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The situation which caused this rant is rather esoteric so I won't go into it. Let it simply suffice for me to lead into my bitching with two basic statements:
Beginning with the first thing: one's character is often defined by how well they accept negative things. Whenever, say, someone on an internet chatroom is banned, they have three options: first, he can suck it up and try to see (if he don't know already) what he did and what he can do to make it up. That is probably the most mature and socially cognizant option; it shows that there's more in that person's mind than just him. Second, he can pull a "sour grapes" and decide he didn't want to be in the room anyway. While this is generally considered immature, at least it's a mutually agreeable option; someone deciding on "sour grapes" isn't going to create that big a fuss and generally wanders off to bigger and better things. The third, and certainly most obnoxious, is when the person who just had his knuckles rapped decides that nothing could possibly be his fault and decides to ascribe it to some sort of bias.
Or better, some sort of conspiracy.
This person will spend inordinate amounts of time constructing elaborate or not so elaborate conspiracy theories on how a group of like-minded biased individuals (heretofore referred to collectively as "The Man," individually as "Agent of The Man") spend equally inordinate amounts of time keeping down the person (in future referenced as "The Victim") who found himself somewhere where he didn't want to be. The Man is always bigger and more powerful than The Victim, and his modus operandi is quite simple--The Man always tries to beat down The Victim under all circumstances. Any motive for The Man's oppression is secondary at best and usually just broomed under the rug because the realization that a conspiracy theory is useless milkwater trash so The Victim can survive knuckle-rapping without a mildly bruised ego becomes counterproductive. The Victim must be, in his own mind, completely blameless and battered by circumstances entirely out of control; if this is so, he does not have to expend the effort in correcting himself.
So The Victim goes out and pleads his case to third parties, telling of his oppression; most people ignore him but those few who usually already have axes to grind (usually by being Victims) themselves join up and shout doubleplusloud in the face of reason and good behavior. At first, the people "involved" in the giant conspiracy--i.e., The Man--generally find this sort of thing wryly amusing, and then annoying.
And then the prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. That leads to the second statement. As time progresses and The Victim's self-serving ranting accumulates, stress builds in the people who were just doing their job in the first place. Insult the people who you think are The Man enough and if they weren't biased and didn't hate you before, well, you've just given them a damn good reason. They do, eventually, become The Man, completely oblivious to any positive aspects The Victim may have due to the endless stream of vitriol and untruth The Victim spews at them. Whenever The Man has gotten so tired of this that they act out in like kind, it's suddenly something decidedly different somehow from what The Victim has been doing for an extended period of time.
Either way, it's wrong. But at least when I'm The Man, I recognize that I'm being a jerk when I'm being a jerk. I'm not acting out of self-righteousness or piety or any of the happy happy rationalizations that angsty therapy groups of troublemakers make so they can feel better about themselves and not care about the consequences, I'm acting out of simple vendetta and the psychological need to strike back at people who belittle me because they were the ones in the wrong initially.
Just as predicted.
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