Everyone’s a Badass

(Note:  Much of this revolves around intermale aggression, male power fantasies, and the paleolithic kabuki of male dominance rituals—but the message at the end is good for everyone, I promise.)

Human societies are fascinated with strength and power, especially obvious personal power:  height, musculature, and a hair-trigger willingness to do violence are eternally impressive to us.  We all desire what those attributes grant the possessor—to be respected, to inspire awe, and, perhaps, fear.  When we are intimidated, we feel all those things acutely, most of all the gut-snarling fear.  We feel it, and we want to make others feel those things, too.  We feel it and realize we don’t want to confront the intimidating person… and wouldn’t that feeling be a very useful thing to project?  Only if you want to take it to the physical, to have to use violence to back up your newfound badass attitude more often than you’d like.  Intimidation is like juggling 13 double-edged swords and playing with fire simultaneously.

For our purposes we’re going to define “intimidation” as the antisocial process of going out of your way to make someone afraid of you.  Most people take this a step further, not stopping at mere fear but going headlong into humiliation.  Once they realize they’ve made someone afraid, they will typically push it and rub it in to humiliate the affected person.

(As an interesting aside, it’s a common truth that people who use intimidation as a social tool tend to do the things that intimidate them—they will project the behaviors that they, themselves, fear most.)

Why is intimidation so dangerous?  Because it can get you killed, whether you fail or succeed.  If you fail to intimidate the man, you have just escalated the situation—by saying, in effect, “Do you want me to hurt you?”—and now, unimpressed, he’s calling your bluff.  If he’s the kind of guy who responds to threats with physical action, then it’s on.  You just called it down upon yourself because you wanted to be a badass.

Usually, it’s not going to be a problem—if it went physical all the time very few people would do it, right?  The problem is the people who get set off by this are the worst kind… and I hope I don’t have to tell you that choosing to escalate a screaming match to a life-or-death situation is asinine.

Let’s say you succeed in intimidating him.  Mission accomplished, right?  You put him in his place, you showed him (and everyone in earshot) who’s boss, you made him feel afraid.  How could that possibly go wrong?

Yeah, I know—it’s a rhetorical question.

Let’s flip it around:  He succeeded in intimidating you, he made you feel afraid.  Maybe even made you feel afraid for your life.  How do you respond?  You know how to handle the physical side; you can take it there in a blink of an eye and shut him off.  Maybe you just feel socially embarrassed and walk away.  Or maybe you knock him down, knee him in the face and stomp on his head until he’s nonfunctional.  Who can say?  It’s going to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

What if you make him feel afraid?  Most people will back down and disengage, usually while making even more noise than before.  But there are some, the worst out there, who will take it as a threat and work to destroy that threat.  They may go off instantaneously, or they may simmer for hours, days, months.  In the long-term case, you probably won’t have the luxury of seeing it coming.  And if you truly terrified them, they’re going to want to do things to even the odds—bringing accomplices and firearms, say.  So, succeed or fail, intimidation can get you killed.  It’s a sucker’s game.

“But Chris,” you say, “If I’m not intimidating then I’m prey!”

Let’s make a quick clarification here:  the opposite of being intimidating is not the same as appearing meek, weak, or helpless—it’s simply not registering as prey.  Looking like you know what you’re doing, that you are aware, yet comfortably unconcerned, is more akin to being socially remote.  That is, you’ve got the NO SOLICITING sign out without being a jerk about it.  Appearing unimpressed and unafraid is not the same as trying to be intimidating.  You can project the confidence that you can handle yourself without threatening anyone.

A high order social skill?  Probably one of the highest.  And for many people, elusive.  But it’s a lot less harrowing than running around being intimidating, which is exhausting and scary at the same time.  I think of it like this:  “Go out of your way to get to the rest of your day.”  When in the social arena, be social, use your social skills, and treat everyone like people.  In the asocial arena treat everyone like meat.  Don’t confuse the two.

It doesn’t mean you have to be everyone’s friend, a pushover, or smile at daily human ugliness.  It can be as simple as biting your tongue instead of spitting fuel on the fire.  Of course, the hard part is if you’re successful, you’ll never know it.  You’ll never even be aware of the trouble you’ve dodged—you can only know the trouble you’ve caused.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)