I Don't Care

[Belacqua]

I always feel better about myself when I have stood my ground, and I don't have to lose control of myself to do so.

The not losing control part is important, I think. If it's a situation where standing your ground is important -- if it's your career or something at stake -- then that's necessary. But in a case where standing one's ground gains nothing and only prolongs vituperation, I don't see any good for it. Control would imply that one knows when standing one's ground makes a difference, and when it just becomes an insult match.

I've been in situations where I've bitten my tongue, but biting your tongue too often I find tends to make things build up inside, and when things come to a head and you let it all out at once, that's when your self control suffers. If you've got something to say, say it and move on.

This is what I jokingly call Freud's Hydraulic Theory of the Emotions. He often wrote as if emotion was a fluid that builds up and needs to be released from its storage tank. I think this metaphor has become so common that people don't imagine an alternative -- there may be times when the emotion doesn't have to be spewed out all over everybody. 

But again, if saying it makes some difference, fine. 

And I was thinking today on the bus about Marcus Aurelius. He was the most powerful man in the Roman Empire for quite a while. To suggest that he was a doormat because he thought one should control oneself is a bit comical. I know you didn't mean it seriously, but it was a funny image. To say that always behaving well necessarily makes one a doormat seems to me a dangerous moral commitment. It almost could lead to the belief that not being a doormat demands repayment in kind for every imagined slight. That's the kind of thing that leads Americans to shoot each other over how they stack their garbage cans.