They're there.
Everywhere I go.
The people who don't matter.
The people who both A) have no confidence in their own ability to judge what is socially acceptable or not, and B) don't know that the best thing is to just be accepting of people who are different, and that there are no criteria people have to fall in line with to be accepted. These are the people who follow. They don't feel like they know what's cool and what's not cool. And it's not because they're bad judges. It's because they don't know that they shouldn't be judges at all.

I was going to room with these guys I made friends with at school. I didn't really have many other friends other than them. So I clung to them. But as I clung and I hung out with them, I grew continually more wary. I was beginning to learn that they...were people who didn't matter.

Most of them were followers. But a couple of them were leaders, or rather, misleaders. Every exclusive clique has them--the people who make the judgments of who is acceptable or not, with their own sets of fictitious criteria upon which they evaluate outsiders.

In particular, this group had one ringleader, who so happens to be one of the most judgmental people I've ever met. He seemed to be confident in his idea of what was socially acceptable or not. This confidence was only stupidity, though, not only because of his high standards, but because he HAD ANY standards. When he set forth the name "Club 10" to our group, I should have known how exclusive he was based on the usage of the word "club." But now I get it.

Other than this ringleader, the others were all mostly followers. Since they didn't have any confidence in their own judgment of what is cool and uncool, they relied on the ringleader's judgment. It's not because they were assholes that they decided to be as exclusive as the ringleader. It was just because they were weaklings. Since they felt that they didn't have the capacity to judge people properly, they relied on Mr. Ringleader to do it for them. In fact, some of them are actually nice guys. But they're weak on the inside, so they listen to the ringleader.

I never thought that I would see behavior like this after junior high, but I sure do. In fact, it's horrendously common, and rampant even. It's ridiculous. There are so many people who just follow. They follow because they don't trust their own judgment about what's cool and what's uncool, and they don't realize that THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN BE CHOOSING TO EXCLUDE PEOPLE AT ALL. Some people say "don't judge me," but what they really mean is, "I know you're going to judge me, but don't hold a grudge against me based on any of your judgments." That's akin to racism, sexism, and other "isms" of the sort, even though it may be on a smaller scale. Don't hate people based on their character traits. Hate them based on their bad dispositions.

I think that maybe people follow others like this because THEY aren't socially aware enough themselves. They don't realize that they shouldn't be closing themselves off to people just because they're "uncool," because they're the very same people who do the same. They exclude people, and then wonder why other people won't talk to them for a certain trait they have. DON'T THEY REALIZE WHAT THEY'RE DOING?

This activity goes on on the internet too. There's a character, and he's upbeat and the life of the party. Other people begin to cling to the character. These people together form a group. The character makes a lot of judgments based on who is cool and who is not. The other people follow his judgment. But then the character starts hating on someone that one of the followers actually values as a friend. Is the follower strong enough as a person to stand up for his friend? Chances are, no, he's not. Who would you rather be friends with, in this case? The character, or that guy who is your friend that Mr. Character was hating on?

I actually got into a situation like this in college, and the choice was clear to me at the beginning of this year. I chose the obvious choice. I picked the people who were being hated on. I rarely talk to anyone from the group anymore, because I realize how they function now. They may not realize it, but I do. And it's stupid, like the semi-geeky table of guys at my junior high school who never branches out to any new friends. But they talk about their video games, and make the same tact-less jokes over and over until you get sick of them. I mean, sure, inside jokes are fun, but at some point YOU NEED TO TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. SOMETHING RELATABLE. Whether they notice it or not, they reflect a social failure. They fail at connecting with other people outside the group. They fail at realizing that judging people is wrong. They fail at recognizing that they are being followers, led by someone with a worldview that is greatly flawed and needlessly exclusive. And they fail at being their own individuals.

The internet is also full of people like this. People who use the internet for socializing are often people who fail at meeting people face-to-face. And these are typically the same people who are too weak to take action in the case of being individuals and renouncing other people's judgments to determine who their friends are independently. And these are the people who don't know not to judge people and exclude them. And these are the people who create bullshit criteria of "what's cool" and "what's not cool" to judge whether or not to accept them as people. And so they call each other out on each other's character flaws, which aren't really flaws at all, and then they start fighting with each other. As this happens, the people like me who know not to judge people so harshly sit back chuckling with our metaphorical buckets of popcorn watching them tear each other apart. Either that, or you know, they just awkwardly cease to talk to each other. Actually, the last thing I just said is a lot more common. If people are too wimpy to make decisions independent of one another's, they're also too wimpy to tell each other off.

People on the internet act very strangely. Cowards have an extreme advantage on the internet, because the interaction isn't face-to-face. You know, cowards. People who never let their true character shine because they're too afraid of other people's judgments. And they're afraid of other people's judgments either because they're just timid, or because their true character SUCKS and they know it. The people who's true character SUCKS and they know it include people who troll on the internet, people who drive aggressively, and people who go to sports games just to scream at and irritate the opposing team and its fans.

The internet provides all sorts of opportunities for cowards. They can hide behind alternate identities, or even remain anonymous if they want. With this anonymity or false identity, they can do any manner of annoying, belligerent, and denigrating things to people without being recognized. There are people who LIVE to watch other people get pissed off. The internet is a harbor for people like that. We like to call them "trolls." But what we're really talking about is people who are cowards and who are looking to be detrimental in small ways to people so they can derive some sort of sick fucked-up satisfaction from it. It can be from poor treatment as a child, or from a lack of parenting, among other things. But no matter what the reason for this psychological malfunction, it's fucked up, it needs to stop, the people involved need to grow up, and it pisses me off.

The people I was friends with in college included many people like this. It's kind of funny how all of these psychological immaturities come together in the same people. It's like they're all correlated.
Well, I'm going to bed. Let me know your thoughts on this, too.