The best way to destroy trust is through pranks.
As noted previously on this blog, your sense of humor is your own. You never apologize for what you find funny, but it may force you to seek other company. In situations where you have no choice about your company, be vary careful about pranks. You may find yourself forced to sleep next to someone who thinks you are their enemy.
Cruelty in pranking is fundamental to Western culture. It arises from the tribal Germanic culture in which men are encouraged to remain juvenile and spiteful, except when they are socially promoted. In other words, it belongs to the commoners, and nobility is mis-characterized as stuffy. A bit of rough fun at the expense of someone stuck with you is part of our class warfare. It’s one of the rites of passage, a form of initiation into a dominant subculture.
However, it is also a matter of trust failure. Juvenile idiots don’t know the social value of trust, so they create a sphere of faux trust based on some common misery. For them, the only grounds of trust is misery, whether real or imagined, and they willingly manufacture false misery for others as the sole means of building social trust. In a culture where trust is considered a weakness, you’ll find pranking.
The danger is when the prankster and victim disagree over where the line should be drawn in defining a prank as harmless. Holding a measure of social power tends to make pranking intentionally cruel and hateful. It’s a matter of jockeying for position within the existing social structure. Among higher status Westerners, pranking is often a matter of words and contrived drama, whereas the lower class version is actual physical attack. It’s the false Western tribalism. What both share is the utter necessity of destroying fundamental human trust and kindness, as if such were the trappings of some forsaken tribal identity, to build something supposedly tougher as you enter your new tribal idenity. The real breaking point is how seriously people take themselves, both the pranksters and the victims.
The intent to be silly and harmless, an invitation to laugh with, not an excuse to laugh at, is not so hard to bear. That actually builds genuine trust. In general, Westerners are not very good at this. Westerners prefer humbling the victim, even to the point of suckering him as a set-up to something nasty and demeaning. It’s a demand that the victim accept that value system or face escalating hatred and threats. There’s usually one or more members of the existing social group who feel the drive to carefully guard something seldom consciously defined, or defined in mythical terms. The sense of humor is assumed without consideration, fiercely guarded as if it were God’s own.
This is the reality in which we live. People who are comfortable with whimsy and don’t take themselves too seriously are very much a minority. If you aspire to a shepherd’s soul, you will find yourself already completely alien to the virtually every social matrix of this world. When life tosses you into a new social situation, your strongest defense against losing yourself to distractions is to remain alien and aloof. It’s not a question of what you find humorous; it’s a question of the social dynamics and shepherding souls. You have a mission. If you react strongly, you have surrendered that mission.
You should expect pranks as a standard element to initial entry into any social structures. Your mission remains otherworldly, calling people to something above this realm. It’s one thing to salute the flag flying over the turf on which you stand; it’s another thing to forget that your God is neither that flag nor under it. You can be the only adult in the room, so to speak, and not have to play the scold for either side of any faux conflict. You’ll confront the existing structure, without so much seeking to change it as to rise above it. The shepherd soul belongs to a civilization in another realm entirely. You have to trust in a higher power, a cosmic moral fabric, to preserve your sanity.
Your mission is to build valid structures of trust for whomever is willing to climb.
