Fair Warning: I WILL challenge this kind of bigotry.

[TygrBright]

39. I think that what we call "passive aggressive" response is predicated on two things:

The first one is an overall emotional ignorance that has arisen out of our collective need to condition ourselves to a very dysfunctional culture. It assigns "appropriateness" coefficients to various feelings and the manifestation thereof, and relates the coefficients themselves to all kinds of irrelevant criteria, such as gender, social background, environment, etc.

Powerful emotions, such as anger, are manipulated based on the needs of our dysfunctional culture, rather than on our understanding of the feeling and how to deal with it positively. We can't teach everyone about having and dealing with anger positively because if certain classes of people started actually doing that, it would disrupt the structures of power and influence. The same is true of other powerful emotions.

We are pretty much emotional imbeciles, because the irrational, fragile but incredibly complex and powerful structure of who gets what, who does what, etc., in our culture demands that we respond to our own powerful feelings only in carefully circumscribed ways.

So that's one factor. The other is the pervasiveness of fear.

We have become almost completely dependent on fear to maintain the status quo: To ward off social disruption, disorder, and the uncontrollable spiral into destructive violence we have set the stage for.

Fear ignites our fight/flight response. But there's nothing to "do" with that response in the face of a pervasive, floating anxiety and fear. It transmutes into anger, but there's no appropriate focus for that anger, so we internalize it, and express it passively in all kinds of situations and settings whenever our anxiety is tweaked.

speculatively,
Bright