Teetering on the Brink of Barbarism

Is Abuse a Systemic, Chronic, Mass-Scale Epidemic?

I had a long, fulfilling day, coaching, counselling, writing. I came home, watched a couple of episodes of Goliath (not bad), and then, finally a little relaxed, made the fatal mistake of checking Twitter.

It was explosive. First, a governor accused of taking nude pics of his blindfolded mistress to blackmail her with (a Trumpist, of course) — and then, the woman who created an open-source list of abusive men in media outed by a prestigious publication. “This society”, I thought to myself, “appears to be teetering on the brink of barbarism.”

Do you think I overstate the case? Let me put it another way, then, so we can examine it. You know the long list of major problems in the world by now, all of which America is unfortunately a leading example of. Climate change. Inequality. Stagnation. Nationalism. Extremism. Demagoguery. Young people with few opportunities. And so on.

We are going to have to add another item to this daunting list: abuse. Abusive societies. Abuse not as some kind of improbable exception, but as a systemic issue: a chronic, widespread mass-scale, expected harm — whispered about en masse, kept an open secret by the very institutions whose job it is to prevent it (like the media, industry organizations…