your own status at center stage. You enter a cycle of keyboard vengeance. You end up with a painfully distended ego, forever in danger, needing to assert itself, and sensitive to sleights.

You may want to rethink this. I know we always say, "Do not feed the trolls," but trolls are hardly engaged in a status competition. You know how Krugman, say, has a Nobel Prize in economics but leaps into combat with the glee of a graduate student? His ego is not small, but it is not painfully swollen either; he seems extremely comfortable with it, and not in the least afraid of what will happen if he's shown to be wrong, unlike, say, Yuval Levin, whereas you, bursting out today after all this repression of your feelings, manage to sound ego-endangered, hypersensitive, and aflame with status anxiety.

Clearly, the best way to respond is to step out of the game. It’s to get out of the status competition.

Yes, you—

Abraham Lincoln was caught in the middle of a horrific civil war. It would have been natural for him to live with his instincts aflame — filled with indignation toward those who started the war, enmity toward those who killed his men and who would end up killing him. But his second inaugural is a masterpiece of rising above the natural urge toward animosity and instead adopting an elevated stance.

—show very oddly how unconcerned with status you are when you compare yourself to Abraham Lincoln, or to the victims of the self-denominated Caliphate:

The terror theater that the Islamic State, or ISIS, is perpetrating these days is certainly in a different category than Internet nastiness. But the beheadings and the monstrous act of human incineration are also insults designed to generate a visceral response. They are a different kind of play of dominance. They are attempts by insignificant men to get the world to recognize their power and status.

I'd be very sympathetic to the foreign-policy thought you express in the conclusion tacked onto today's piece like the end of a seventh-grade five-paragraph essay—

In this column, I’ve tried to describe the interplay of conflict and ego, in arenas that are trivial (the comments section) and in arenas that are monstrous (the war against the Islamic State). In all cases, conflict inflames the ego, distorts it and degrades it. The people we admire break that chain. They quiet the self and step outside the status war. They focus on the larger mission. They reject the puerile logic of honor codes and status rivalries, and enter a more civilized logic...

—if you hadn't yourself been pushing a sophomoric alpha-male pissing-contest foreign policy for the past two decades, reasserting it as recently as January 30 (in favor of pissing with Bashar al-Assad instead of the Da'esh), or if you'd somehow apologize for that. But as it is, it seems as if the ISIS material is just a pretext for you to talk about how hurt your feelings are, even as you deny that they are and pretend to be one of those "people we admire". Why don't you just let it out? It will do your prose some good.

Yours amicably,

Yaz